mattzang's IM 100 EXT

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#21
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final fish coming out of copper! i gave every fish a hydrogen peroxide bath just because now i'm paranoid. apparently my flame wrasse turned into a dude during QT so if you want your cirrhilabrus to turn male obviously just get velvet and copper your fish and that'll do it :D

i somehow didn't lose any fish to the copper, or at least i don't think so. i did lose my neon goby and an indigo dottyback. the goby got put in a trashcan with my rock that got pretty cold while i was catching fish and seemed semi lifeless and i never saw it again. the dottyback i have no idea what happened, but no body found. it may have drawn the ire of the potters angel i had in the tote with him or it found a way out and my cat does like seafood

all told losses were: burgess butterfly, sunburst anthias, neon goby, indigo dottyback. i raised the copper level on the wrasse tote really slowly so maybe that was the key.

on the DT front i added some live rock and a massive CUC from reefcleaners. i'm still kinda dealing with dinos, but i'm lazy so i'm just kinda letting it go and hoping live rock + IPSF order of live sand and live mud will outcompete. but if not, i did buy a laughably small microscope to ID and i guess i'll have to get a UV if it won't die naturally, assuming it's the common type of dinos that UV will kill off

i also don't want to deal with this again so i bought a used innovative marine nuvo 20 that i will use as a coral/invert QT. i didn't really want a second coral tank to test and monitor, but i like my fish so oh well. probably best to QT coral anyway. i've never been bit by that bug, but shouldn't hurt to have them easy access to dip and what not
 

Smite

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#22
Nice, glad to see the majority of the fish pulled through and made it past copper. Raising the levels slow over 4-5 days was always key for me too but its tough in a emergency state.

Looking forward to how that mud works out for ya!
 
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#23
Nice! Looks like you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Kudos to you for not being totally frustrated, sounds like it’s been a long run.
 
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#24
Nice, glad to see the majority of the fish pulled through and made it past copper. Raising the levels slow over 4-5 days was always key for me too but its tough in a emergency state.

Looking forward to how that mud works out for ya!
yeah i think that helped a lot. i set expectations low so this was a nice surprise lol

will do on the mud, i need to email them to clarify on the mud because i think they want u to just dump the mud in the DT? so that seems kinda bizarre, but i guess maybe it just mixes with the sand and it is what it is. no mega white sandbed for me if that's the case

Nice! Looks like you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Kudos to you for not being totally frustrated, sounds like it’s been a long run.
thanks, yeah 2020 wasn't a great reefing year for me to say the least rofl. i've actually fixed some of the algae issues in my DT, but i still want to move out some of the rock and move in some of the fiji rock i got. i actually took this mammoth boulder i cemented together and brushed it with a toothbrush and dipped it in hydrogen peroxide, it worked really well. not sure what bad it did, though. there's always a price to pay..
 
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#25

rescaped the tank a bit and added some more frags. after doing so i kinda had the thought, maybe this wasn't the best idea. maybe the best idea would've been to put the dry white rock in a tub with saltwater and pour in some bacteria and feed it for like a month. and then put it in the tank

but alas, that idea only came to me after putting it in the tank so proceeding forward

fish QT, i lost my pintail wrasse in post copper observation. not sure the cause, i vaguely recall hearing a jumping sound last night at lights out, which isn't really uncommon, but i can't shake the feeling something could've snuck through. i would think a wrasse would be the last to die from velvet, but never know. i treated the fish at different ranges, but some got as low as 2.1s in the teens and there's apparently a strain of velvet lurking out there that's prevalent enough for humblefish to recommend treating at around 2.5 copper power now. i was hesitant to do that high with the wrasses and angels, so hopefully that doesn't come back to bite me

i have all of my fish in these storage tote things and that just isn't working as i planned so i'm gonna move them into actual tanks hopefully tomorrow if i have enough water on hand.

my potters angel has decided to go on a food strike, right as hawaii closed, so that's fun. he looks healthy otherwise, but doesn't seem to aggressively attack food if he does eat anything


i took that a week ago and since then he has moved to the larger rock area, but still just kinda swims around like a zombie and doesn't seem to chase down food. not sure what to do, i've tried the extra alluring food like clams, nori, and masstick, but idk if he ate any. hopefully he just wants to be in a normalish tank again and that'll get him out of his funk
 
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#26
latest adventures:

my potters had continued acting weird, so i was suspecting something was up. did velvet sneak through copper power of a minimum of 2.1? wtf?

well, last week wednesday i found my azure damsel dead. then my springer damsel the next day. i didn't know damsels could die, so something was definitely up. i left for work on friday knowing things were pretty screwed, but got home to a dead potters angel and two dead kamohara blennies :( the blennies didn't even seem bad. so that sucked. the springer damsel was my oldest fish, potters is obviously not replaceable anymore, and the others were cool fish.

