FarmerTy

Somebody help me! I have a problem! 110-watt UV sterilizer! If you thought the 57-watt was oversized!

Hopefully the opportunity of eating SPS never crosses his mind.

Interesting observation I'd like to point out but after catching all the fish, there was leftover pellets, mysis, and bloodworms in the fish trap. The blue linkia starfish went back in there and started to eat all of it. I've never actually seen it feed other than it was snacking on a dead snail once. I guess rotting meat is on their menu. Just wanted to pass along as I know success with blue linkias is pretty limited. Mine has made it the all important year now and has stayed healthy looking. Hopefully he has a couple more years in him.

Think of my tank as a short-term rental and my fish more like SXSW participants and F1 patrons.

My money is on my fish going back in the tank first. [emoji23] You gonna QT another Powder Blue again?Heck yeah!

Nvrenuf was a big fan of them. He's not as active these days but here's his thread on it. http://www.austinreefclub.com/topic/29869-6-weeks-of-algal-scrubbing/

My money is on my fish going back in the tank first. [emoji23]

Like moving water over a rock... very hypnotic movement for sure.

Glad they are still making progress and good thing you're such a patient person.

Think about the heartburn the guy typing it all up was having. I will say that the whole process is actually really easy. I'm surprised such a simple process can rid you of ich. Remove fish, do tank transfer method for 12 days, leave fish tank fish tank empty for 76 days, and put back all the fish. As long as you are better at execution than I was, you're done!

No, just a normal midas blenny. They start looking more orangy-red as they get older in my experience. For the question on ich, I'm almost 100% sure it was because I screwed up one of the pretreatments for ich so that's how it got back in the system when I reintroduced everything. I literally missed an entire tank transfer by a day as part of the pretreatment. I can even narrow it down to the likely culprit, the midas blenny. Another thing logistically was I need a true separate QT and mine wasn't setup yet. And knowing me... And I'm sure the rest of the club knows this truth I deny as well sometimes... Is that I have no resistence to a pretty coral. So I told myself, I better have my full QT setup up and ready from the get go before I even think about putting fish back in. That way I can stay true to the 30 day rule for all corals and fish. Great plan, bad implementation I had before. This time should prove to be much better. I call the first time the beta test. [emoji14]

Had this exact species show up in my nanocube way back in the day. Coolest thing in the world to watch them move around but I did lose a lot of snails in that tank.

I employ all kinds of tricks to snag the fish. The trap will catch the most aggressive eaters easily after usually only a day or two of feeding the tank only through the trap. What I usually do is not catch those fish first but wait for the more reclusive fish to start trusting it and catch them first. They get emboldened by the more aggressive fish so i grab them first. Most of the fish have terrible memories too so I've been able to literally catch fish, remove the trap, put the trap back in, and the next victims swim right back into it like nothing happened. Here's an old video of the trap in action. http://youtu.be/bulm1Aqi-N0 For the fish that sleep in the same spot every night, I wait until lights out and put on my red LED headlamp and scoop them up while sleeping if possible. If the red light doesn't work, suddenly turning on the lights on them catches some in a deer in headlights moment and then... scoop! My midas blenny was interesting. I knew all his favorite places to back into and sit there with his head poking out. One of those spots was underneath and an acro colony, so I put a clear cup over the colony and forced him under the colony even more. Afterwards, I just dislodged the colony and he shot straight up into the cup. That worked well until one of my fingers could not cover up the bottom as well as hoped and he slipped out. Luckily one of his other favorite spots to hide is in the giant Jedi mind trick colony. I scared him until he finally sought refuge in the colony and then I grabbed the whole colony out of the water and held it over the net until he decided to pop out. For fish that ignore the lower zone of the fish tank (anthias) where the trap is, I held a giant net in water for hours and fed only in a corner of the tank. Eventually, their hunger overrides their desire to be safe. I just kept dropping food in front of the net and waited until they got close enough to the front of the net for one swift scoop. Hope the tips are useful. Hunger is your friend... and so are their bad memories. [emoji4]

Last two fish have been caught with only two dislodged corals on the sandbed. Not a bad nights work! June 29th, here I come! [emoji30]

Add me to the club...

It was only a matter of time before Charlie Sheen made it into this mess of a build thread! Well, I just realized with my stocking levels that there was no way I was going to keep an epidemic out of my tank. Maybe if I had 10 fish but not 20+... And my name is not Juiceman so it wasn't going to work for me. Now at least that means I can get that powder blue! Second chances... Here I come!

Oh no Brooks! Congrats on the exciting life and sad to see you shut down the tank. This is a primo setup for sure!

Caught a fish last night but not one of the two I'm looking for...

I've got a midas blenny and an anthia left to catch and then the countdown begins for another 76 day session of running fallow. This time I won't try to overcomplicate things by running TTM on the original stock plus adding two additional batches of new fish that needed to go through TTM separately as well. It'll just be TTM on the current tank stock and that's it. One tank... Nice and easy.

I thought it would be funny to post the video with... Newbs be like... 18 fish in a 30 gallon but I thought that might be a bad idea as the internet might take hold of it and go nuts. No, they aren't in there permanently, they were there for a day as I was trying to catch the rest before putting them all back in the 100-gallon tub again.

It begins! Again.... TTM 2.0, the for real edition this time. http://youtu.be/xye-W_BTT6U

Nice stuff!

I'd go urchin, foxface, then seahare, as the first two are sustainable in most aquariums. The seahare is akin to a moving truck for me, rent it, and once done, return it. Their appetites are so voracious that they'll eat themselves out of a food source in a couple days in most tanks.

I was going to say, if it worked before, but doesn't work now, and you've cleaned the air line... then the last possible culprit is the impeller or the pump itself. You wouldn't believe what a snail shell can do in some of those needle-wheel impellers... just shatter and break all the points or get lodged within it. If the needle-wheel impeller looks fine, I'm going to blame a malfunctioning pump at that point.

From what I see on the national forums, it's LEDs with the lion's share of the lighting market (beginners to advanced setups), T5s on a majority of the high-end setups alone or combined with LEDs, and MHs coming in last, not so unlike our own community. Personally, I prefer T5 coloration the best for SPS, MHs 2nd, and LEDs last. That being said, the combo of LEDs and T5s is my ultimate goal but I can't drop $1500 on a fixture so I'm making my own. Aesthetics isn't a concern because it'll be enclosed in a canopy anyways. I think it's the best of both worlds, cheap, energy efficient lighting with the LEDs but with the addition of better coverage from the T5s to remove shadowing and the disco ball effect as well as covering certain peaks in lighting that aren't as really covered with most LED fixtures. I will say just me switching out a majority of the cool white LED diodes in my fixture for warm white could almost convince me to run my LEDs by themselves as the coloration is spectacular and corrects the one thing I disliked about LEDs the most was that overly blue look but I still think having a couple of T5s in there will be helpful, mainly for coverage and tweaking color.