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View Full Version : hit upon way to grow euphyllias...


Sk8r
08/03/2010, 09:32 AM
Euphyllia, ie, hammer, frogspawn, torch.

My hammer was large...it is becoming incrementally larger, as in over a foot across. The small frog has doubled in size in 2 months, and the torch which was in a funk has started dividing.

The recipe, part 1: kalk drip (I use kalk in my topoff water: no reactor, no muss, no fuss, no stirring). [Other perhaps pertinent elements of my setup: a fuge lit 24/7, so plenty of copepods: the 54 gallon tank supports 2 dragonets happily, and has copepods left over. Plenty of bristleworms, which IME are real good at predigesting leftovers into coral-food-optimum-size-bits. MH lighting at 10k. For flow, I use 2 opposed 1/2 sea swirls aimed at each other (Sea Swirls move their nozzles constantly, making a chaotic water flow, and they don't move quite at the same rate, which makes it even better: sometimes they blow at each other head on, sometimes they don't, but the flow gets all over and doesn't concentrate on any specimen.) All this is as it was.]

The change: I got some inch-size dried krill for my pond fish, who didn't like it. Big box. Pond treats. I fed it to my reef fishes. In about 4 weeks the color and 'bloom' and growth rate of the euphylias, and incidentally, the color and vigor of the crocea clam, have turned sharply from ok to oh-my!

I would advise anyone trying this diet to be sure at the outset it's just plain dried krill, and also suggest one vary the food now and again so the fish get the full range of their dietary requirements. But that monster hammer has now taken half the front of my tank, and the frog that languished without reproducing for the last 2 years has gone into overdrive. There seems to be some key nutrient in the diet as now exists, and I suspect the worms are helping break it down, because that rabbit is a very messy eater where krill are concerned, and he drops pieces that are gone into worm-caves in short order. The corals get lush, yet never seem to grab an actual piece, so I'm thinking the worm-digested bits are floating around to get inhaled: my skimmer's good, but not great, and the floaty bits do get around.

HTH.

PoukieBear
08/03/2010, 11:16 AM
As always Sk8r, you're full of great info !

Now, lets see pics of your foot long hammer! Please?

Sk8r
08/03/2010, 11:45 AM
http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f269/Sk8r10/onespotMar2010.jpg

This is far from a good shot...and it's grown since this. The little chromis is very foreground. The rabbit is about 5".

180+55reef
08/03/2010, 12:25 PM
wow and thank you

Sk8r
08/03/2010, 12:44 PM
Thing is, once a coral goes 'colony,' every division, happening all over the colony at once with every head dividing, means its growth rate increases with every division--- as long as the calcium and magnesium are adequate. This poor thing has been through 3 kalk accidents in the past 2 years, the heater being unplugged for two weeks, you name it---and it grows, and grows and grows.

The colony started with a little frag of 3 heads: it grew baseball sized. We moved 3 years ago, and the re-setup didn't phase it. The baseball became a softball. Then a basketball. I'm going to have to frag it: fortunately I have an lfs that will market the pieces. As a frag producer, in a good tank, this coral could go on doing this indefinitely.

180+55reef
08/03/2010, 12:49 PM
what is ur ph goal with the kalk and what is ur alk, calc and mag, maybe u hit a sweet spot

I have tons of LPS, so I am VERY Interested

thanks!

Sk8r
08/03/2010, 01:31 PM
My parameters are in my sig, on the recommended list---not indisputable: some like it more one way than another, on salinity, e.g., but I buzz through the newbie forum fairly often, and figure it's helpful to state at least what a set of good parameters looks like, so I just put what I use in the sig line.

The ph---y'know, I haven't measured it in forever. I'll do that if the meter still has a battery. I don't worry so much about ph, so long as my alk is within bounds. I find it sort of self-adjusts. Let me go downstairs (basement sump) and see if I can find an answer for you. I need to throw more ro/di water into the topoff anyway.