so velvet was suspected, but no signs of it were present. i also started to suspect a bacterial issue. where it came from? no freaking clue. so i decided to not do copper again as copper + antibiotics isn't a great combo. so i opted for hybrid ttm. since friday night i haven't lost any other fish, so hopefully it's working. @Dvon0605 volunteered use of his microscope to check out the potters and kamoharas under it to see if we could see any kind of parasites, but i didn't see anything and neither did he. so i'm pretty sure it's bacterial, but i'm continuing the ttm anyway just in case

my other group of fish seem to be ok, although i think the smaller confines of a 55g tank has my midas blenny and possibly my orangeback fairy wrasse bullying the hooded fairy wrasse and flame fairy wrasse a bit. doesn't seem bad, just keeps them on either ends of the tank, but not ideal


on my DT i'm getting the IPSF order tomorrow, so i'll throw some pics of that up on here. when i ordered it like 3 weeks ago my tank still had a bit of dinos and what not, but now seems pretty good to go.. so hopefully this doesn't mess anything up lol

i picked up some frags from @stephj03 and they were all looking good to go, so i figured go big or go home. if i'm gonna qt coral in a fishless tank i'm expecting some serious roadblocks, so i wanted to add some more stuff to get me over the hump

my sister got me a gift certificate to cultivatedreef.com for christmas, so i grabbed a $10 frag of red planet along with 3x 6 packs of assorted SPS. in the notes section i asked if it'd be possible to get "mostly sticks" and not so many encrusting or plating montis. they responded by asking how i'd feel with getting half as many frags, but XL frags of the stick variety. so i said sure


mostly older stuff, but stuff i was wanting so i'm pretty pleased. i then went down to temecula to see what their lfs had for sps frags since i want to start my actual fallow clock and stop adding stuff. i went to some place called fish frenzy which was alright, but alas no sps frags in sight. so i went over to riptide creatures (literally around the block) and was again met with minimal at best sps frags. they had a rainbow monti, jackolantern lepto, and some other encrusting monti (the exact stuff i didn't want from cultivatedreef :p) so i got those. they did have a cool aquaculture thing going on in the back, that was cool to see.

i try to support lfs, but tbh most lfs are just garbage ime. the riptide place was cool, but in the IE most of the stores suck, especially when it comes to sps corals. most don't even carry them. so i guess online or socalireefs it is :D
 
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#28
thanks man. i'm kinda kicking myself over not doing something about the potters, but i also just had no idea what the problem was or could've been. even after dying, the fish only had minimal fin tearing that i'd even possibly attribute to bacterial issues. most of those fish i had for many months to years, but the bicolor foxface was newer. picked him up the week of velvet initially appearing, but that still seems nuts for a bacterial issue to just hang out for like 6 weeks, but i also don't really know much about bacterial issues in fish.

velvet appeared 12/17

fish finished copper and transferred to new tanks just after new years

fish in that group other than the potters were good to go, eating behaving fine. then boom
 
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#29
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so with the loss of my potters, i actually still had my flame angel from my old tank. my plan all along was to add all 3 to my tank, but i kept getting cold feet about adding the flame. he was a bit of an ahole when i added him to my last tank, but eventually chilled out and was a good community fish, but when stocking up my new tank i just kinda had the chance to grab a potters and a multicolor so i went for it. i did a deep dive of every crevice on r2r recently looking for people that had kept 3 centropyges in a tank my size for a long time and i just couldn't find it and therefore couldn't justify trying it. i think 3 would've became 2 eventually.

nonetheless, coming in from the bullpen will be the flame angel. hopefully he doesn't bully the poor multicolor too much, but there's a lot of rockwork now so they can share
 
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#30

other fish doing ttm on them and running antibiotics. there's a bit of fin tearing on the foxface, hopefully it's just remnants from the bacterial issue that was going wild. about a week left on their treatments and then hopefully everyone will be healthy..

i did get my IPSF order today, delayed by a day. it was packaged well and seemed no worse for the wear.

the order was:

19. Mixandmatch @ 99.956Bristleworms,wondermud,6nerite,6littorinid,6microhermits,25reefamphipods,podflakes,podmat,livesandactivator

23. Reefworms package @ 29.95 with livestock

29. MiniStars, 6 @ 24.95 with livestock order

the ministars were TINY, i couldn't count them, but this guy seems pretty trustworthy. everything else seemed more numerous than what i ordered. my tank is definitely crawling with worms now

the acclimation instructions basically said to float stuff and then dump in a cup of water, wait a few minutes and then pour entire contents of the bag in. so i did for the most part. i had to go through and pick out the red algae looking stuff which got caught on my sticks

this is definitely not the way to go if you have fish and want to keep things sterile, suffice to say haha

either way hopefully my tank is nice and diverse now with this order and the live rock i bought from a local guy. now for my cbb to get back in there to eliminate my aptasia issue which is going pretty nutty already

a few crappy pics

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idk what that thing is, it was just labeled "freebie". felt like a soft coral of some sort

