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Reeftank Log 08/98 Tuesday, August 04, 1998 Purchased a small rock of striated turquoise blue mushrooms last Saturday. They seem to be doing well. The first 24 hours the rock was in the tank, the snails and hermit crabs went hog wild cleaning the surface of the rock of any algae. I hope those mushrooms spread and reproduce. Performed a 5 gallon water change today. SG appears to be 1.026 at 80 degrees. Removed some hair algae, snipped some excess Caulerpa racemosa, scraped coralline algae off the front of the tank and used the baster to blow out excess detritus on the corals. Noticed green juice flowing out of the Caulerpa where I had cut it. I'll try to change the carbon and Poly Filter tonight. All mushrooms, especially the red ones, are at the greatest expansion I've ever seen. No hair or slime algae on substrate surface.
Wednesday, August 05, 1998 I'm thinking of moving the contents in the 20 gallon tank to a 30 gallon tank on a higher stand in front of the fire place. We never use the fire place and moving the tank/contents would free up some room in the living room. I'll first have to find the tank and the stand. The move shouldn't be too difficult as long as I make sure the inhabitants are properly acclimated to their new surroundings. I'll probably have the substrate a little bit deeper than in the 20-gallon for the benefit of the green open brain coral. An alternative to buying a new stand and tank would be to just move the whole 20-gallon with the stand. This is probably the best thing to do in terms of time and budget. Yesterday, upon coming home, I saw the temperature of the tank was 87 degrees! I guess that isn't that bad considering it's been over 100 degrees in parts of Northern California. As long as the temperature doesn't stay high for a long period of time, the tank inhabitants shouldn't have a problem. I left the fan on top of the tank on for the whole day in order to cool off the tank. Last weekend, I increased the hours of light from 5 to 6 hours. It appears the hair algae is well controlled now so I'm not concerned about an algae outbreak.
Thursday, August 06, 1998 Things have cooled down considerably since the beginning of the week. Aquarium was only 80 degrees when I came home last night. Temperature in the house this morning was only 74 degrees. Changed Poly Filter and carbon yesterday. Poly Filter definitely does something to the water so that more bubbles are released from the skimmer into the tank. But this usually goes away in one day. Green star polyps are starting to become brighter again. New mushrooms are expanding to full size. New growth of Caulerpa racemosa is growing straight up now.
Friday, August 14, 1998 After reading the Eric Bornemann article, I think I'm going to drastically reduce the amount of strontium and iodide I've been adding to the tank. The instructions on the Reef Evolution bottles says to add 1 tsp per 50 gallons every two weeks. I've been adding ¼ tsp a day and ½ tsp every weekend to a 20 gallon tank. I think the extra addition of iodine may have contributed to the loss of the flowering star polyps – that sure makes me sad since they were beautiful polyps. So from now on I'm going to add only ¼ of a teaspoon of Reef Evolution products and ½ tsp of CombiSan a week along with biweekly water changes. Overall though, it looks like the 20 gallon is doing great | ||||||
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