FarmerTy

Yeah, I hate to say it but the mandarin would die a slow death in the tank, even with a refugium. They eat an average of 1 pod every 10 seconds, that's almost 1.5 million pods in a year! You'd be hard pressed to produce that in a 100 gallon, let alone a 29 gallon. The only way is to train it to eat prepared foods but that's an uphill battle in itself. If it was easy, you'd see a whole lot more mandarins in small tanks.

Address: 1315 Meadgreen Circle, 78758 Time: 2pm, Saturday, Feb 20th (tomorrow)

Found everything in the house that someone could sit on and threw it in the fish room. Looking forward to having everyone over tomorrow for some geeking out on reefing!

How'd you get a copy of my first piece of artwork? I called it... strawberry shortcake acro rain.

I've had one for over a year now! Do you even look at my tank? [emoji16] Nah, just at the amazing woodwork of your standThe craftsmanship is often compared to artistry. The high grade, furniture quality sheet of plywood covering the front is distracting as well. I can completely understand. [emoji12]

He's probably got pretty badly burned gills from the ammonia. Physically, do you see anything wrong with him?

Something tells me when I add more nitrates to my system, I'll reach a more harmonic balance of nitrate to phosphate. It's so odd to remove fish and the resulting higher nutrients that come with them, and end up with MORE nuisance algae then with lower nutrient levels in the tank. I feel like the imbalance is causing the algal growth, not so much the nutrient level itself, even though it's lower. Of course the fish do eat a lot of the algae but I'm also seeing more growth in my sump where it didn't really grow much before and that area was always free of grazing fish.

I'm calling crime stoppers... Coral division! [emoji61]

I've had one for over a year now! Do you even look at my tank? [emoji16]

Just to expound on the ammonia in the bag during shipping, when a fish is shipped in a bag, the respiration of the fish produces CO2. The CO2 increases the acidity of the water and causes the pH to drop, thereby, allowing the ammonia being produced from the fishes waste products to convert to the much more harmless ammonium while the fish is in transport. The problem you have is when you open the bag, it allows for the pH of the water to start increasing as the water aims to reach atmospheric equilibrium. This causes your ammonium to convert back to toxic ammonia in the bag and causes major issues with the fish very quickly. If you drip acclimate, you're introducing high pH water to the bag which increases the pH even faster and the ammonia gets toxic even more quickly. The ideal scenario is to open the bag very quickly, disturbing the air in it as little as possible to pull just a little water out to determine the salinity of the water, which is usually 1.018-1.020. Heck, you may even just poke a hole in the bag to get just enough water for a salinity measurement and then tape the hole back up. Then temperature float the bag in the new water, match the new water salinity to the bag that the fish is in, and once temperature matches, literally put the fish right into the new water with matching salinity and temperature. No drip acclimating, just right in. Fish are active osmoregulators and can readily adjust to salinities that are within +/- 0.01 of each other. This allows the fish to bypass the toxic ammonia issue when being in the bag too long. This really only applies to shipped fish. The ones you buy locally have not been in the bag long enough to produce that much ammonia so drip acclimation is still ideal. Hope your fish makes it. I know the information above is irreverent for you now but I wanted to post for future reference for everybody else.

They might put you away in reefer prison for coral abuse based on the laser evidence!

We should start an emperor club! Interesting tidbit, but the whole change happened in less than 5 months. It was quite dramatic to see personally in that timeframe. I'm just late to the party posting these pictures.

I thought it would be fun to show progression shots of my emperor angel changing from juvenile to adult form. Juvi Juvi with a hint of yellow Transition Transition Transition Transition Adult

Interesting short video:

Food ordered! I have 120 eggrolls and 60 spring rolls on its way! The most hilarious part was he asked for how many people, and I said 30ish. I hope you guys are ready to chow down!

You are exactly correct. It does look like a kenya tree. The tripod looking thing definitely looks like a single zoa polyp with a few runners growing to attach to the substrate and grow other polyps down the road. Here's the meeting thread. http://www.austinreefclub.com/topic/35937-february-meeting-at-farmertys-22016-2pm/ To respond to the poll, you'll have to view it either on a regular browser or on your mobile, but not on Tapatalk. And no, you do not need to have a premium membership to vote on the poll or attend the meetings. Hope to see you there this Saturday. -Ty

Wow! You're like the scoly whisperer! Great job bringing that thing back from the dead! KimP's zombie scoly!

You may want to look into degassing your water of CO2 first before running it through the RO/DI system. I believe your area has higher than normal CO2 in the water and it causes the DI resin to be spent prematurely, allowing more impurities into your made water. Also, I believe they sell specific silicate filters that you can add to your RO/DI system to target their removal.

Yay! Play with it and give us good review!

No direct feeding here either.

Come on by and win it for her! Funny, that's exactly why I don't do water changes either! [emoji14]

Where are you located? Silicates are definitely driving the growth of diatoms and your water changes only add to it as you are adding silicates to the tank with each water change.

You can have a bottle of my reagent Jolt since Hanna was nice enough to give us all freebies.

That's got Garf written all over it. I think those were the names of the founders of Garf Reef.

Can I steal this one tomorrow? Haha, sorry Brooks. I got a waitlist a mile long for this guy. I have to look back on the list and see who's next! Ooh! Ooh! Can I be placed on the list?! This is absolutely one of my favorite corals... ORA really struck gold! You got it sir! I think you're only 2 back but I'll have to look at that list again. I'm getting old and senile these days.