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tank super cloudy now

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that's where i poured the live sand. the aptasia is mine, so no blame on ipsf for that. my cbb has been out of the tank for like 2 months now and aptasia is moving back in big time.

the sand itself is pretty large grain size. my sand is the special grade variety so pretty large, but this stuff is much larger. i assume my jawfish will not be disappointed with this stuff

the rest of the stuff seemed pretty generous in numbers. the snails and crabs seem like way more than just 6. the worms seemed like a ton of them, now i'll have to watch where i put my hands in the tank :oops:

the "pod mat" is kinda odd, seemed like just a big bunch of algae tightly packed into a ball along with some sea lettuce. i put it in my sump which is unlit so idk how long that'll last. it's next to my algae turf scrubber so it'll be interesting to see if it starts growing some of that stuff in there

oh and the mud. i believe the instructions say to just pour it in the tank, but i balked on that. i put it in a tupperware in my sump and the tank still got cloudy :p
 
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#36
I had the day off today so I procrastinated for awhile and then made the journey and a half down to the la area to check out some lfs. I got going at like 3 pm so I hit a ton of traffic and had to dip on the first place I was gonna check out that tongs place. The other two were Harry’s and then Ellis aquatics

harrys was aight they definitely had a better selection of fish than I was used to and they did have 3 tiny burgess butterflies in and referred to them as the ugly butterflies lol. I was tempted but my qt continues for another week so I held off. I totally could’ve got fish as I have tanks for days but $100 for a burgess didn’t seem that great of a deal. I did pick up two mariculture frags. I don’t think I’m good enough at sps or acros to go hard on these but I figured a couple couldn’t hurt

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I think the evening blues and orange filter is being a bit generous on the Millie but it looks cool

I then went over to Ellis aquatics as their cuc prices are nutty. I thought this place was great and totally what I was looking for in an lfs. Lots of sps affordable stuff. I can’t say I hang out in Compton often but I’d definitely go back there

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Grafted monti and a green with blue tips acro looked different than joe the coral. Ora blue voodoo maybe? It was 80s porn hairy and more of a deeper forest green

I’m getting another shipment of corals from a guy up north tomorrow and then actual fallow shall begin
 
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#37
Nice man new pieces are always exciting.

Harry’s always has some cool stuff if you look hard enough. That’s Millie looks nice! Next time beat him up on price lol (joking) but they’re always willing to work a deal. Ellis always has the dry goods you can’t find elsewhere and he’s a solid guy.
 
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#38
yeah they said they were down to work some deals, but i wasn't super looking for fish. mostly i just wanted to see what they had that wasn't on their website and what sort of quality

plus when i asked about the burgess he was like HEY HOW MUCH FOR THE UGLY BUTTERFLIES :ROFLMAO::unsure::cry: so i think i could maybe coax them into dealing a bit on those since i'm guessing most people wouldn't dare put a non copperband or pyramid butterfly in a reef tank

i really liked the ellis place, by far the most sps of any store i've been to lately. i think i left with like 20 trochus, 10 nassarius, 2 frags, a fire shrimp, and a conch for like $120? i think 20 trochus can go for $120 at some places now lol
 
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#39

and the final corals for awhile. i got them from a guy in norcal on humblefish's site, dude is a pretty pro shipper apparently they were shipped really well

splurged a bit for oregon tort, walt disney, and a diabolic pac man (kinda looks like one of those yellow acro variants) and he tossed in freebies of green slimer and pc rainbow

now to get the temp up to 80 and wait out the actual fallow period. at 80 the fallow period is ~45 days, but to be safe i'm either gonna wait 60 or try some black mollies in there at 45 days. and then go in the fetal position if velvet somehow survived all this time
 
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#40


still fallow for a couple more months. my two finnex heaters aren't cutting it as the tank was 75 this morning so if i want to make fallow shorter i'll have to add another heater. i have one of those yardstick long eheims so i'll probably put that in the tank

fish are seemingly doing ok, although i lost my moyers leopard wrasse over the weekend, no idea why. i was leaving town saturday around noon so of course when i got up she was just kinda laying on the bottom, which progressed into being head first face down next to a pvc pipe an hour or two later. i took her out and gave her a freshwater bath real quick, but nothing came off. shrug. i came back to no other losses and everyone else seems fine

new fish en route thursday so i got some reefnutrition roe and arcitpods in case they aren't eager eaters. gonna do hybrid ttm on them, i think i like that more than copper which just seems to cause a lot of other issues for me either during or after treatment
 

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