Some recent stuff.

Comments?

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Oh... and that is my tank.


Unfortunately I woke up today to find that big sculpin dead. There was a staghorn sculpin that died too. I don't know about the little tide pool sculpin I had, he disapeared as soon as I added the big red guy!

I've read that sculpins are sensitive to water quality. There is proof.

I'm pretty sure I added him too soon after that greenling and it overwhelmed the system.

My nem died with him :'(

So, big water change and....

That sculpin really looked to have rapid breathing in that video. I've never seen sculpins breath that rapidly either in the wild or in captivity. Is it possible that you have a low oxygen level issue ? Anemones are known to perish in low O2 levels too. With my sculpins (albeit a different species) their breathing is very slow.

No, I don't think low 02. I have an intank counter current protein skimmer and a trickle filter.

I think it was ammonia. That fish alone was equal to about all the other animal mass in the tank!

That was the first nem I managed to keep alive. :'(

That's learning. Even though I have a powerful filter system, it is useless if I don't allow it to adjust to any new additions. And the fact that it is an unheated tank would only make that last much longer.

Big water change later tonight.

I hope I can get another sculpin like that when the tank is ready... He was so gorgeous!

Ammonia could result in the labored breathing too. It is very true that a temperate tank's bacterial population takes a long time to adjust to new bioloads......much longer than a warm tank. It's the main reason that I continuously run a Poly Pad along with my filter floss. When I go collecting, sometimes I bring back rocks covered with NH4 producing critters....and the pads help control the NH4 until the bacterial populations adjusts to the new load.

I hear you Steve! lol

I normally have filter floss on my drip tray. I found a nice very fine sheet of filter material once. It cost a lot, but it worked very well. VERY fine. The problem was that you would see where the water flowed through the pad and then clogging. Then the water would either bipassed the pad or collect until the unit over flowed. If I get this stuff again, and I might, I will have to modify my drip tray so that less mat is against the plastic (bigger holes) so more water can drip though.

I use a poly pad under my floss pad. The poly pads are chemically treated to remove heavy metals, ammonia, organics, etc. It changes colors as a result of what is being removed (ie. it turns yellow if there's ammonia... blue for copper, etc). It doesn't seem to clog with a floss pad over it.

Fluval makes them, right?

From my experience and research it looks like mechanical filtration is very important for this type of tank.

On the one hand, I want food for my filter feeders, but I would do well to remove as much free floating organic matter as possible.

I did a 30gallon water change on the tank (80gal) yesterday. Tonight I'm going to see if I can't get another nem.

Is there a good source to buy the poly pads in bulk?

AquaticEngineer wrote:Is there a good source to buy the poly pads in bulk?

Hmm found these on ebay.

Just gotta cut it down to size.

Is the "bio" filter part refer to the chemical treatment?

This is what I use under my filter floss. I get it from Custom Aquatic through my wholesale account.

http://www.poly-bio-marine.com/polyfilter.html

Michael Milligan wrote:

On the one hand, I want food for my filter feeders, but I would do well to remove as much free floating organic matter as possible.

This is why many of those who are keeping heavily fed non-photosynthetic tanks (both warm and cold) have gone with feeding systems that feed heavily several times a day....but also, have heavy filtration. Concentrating the feeding while the filtration is either turned off or diverted away from the display tank is the best way to both feed heavily and filter heavily.

As for the ebay link....it looks to be the same pad that I use....but, I've only seen them come in 4" x 8" or 12" x 12".....for at least triple that price. If it's the same stuff, it's quite the deal.

I'm gonna buy some and give it a shot, worst case I use it as a regular filter pad and toss it when its dirty.

steveweast wrote:

Michael Milligan wrote:

On the one hand, I want food for my filter feeders, but I would do well to remove as much free floating organic matter as possible.

This is why many of those who are keeping heavily fed non-photosynthetic tanks (both warm and cold) have gone with feeding systems that feed heavily several times a day....but also, have heavy filtration. Concentrating the feeding while the filtration is either turned off or diverted away from the display tank is the best way to both feed heavily and filter heavily.

Why is this particular to non photosynthetic tanks?

In both warm and cold water non-photosynthetic tanks, all the inhabitants' food requirements must be added to the tank's water. By definition, no food can be made from the lights via symbiotic algae. In an sps or lps tank, one can get by with no feedings or very small additions.....and thus maintain a high water quality. In my current cold tank, my automated feeding system adds 40 ml of various foods to the water 3X a day....plus manually additions (about a full cup of additional food per day). If I did not do this, many of the tank's critters would just fade away.

I have a first hand example of this. When I sold my cold system to a buddy of mine three years ago, it was thriving. Over the course of six months of his treating it like a warm water sps tank, most of the strawberries and all of the gorgonians melted away. When I bought back the remnants, it took a year to grow them back from the survivors with heavy feedings and even heavier filtration.

There are now some warm water reefs using the same feeding/filtration regiments to successfully keep once thought impossible to keep critters like carnations, sponges and non-photo gorgonians.

If this same feeding schedule was imposed upon an sps tank, the decline in water quality would either turn the coral brown or kill them out-right.

As our filtration methods get more efficient, we can feed more and more often.....much like the natural seas. Food is the key to keeping cold critters without turning the water into a cesspool. In the wild, these critters are accustomed to being surrounded by food 24-7.....and they just don't well when food is only offered a couple times a week for just a few minutes.....and they will never be able to out compete a filter.