- It's been a few months since my last reef tank tour,
so I thought it was about time to do another.
This 280-ish gallon tank has been running
since about March of 2015,
and it's come a long way in that time.
Hi guys and girls, I'm ReefMan,
and I hope you'll join me for a few minutes
to check out some coral and reef tank equipment.
My tank's lights, they're a mix of Radion Pro Gen 3
and Gen 4 and a few Kessil pendants,
are on a twelve hour schedule.
They come on around nine in the morning
and they go off around nine at night.
I don't do any seasonal light changes in the daylight
because wild reefs are found near the equator
where the days don't change in length very much.
I am considering trying out the new Philips CoralCare
Gen 2 lights, my Radions are sort of getting a bit old.
But we'll see, reef lights are a huge money investment
and with COVID and all the stuff going on,
I'm not really sure I wanna spend that much right now.
But maybe I'll get one just to try it out
and see how I like them.
At night, I do have some moon lights that I use.
And I use them on a lunar cycle.
I'll link a video above.
They're customized Lunar lights controlled
by my Neptune Apex controller.
I hope to one day replace that with a Reef-Pi based
lunar controller which will give me a more accurate control
over the brightness.
And brightness is still an issue for my moon lights.
Despite some recent disease setbacks
amongst a couple of my Acropora,
most of my corals are growing very well.
They've changed so much as they've grown,
and seeing the different growth forms is really cool.
Check out this green acropora,
it started as a little frag and it's such a big colony now.
The same is true of this other greenish blueish acropora.
But its growth form is totally different.
It started out as a frag just like the other,
but now it's grown into this really neat colony,
it has a nice flat bottom.
But it's a whole different growth form.
And it's totally different from the other one
we were just looking at.
And I think it's really cool to see how frags can grow
into colonies over time.
My Anacropora is growing like crazy,
and I gotta give it to the Chalice right under it.
It's getting a lot of shade,
but that chalice is doing great.
I'm planning on thinning out the anacropora,
so when I do that maybe we'll have a little raffle
and then donate some money to a reef charity of some sort
or something like that.
We'll see how that might work out.
My Montipora are also growing like crazy.
This one is very close to the glass,
and in fact it gets rubbed every time I clean the glass
on this side of the tank.
I know that irritates the coral,
it actually breaks off parts of it,
but it doesn't really seem to be any worse for the wear
and I really like the overall growth,
and so I can't bring myself to cut it.
It's another thing we'll have to monitor
as it grows and gets bigger
and that becomes more of an issue.
This Acropora was sold as a shelving acropora.
You can see, it did grow from a frag
into this really nice colony,
but as it has grown, the edges are starting
to grow vertically instead of out.
And it's forming a really neat cup shape in the process.
I'm really interested to see how this one continues to grow,
maybe some day a small fish or some invertebrate,
acropora crab or something like that
will take up a home inside it, protected in the bowl.
It's hard to tell in the video,
but the coral is about nine inches in diameter,
that's 23 centimeters, and it's still growing,
although the edges are starting to grow up more than out
as I mentioned now.
I feed my fish every day, but what I feed changes randomly.
Some days they'll get a mix of pellets,
like the Pantry Sponge
or the AlgaeMAX from New Line Spectrum,
and other days I'll just use my homemade frozen food.
I try to put a half sheet of nori in most days,
and my blue spotted angelfish takes that over
much to the disappointment of my Achilles Tang.
My Achilles Tang then swims around
cleaning up any pieces of nori
that the angelfish drops, which is most of it.
And then what's missed by the Achilles Tang is picked up
by my Kole Tang and the other fish in my tank
all get a little bit of nori.
I've been really loving my DaStaCo calcium reactor,
it works really well,
and I wanted to show you why you need to flush it out
every so often.
See all the sediment that builds up over time
in the bottom of the reactor vessels?
Well, eventually that'll start to slow down or even block
the water flow through the reactor.
So you just need to connect a tube and flush it out
every so often.
It's time to do that now, and at the same time
I'll top off the media.
This video is getting pretty long as you know,
so I'm gonna wrap it up.
I hope you enjoyed this update for my tank in June 2020.
Stay safe, be kind to each other,
have a fantastic day, bye!