20L Garden Reef

[Corsair]

I started a thread for this tank a while back, but since the last update just about everything save the tank itself has changed. It's a mashup of softies, LPS and macroalgea, filtered by biopellets and a small skimmer down in the sump.





The candy cane is a very recent addition. Looks neat on the little wall I had there.



Filtration is pretty straightforward. The sump is a 10G aga with no baffles. The return dumps in through a sock filter with a big carbon bag shoved in it. The pump is a Mag5 split between the return and a Phosban reactor with NPX biopellets. The reactor effluent is fed to an Aquatic Life 115 Skimmer. The level is kept constant by a float valve, hooked to a Minijet in the freshwater reservoir. That pump is on a timer to top off periodically throughout the day.



Lighting is 4 X T5HO with stock Coralife bulbs. Up in the display, the return water, and output from an Ehiem pump are routed through a pair of Hydor rotating heads. I'd guess there is somewhere around 250gph moving in the display.

The stocking is heavy, very nearly ridiculous. I can only attribute the water quality to the pellets, which are amazing. Nitrates bottomed out about 3 weeks after they were added, and haven't been much of an issue since then. That's with pretty generous daily feeding.

Livestock
1 Black Percula Clown
1 Pajama Cardinal
5 Blue Green Chromis
1 Spotted Dragonet
1 Lyretail Mollie (yes it's silly, but I like that thing, lol)

It's hard to keep an accurate count on the clean up crew, but there is a group of 6 or so emerald crabs, a dozen various trochus snails, and a few nassarius snails.

The coral is mostly softies. A mix of leathers, mushrooms and polyps. No zoas though. An early infestation with nudibranches sort of doomed that from the start, as I learned the hard way. LPS has started to find it's way into the mix. There is a colony of frogspawn, an open brain, and most recently the candy cane. It's been doing pretty well. The only change it necessitated was adding the carbon bag to cut down on the chemical soup.

The macros are one of my favorite parts of the tank. There is a good mix of them now.

Calurpa Prolifera
Shaving Brush Algea
Mermaids Fan
Red Gracilaria
Halimeda

I don't harvest it a great deal. The crabs and the molly keep it pretty well mowed. This tank is pretty hands off. I scrape algae every once in a while, and do a 10% waterchange bi-weekly. It took a little while to get here, but the tank is finally getting legs and has a pretty good margin of error. I let my neighbor watch it when I was out of town and no disaster struck. I saw the first nitrate reading in months, so I suspect he tried to feed them to death, lol.

Thanks for checking out my tank

[Jarob]

I absolutly LOVE your tank... I wouldnt mind setting up something like that! I also really like that mollie in there a lot! Great job, keep it up

[Europhyllia]

I think it looks very nice but I am a little surprised by the pellet/macro combo.

When the pellets work as intended they really don't leave enough over for macro especially not that much macro. And when you have and want that much macro why bother with the expense of pellets?

[Corsair]

The pellet/macro combo is thus far working very well at keeping up with a very heavy stock load. Even with all those fish, my nitrates are rarely detectable. I suspect my "max capacity" will be determined by behavior issues, not by waste processing ability.

Unusual or not, it's a nice way to go. The macro growth is moderate, and largely controlled growth-wise by tank inhabitants. The skimmer is running, but rarely produces any skimmate. It's mainly a glorified aerator, and a back-up mode of filtration in the event of a spike in nutrients. Most of the macro has been doing well, and showing consistent growth. Xenia, on the other hand, dies a slow wasting death in these waters. Just not competitive enough. I haven't experimented with fertilizers yet, but that's likely my next step.

Before the pellets, the tank usually hovered at 20ppm in nitrates. I added the reactor at the same time as the sump to reduce nutrients, make the system less sensitive to w/c frequency, and to produce food. I've discontinued using phytoplankton, and the filter feeders are none the worse for wear. I would imagine in time, larger zooplankton, and other critters will fill in the food chain with the constant supply of fresh bacteria to consume. Hard to confirm or deny that suspicion though.

