The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Well it's been a while since my last post. All was going well until last week when I stopped seeing the Royal Gramma and the Firefish. I ended up finding a tiny bit of a dead fish but it was so far gone I couldn't identify. RIP Gramma and Firefish. I can't figure out a direct cause of death. My nitrates were pretty high, around 40ppm, but I couldn't figure out if that was what killed the fish or if the decomposing bodies caused the high nitrates.

Anyway, I've been doing everything I can to bring the nitrates down. Every other parameter of the tank is strong: a steady temp, steady pH at 8.0, steady salinity at 1.024ish, zero ammonia, zero nitrites. I started testing alkalinity, and that's fine, but nitrates remain stubbornly high. So Dennis at my favorite Local Fish Store (LFS) recommended Red Sea NO3/PO4 reducer, which I think is essentially vinegar mixed with methanol. Dosing that stuff encourages bacterial populations to bloom, which through reproduction suck up a lot of nitrates.

So far the dosing seems to really be helping. Nitrates fell over the week from 40 to 20 without a water change. I'm going to keep it up. Hopefully it'll do the trick.

Anyway, here's a picture of the tank. I did a big water change last night, cleaned the glass and the light fixture. It's looking good!

PICTURES!

Let the shameless exhibitionism begin!


 This is a coral cutting (frag) I got from my friend Billy. It's called Blue Cespitularia.

This is a frag of favia. It's kind of maroon with green centers. I'm going to glue it to the rock you see to the right, on which it should eventually spread and cover.

 This is another frag from Billy, pink (maybe orange?) birdsnest. I kind of killed the top when I drained too much water out of the tank, but the rest is doing great. Each polyp closes up at night to no bigger than the tip of a pen, and then it comes out (as shown here) in the daytime to look all nice and fuzzy.

 Our firefish (with the red tail) and the Royal Gramma (purple and yellow) behind.

Our lawnmower blenny come out to play.

Four of our six fish, with the clowns featured prominantly.

We've got a cleaner shrimp, and he's started cleaning!

So we've reached our quota on fish for the tank, the "no vacancy" sign is on out front of the aquarium. We have our two clownfish, blue tang, firefish, royal gramma, and lawnmower blenny. In saltwater aquariums, you have to limit the quantity of fish per gallon much moreso than in freshwater.

That limit doesn't prohibit adding invertebrates. So last weekend we bought a fighting conch snail, a frag (piece) of coral, and a cleaner shrimp.

Not two days after putting the cleaner shrimp in the tank, he set up a "cleaning station" like the literature says they do, and started cleaning the blue tang! They clean parasites and dead skin off of fish on the reef, and they'll do it in the aquarium too. I sorta got a picture of the action, see below!