Newb looking to repent

[nyma11]

Hey Gang,

So I am new to Saltwater. i have had fishtanks for over 30 years, however this is my first experience with saltwater.

Why am i repenting?

I fell into the trap where i bought bought bought, just based on beauty and not so much doing things the right way. I am here today to make things right.

I wish to show you a picture of my tank, my coral, my setup and hope to gain some information such as placement (based on lights ecotech 30's LED). how to control the coral group (prevent them from spreading). And any other useful information regarding the setup.

My setup:

150 gallon tank with 3 XR30 lights, a 30 gallon sump, vortech mp40 powerhead, battery backup, and reeflink.

The tank is 6 feet long and about 36" deep (approx).

here are some pictures. please nit pic these images. Are my corals to high up in the tank? maybe they prefer to be lower and more in shade? as examples.

With that said let me upload the pictures. Please assist a newb looking to repent. I dont even know some of the names of the corals, how to care for them properly and such (all of them are new) if you could assist me with that as well.

:fish1:

255503

255504

255505

255507

255508


What do i want? Well i want the names, care, location you recommend to be placed in tank, what type of suppliments if any. anything useful.

thank you for taking the time to read this.

[Nanook]

[moved]

[chefbill]

I'll do what I can, I can't promise I'm right though...from the top:
pic 1: aquascape looks good
pic 2: goniopora, word is these are hard to care for and usually die
pic 3: zoanthids/palys easy beginner soft coral
pic 4: looks like toadstool leather to me (med to high light, med to high flow) easy to care for
pic 5: anchor coral, wall variety. I'd say it's fine as is, be careful about too much flow.

These are my non expert opinions. Someone let me know how I did :)

[oshanickreef]

I'll do what I can, I can't promise I'm right though...from the top:
pic 1: aquascape looks good
pic 2: goniopora, word is these are hard to care for and usually die
pic 3: zoanthids/palys easy beginner soft coral
pic 4: looks like toadstool leather to me (med to high light, med to high flow) easy to care for
pic 5: anchor coral, wall variety. I'd say it's fine as is, be careful about too much flow.

These are my non expert opinions. Someone let me know how I did :)

Picture 2: Goniopora. this is correct. do not touch them with your hands. the oils on your hands will kill this coral. use rubber gloves. hopefully not too late.

[nyma11]

Wow thank you very very much.. esspecially the dont touch them with you hands part.

[oshanickreef]

no problem. i cannot believe your LFS didnt warn you. you should go back and tell them to either get more educated employees or to actually give a [profanity]when selling livestock..

[disc1]

no problem. i cannot believe your LFS didnt warn you. you should go back and tell them to either get more educated employees or to actually give a [profanity] when selling livestock..

Better yet would be to educate yourself so you don't have to rely on people with dubious motives to do your thinking for you.

[oshanickreef]

Better yet would be to educate yourself so you don't have to rely on people with dubious motives to do your thinking for you.

+1

Cant trust nobody! haha:furious:

[garydan]

For lighting, you asked if stuff was too high/low in the tank. Honestly, I wish I had bought a PAR meter earlier to answer this question. Placement depends on your light intensity and your flow. Everyone's lighting and flow is a little different, so the best anyone on here can give you is a guess. A PAR meter takes the guess work out of it for light intensity, and observing the coral will answer if the placement is right for flow. Also, having a PAR meter will allow you to track your light intensity over time, so you know when to change bulbs. :) (just clicked that you have LED's, it's still possible to use PAR meters to adjust intensity, even though you never have bulbs to replace).

For your goniopora, even with tons of research and trying every kind of food I could find, mine slowly disappeared over a course of a year. It was likely a nutrition issue, everything else in the tank was happy, healthy, and growing. Hopefully you have better luck than me. This may help: http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2005/10/aafeature2

BTW, if you like this coral, I’ve heard many have had great success with the ORA Red Goniopora. It’s aquacultured, and seems to have a much better survival track record than the wild caught specimens.

[nyma11]

Thats for all the advice.

I am starting to see the goniopora not open up as much anymore. I wonder where i am going wrong. It opens up on some days other days it just remains a softball size and doesnt extend very far.

I have changed the lighting intensity and the powerhead speed recently during a maintnaance, i wonder which is the first thing to change back.

[tylersarah]

My goniopora prefers to live towards the bottom where there is not much flow, but they do like to sway in the current. You can try to target feed it with a pipette.

Buying too many corals at once is still better than buying a lot of fish. Maintain your Alk, Ca and Mg (especially Alk!) and I wouldn't bother with other supplements, but I would feed the corals. Also, corals are not hosts for marine disease, but can transport to your tank and later infect fish (the longest known living strain of ich was 12 wks, afaik). I added snails to my display and infected my fish with flukes (I even swished each snail in a dipping bowl of water prior to introduction). I'm not being overly cautious here, I cannot stress enough the importance of quarantine.

[garydan]

Like all LPS, too much flow direct flow has the potential to tear the flesh. As tylersarah said, they like to sway I the current, so soft, alternating, indirect flow is your goal.

LPS tend to adjust how much they expand to compensate for the amount of light they receive. An LPS that's blown up like a balloon looks cool, but that behavior is often a response to insufficient light. It's expanded trying to capture more light. Newbies confuse it for "growth" just before it dies because it's not getting enough light/food from the algae inside of it. Seeing yours shrunk down may be a sign of too much light, or it may be a stress response to the change in light. When light increases, corals have the ability to shade themselves internally by increasing pigments in their tissue. This response takes time though.

For all corals, stability is more important than absolute value. There's a range of acceptable values, try to pick a point and stick too it. One of the biggest mistakes new reefers make is fiddling and "adjusting." The animal is new to the tank and already adjusting to the new conditions it was just dropped into. Change on top of that is generally a very bad idea and can lead to death. At this point, I'd recommend just leaving it alone (unless you've changed it so there is direct flow at it which is tearing it's flesh). Your light level already changed, it's already adjusting, it's best to just leave the light alone now. My experience is that the animals are pretty adaptable to flow changes, I'd be less concerned about small changes in flow than changes in light.

We tend to think we can "fix" stuff by moving it around, often the change causes more problems than it solves. The animal is trying to adapt to a moving target, the adaptation takes energy and causes stress.

There's a lot of articles (not just the one I linked to) that says nutrition is critical to goniopora. Target feeding with the right foods is the only way you'll have long term survival. What are you feeding it? When you target feed it, are you seeing a polyp response to take in the food? There's two responses the polyps make, one is when you blow a bunch of food at it and it retracts. That's a stress response, many reefers confuse that with feeding. The other response is when you supply food and you see it open it's mouth and take the food in, typically one polyp at a time. You'll need to experiment to learn what these responses look like.

So, at this time, 1) learn about nutrition and feeding response for this coral, 2) stability, 3) stability, 4) stability.

[nyma11]

makes sense, stability, of course I moved the goniopora down to the bottom of the tank in the sand before i read the imporatant part... stability.

Well it isnt in the "flow" anymore, not that it was super strong or anything.

I also bought some Ocean eggs as i have read they like that stuff. I plan on keeping the lighting the same for some time.

Here she is, all sad, taken a few moments ago.

<a href="http://s107.photobucket.com/user/nyma11/media/DSC_0306.jpg.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m296/nyma11/DSC_0306.jpg" border="0" alt=" photo DSC_0306.jpg"/></a>