[Europhyllia]

I could be wrong ( I often am ) but from my experience with pellets the pellets -when working- put out a noticable amount of bacteria stuff that definitely is detectable in the skimmer (as in stinkier and richer) skimmate.
Nothing in the skimmer would make me suspicious that there is nothing much coming out of the pellets.
With your rockin' amount of macro though they probably also take up the nutrients that in other systems would go towards the pellet bacteria.
When my bacteria population on the pellets was very active macro was struggeling and often not making it.

It's a beautiful system and obviously working. I was just mentioning the pellet thing in case you ever get to a point where you want to reconsider your set up or how most effectively to allocate your investment.

I absolutely love your macro tank! Nice job!

[Mike]

Very nice. Thanks for sharing.

[Corsair]

I absolutly LOVE your tank... I wouldnt mind setting up something like that! I also really like that mollie in there a lot! Great job, keep it up

I absolutely love your macro tank! Nice job!

Very nice. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for the kind words!

I could be wrong ( I often am ) but from my experience with pellets the pellets -when working- put out a noticable amount of bacteria stuff that definitely is detectable in the skimmer (as in stinkier and richer) skimmate.
Nothing in the skimmer would make me suspicious that there is nothing much coming out of the pellets.
With your rockin' amount of macro though they probably also take up the nutrients that in other systems would go towards the pellet bacteria.
When my bacteria population on the pellets was very active macro was struggeling and often not making it.

I'll start by saying that I am by no means an expert here. I'm fairly new to marine tanks and learning as I go along. I can say that I have strong empirical evidence that the pellets are doing something. Before implementing them, my nitrates were always low, but always detectable. I also removed great heaping chunks of calurpa on a regular basis. Since the pellets cycled through, nitrates are gone and macro growth is moderate. The mermaids fan may not make it over the long run, but it may just need time to adjust (it's fairly new). The shaving brush looked awful too until it settled in and started growing. The pellets are absolutely killing the xenia, however. Those were doing well before.

The choice to add the pellets came when I fitted the sump. Since it shares the pump, the only real cost was the Phosban reactor, some PVC and a tiny <$20 bag of pellets. Nitrate drop began within days, and after a couple of weeks I had a mighty bacteria bloom that clouded the tank for a few days. During that phase, the skimmer was producing some utterly foul stuff. Once the bloom cleared, and nitrates bottomed out the skimmer production largely flatlined. Seems like it skims overnight after I've fed, then does nothing all day.

System definitely works. Until about a month ago, there was a Fu Manchu lion in there as well. He ate well, and he ate live, but the tank absorbed the waste without a hitch. That fish was removed for treatment when he got cloudy eye, and now lives in a FOWLR tank. Even with the current load of 9 fish, I'm fairly confidant I can add some shrimp and other small inverts now that the lionfish is gone.

[Corsair]

Added a new critter last night, a Christmas Feather Duster. It's only partially out of it's shell here. Under the led's last night it has 3 separate crowns when fully extended. Muy bonita!



The unsung heros of the tank, emerald crabs doing their thing



Got a decent picture of the dragonet too. This has got to be the most adorable fish to watch, lol. Always on the hunt.

[ErikH]

It looks great. I too like the molly, very cool.

[Corsair]

A not so good update. The air conditioner went out at my place and the tank shot up to 90 degrees. I was able to babysit it with ice for part of the time, but its not all good news. All the snails, and some of the crabs are dead. The coral all looks pretty awful, but it's impossible to tell at this point what will make it and what won't. The softies all look angry but intact, the LPS will be touch and go for a bit. It's all been damaged. The macro has also withered considerably, though with a new absence of predators it will likely recover.

My suspicion about the skimmer's role in the system has been more or less confirmed. The die off has nitrates up to about 20ppm, and I've gotten more skimmate in the past 24 hours than in 2 weeks hence. Ultimately it's an ecosystem, and it will mend. The remaining crabs, the nessarius snails, and the bristle worms look like they're on holiday. It will take some time to see what the full effects are.

Too bad the reef isn't like the freshwater tank. It's a co2 injected nano plant tank, and the heat just seemed to kick off a growth spurt in the grasses, lol