For the topoff, I use a simple container with an eggcrate disk jammed in it to keep my topoff pump out of the white slurry of undissolved kalk that lies below that disk: I don't measure the kalk dose. Ro/di will dissolve exactly what ro/di water can carry, ie, the correct dose---and no more. If you overdose and spike the ph, it self-corrects pretty fast, though i keep a bottle of Schweppes' bar soda on hand in case it's really egregiously bad. When correcting, do it by the teaspoonful of bar soda per 80 gallons of system water (counting sump)---but it's easy to overcorrect. Generally it won't hurt corals, though it's best not to have an accident.

Let me go scope out that ph.

Sk8r
08/03/2010, 01:54 PM
My ph is 8.1. Which is fairly average for this tank. I keep my salinity at 1.025, just for .001 leeway in the balance. Calcium is about 480, mg usually about 1300-1500, alk on the high end.

I just threw a few gallons of ro/di into the reservoir, and added a couple of tbs of magnesium, which I use of course to keep the cal/alk balance up. As in using kalk, I never add calcium or buffer until I accidentally let the mg level drop, and then of course I 'set' the level by hand-dosing magnesium and Kent Turbo-Calcium and Kent Alk buffer toward the high end of the acceptable range. And as you see by the amount of coralline I have to scrape off, (if I didn't, that whole glass would be pink) it soaks up a lot of magnesium. I use Kent Tech M, and I don't mind being a little high in mg---better than low; and since, using kalk, these levels self-adjust to a certain extent, it comes out ok.

I'm not at all good on water changes---I've been putting off one since January: by my experience, lps require 'rich' water, so I don't sweat it too much, but I do several changes a year. Or at least a couple. And I'll probably do up to 50% when I finally do one---I'm embarrassed to admit how sloppy I am about that: not a very good example to the newbies, who by no means should do what I do!!!! But you asked, and I am trying to be mercilessly honest about my practices.

I don't use carbon, and I don't use a filter sock: I rely on my cheato ball to do gross filtering, since all the water goes blasting through there and drops all sediments to the sand of the sand/rock/cheato 20g fuge (middle chamber of a 30g sump---and I have a cleanup crew of snails and crabs in the sump, too. My snails have lived at least 3 years, since I've bought no new ones: the crabs carry on. I have a 5" crocea clam.

What else? The hammer popped a few heads when badly stressed a couple of years ago: they're still in the tank, not down the filter, and they've begun to kind of hang out in the same spot for the last year---they might have started laying down a stony base, but I haven't bothered them to find out: I have a rabbit fish in there at close quarters, and I'm not putting my fingers under rocks. ;)

One thing I think is quite important: I have those two half-inch Sea Swirls aimed dead at each other on opposite sides of a wedge tank---and the nozzles fairly flat out-level. This means there's fierce flow on every back and forth pass when the two flows oppose each other, but then they fall out of rhythm. This means the lowest level, sand level, is quite tranquil, and the mid to upper level has a chaotic flow. The fish get a lot of exercise on the upper level, but I think it's good for them. That flow also means food in the tank tends to stay in the tank to be eaten. My cleanup crew consists of maybe 50-80 worms, including some a foot long (there's almost always 4, go figure: I don't know why they come in 4s)---a nassarius, a fighting conch, and about 20 microcrabs and 10 turbo snails. I maintain rock nearly to the glass, though with deep sand patches, mostly so the stupid snails won't turn over and die. And outside of that, sloppy as my housekeeping has been for 2 years because of business pressures---it thrives through all disasters.

Note: I just added that mg, and the heads on all the euphyllia have poofed to max. They wanted that, I guess. They're sucking up water. The little frog, that had only 2 weak heads in February, now is the size of a baseball, and the polyps on the hammer right now are about 2" each in diameter. Really poofed.

Plus I had a brain that I thought had died in the move, that got used as structural rock, and lo and behold that poor dead completely corallined rock has coughed up a tiny polyp of maze-brain, that now has domed and is about quarter-sized, so it seems happy too. That's going to be interesting to watch.

When I frag that main hammer I'm going to frag only the lower branches, leave at least half of it, and hope it continues this crazy growth.