"Bonsai Reef" (SPS style)

[Acronic]

Pics look great! Your corals are quite light. How long is your photo period?

[tmc1313]

Originally Posted by Acronic

Pics look great! Your corals are quite light. How long is your photo period?

Thanks Kevin, and thanks for the advice! I'm still not quite there yet, but I'll keep at it. I'm still having a lot of trouble photographing some of the deeper blue corals I have. I can't seem to get them to come out looking accurate. My tank does look like a zeo tank at the moment, but it's not the look I prefer. Most of my colors are light and every time I add a something new with darker colors it will lighten up within a month. My phos is .04, so I think that's good. I'm pretty sure my problem lies with no detectable nitrate using the Salifert test. I've been trying to raise them a little bit, but it doesn't seem that easy. My lighting is full lights for 7 hours and 9 hours total using sunrise and sunset mode on my dimmable ATI fixture.

[tmc1313]

Time for my 3 month update:
What's changed? Well, I couldn't leave well enough alone and switched to all LEDs cold turkey. I figured some of the coral were already browned out from all the instability I've put them through so I might as well change the lighting and have them start acclimating to the leds. So far so good, I'm getting great polyp extension and colors are still slowly improving. Most browned out SPS are showing color on the new growth (I'm taking that as a good sign), I haven't had any bleaching and I'm also getting a lot of encrusting at the base of everything. So here are a few updated photos:

What did I switch to?
AI Hydras (4 units)



Here is how they look over the tank:




And a few full tank shots:

[Shan69743]

very neat idea.

[Shan69743]

great growth too.

[mos90]

looks great.. i do like those hydras . what % you running them at.

[tmc1313]

Originally Posted by Shan69743

very neat idea.

Thanks!

Originally Posted by mos90

looks great.. i do like those hydras . what % you running them at.

Thanks, I'm running them @:

Red = 20%
White = 45%
UV = 70%
Green = 75%
Violet = 80%
DB = 85%
RB = 90%

[trueblackpercula]

Your tank is truly amazing outstanding work thank you for the insperation as I needed that.

[tmc1313]

Originally Posted by trueblackpercula

Your tank is truly amazing outstanding work thank you for the insperation as I needed that.

Thanks so much! And thank you for such a great compliment.

[blakers82]

Well done on the 'scape. Keep us updated on those Hydras.

[tmc1313]

Originally Posted by blakers82

Well done on the 'scape. Keep us updated on those Hydras.

Thanks. Sure thing, I'll be updating whenever I add or change something. Otherwise I plan on updating every few months just to show growth.

[mikeyyj23]

Wow the tank looks great! Thats an awesome aquascape everything is going to look so cool when it grows in. Im thinking about switching one of my tanks lighting over to the hydras

[PanicBuyer]

Wow, very artistic.

[LobsterOfJustice]

Looks like red bugs on the pearlberry, FYI

[tmc1313]

Originally Posted by mikeyyj23

Wow the tank looks great! Thats an awesome aquascape everything is going to look so cool when it grows in. Im thinking about switching one of my tanks lighting over to the hydras

Originally Posted by PanicBuyer

Wow, very artistic.

Thanks, I'm actually running two Hydra 52's right now with two actinic T5's in front and back. I think the addition of T5's evens everything out.

Originally Posted by LobsterOfJustice

Looks like red bugs on the pearlberry, FYI

Hi, thanks for the heads up, but there are no red bugs in the tank (thankfully). I went back and looked at the pic and I see how you might think that though. Might have just been something caught on the coral at the time I snapped the pic. Also, that pic was taken a little while ago. I'm sure I would have noticed if there were RB's by now. I'm always on the look out for any nasty pests.

[glaukos]

Love the scape!
Welldone tmc!

[reefcoco]

Love that look, I agree with everyone here, when these corals grows, this tank will be stunning. Simply Amazing Rockscape.

[tmc1313]

Originally Posted by glaukos

Love the scape!
Welldone tmc!

Originally Posted by reefcoco

Love that look, I agree with everyone here, when these corals grows, this tank will be stunning. Simply Amazing Rockscape.

Thank you! I'm really happy how the scaping turned out. I think the only downside to this look is that I'm limited on space for coral. I guess to have the look I want that's the sacrifice that has to be made. I can live with it though, I just have to be more selective with my coral choices.

[tannersmith2000]

Nice reef bommies

[jackson6745]

Killer scape!

[tmc1313]

Hi guys, time for my quarterly update. I changed my lights again from AI Hydra's to AI Hydra 52's. Most of my corals are easy or no name SPS. The corals showing the best growth and color over the last 3 months are the staghorns, stylo's, turaki, and lokani. The blue stag in the middle/left has colored up and been growing like crazy. The ones showing the least growth and color are the Mille's (bad color, but good growth) and birdnest's (good color, bad growth). I lost a maricultured Loripes colony, but this had been struggling for quite a while. I bleached it when I first switched over to led's and it just never recovered. My nitrates have been undetectable so I have been trying to feed more and cut back on my water changes to try and darken things up a bit. I don't use carbon or GFO and recently I put some online via a phosban reactor. I think I added too much because things lightened up again after they were doing so well. I have no idea why I did that knowing my nitrates and phosphates were already low. Since then I have taken it back offline and don't run any carbon or GFO now. My slimer was a nice deep fluorescent green and now it's a few shades lighter. It's recovered from much worse. So I took some recent pics for documentation. Things had looked better, but the GFO/carbon really brought things a step or two back. Hopefully the next quarterly pics will be much better.


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[trueblackpercula]

First off I want to say your tank is very inspirational. I had this problem and corrected it with feeding my Sps the below recipe. There is also something I am using called reef booster instead of pappone. I just wanted to make sure I tried a few different foods before deciding on what would be the one I would use long term. Either of these are great food and I would recommend to anyone with a reef tank. If you have any questions let me know and please keep the pictures coming.

Pappone� Recipe Italian Coral Food (Updated 1/14/2007)

Materials:
5 Oysters
5 Mussels
5 Clams
5 Shrimp (NOT cocktail shrimp, the big scampi type w/o the head and the shell)
1 Tablespoon of Sugar (not corn syrup, etc.)
200 mL of RO/DI water
10 g of Red Algae (Palmaria palmata; Bisck uses Julian Sprung's brand)
and/or 10 g of Spirulina, 10 g of Nori (spirulina is what Bisck prefers)

Methods: Make SURE that all ingredients are the freshest possible and DO NOT use frozen foods (unless it is impossible for you). Make sure everything "live" is rinsed and cleaned before putting it into the blender. Put all the ingredients into the blender and blend for 5 min, wait 2 min for it to cool, 5 more min blending, 2 min of waiting again, then finally another 5 min of blending (the pausing is so that the solution doesn't get too hot and "cook" from the heat of the blender/blades). Pour into cube forms (approx 10 mL each). Then freeze it all—you want to minimize how long everything is at room temperature.

Procedure: One hour prior to turning off your lights, you have the option of adding Amino acids to the tank*. (For example, 11pm Halides off, add AA’s, 12am, actinics off, then add pappone). Take off the cup of your skimmer, but leave the skimmer running (so you don’t have a massive drop in O2 levels overnight). After the lights are off, start with only a ¼ of a cube per WEEK for every 400 L of tank water (approx 100 gallons). Be sure to measure NO3 and PO4 the next morning so that these parameters don't spike after feeding. You can reduce the amount fed if you are having nutrient problems. Also don’t forget to put the skimmer cup back on the next morning before the lights go back on.

*If everything is going well. It is good to wait and see how the tank is doing for awhile before trying this. The whole point here is that you don't want to change anything too fast, because nothing good happens quickly in this hobby. (Another method to grind up amino acid pills in the next batch of food; however Bisck found that it sometimes causes diatom outbreaks in his tank

[tmc1313]

Originally Posted by trueblackpercula

First off I want to say your tank is very inspirational. I had this problem and corrected it with feeding my Sps the below recipe. There is also something I am using called reef booster instead of pappone. I just wanted to make sure I tried a few different foods before deciding on what would be the one I would use long term. Either of these are great food and I would recommend to anyone with a reef tank. If you have any questions let me know and please keep the pictures coming.

Pappone� Recipe Italian Coral Food (Updated 1/14/2007)

Materials:
5 Oysters
5 Mussels
5 Clams
5 Shrimp (NOT cocktail shrimp, the big scampi type w/o the head and the shell)
1 Tablespoon of Sugar (not corn syrup, etc.)
200 mL of RO/DI water
10 g of Red Algae (Palmaria palmata; Bisck uses Julian Sprung's brand)
and/or 10 g of Spirulina, 10 g of Nori (spirulina is what Bisck prefers)

Methods: Make SURE that all ingredients are the freshest possible and DO NOT use frozen foods (unless it is impossible for you). Make sure everything "live" is rinsed and cleaned before putting it into the blender. Put all the ingredients into the blender and blend for 5 min, wait 2 min for it to cool, 5 more min blending, 2 min of waiting again, then finally another 5 min of blending (the pausing is so that the solution doesn't get too hot and "cook" from the heat of the blender/blades). Pour into cube forms (approx 10 mL each). Then freeze it all—you want to minimize how long everything is at room temperature.

Procedure: One hour prior to turning off your lights, you have the option of adding Amino acids to the tank*. (For example, 11pm Halides off, add AA’s, 12am, actinics off, then add pappone). Take off the cup of your skimmer, but leave the skimmer running (so you don’t have a massive drop in O2 levels overnight). After the lights are off, start with only a ¼ of a cube per WEEK for every 400 L of tank water (approx 100 gallons). Be sure to measure NO3 and PO4 the next morning so that these parameters don't spike after feeding. You can reduce the amount fed if you are having nutrient problems. Also don’t forget to put the skimmer cup back on the next morning before the lights go back on.

*If everything is going well. It is good to wait and see how the tank is doing for awhile before trying this. The whole point here is that you don't want to change anything too fast, because nothing good happens quickly in this hobby. (Another method to grind up amino acid pills in the next batch of food; however Bisck found that it sometimes causes diatom outbreaks in his tank

Thanks for the compliment. That's quite the recipe! I do need to either start feeding the corals a bit or I might try to add more fish and feed them more and see how that goes first. Either way, I think I need to get my trates up (at least to detectable levels. I really don't get much algae growth except that dust up on the glass every few days.

[trueblackpercula]

Yes if you feed either food source I gave you will raise your nitrates.

[GhostCon1]

I love your aqua scape. However maybe I overlooked this, but how did you get the right side structure to stay up and be secure?