46 to 65gal upgrade. New photos added 1/17

beautiful setup...... the rocks are awsm.......

 

Thanks for the kind words

 

Got the coral bug again, new additions include another lps and my first sps. The orange fungia is about 1.5inches across and the montiorpora confusa frag is reddish and supposed to table out with purple edges under high light. Hopefully they both do well am a little worried about the sps but here the montis are fairly easy to care for

Fed it while acclimating ate without hesitation, if only most fish were that well behaved


Put it middle under the light so it will receive the best possible with a dual T5HO, might decide to move it at some point

Placed nice and high under direct light with pretty good flow hopefully it will encrust the whole area someday

 

Finally added a frogspawn today, just a regular wall frogspawn. Also added a small flame angel, maybe around 1.5inches or so. Pictures to follow

 

Coral is looking good, nice setup!

 

Finally had time to get some photos of the new guys. Frogspawn appears healthy but the clowns have yet to show any interest, Im thinking they may not being captive bred. The flame angel is extremely active and acclimated extremely well. As soon as she was put in the tank she began to explore every nook and cranny and pick things off the rockwork and sandbed. Very active as she darts in and out of the rockwork and very hard to capture a good picture! Found a nice little cave to sleep in at night.
Also captured a good image of the fungia, it seems to be very healthy as well eating whatever offers and extending its tentacles all day.

Frogspawn after being added and positioned. I saw 2 mouths on it when retracted

and after being in place for a day or 2


Took forever to try and get pictures of the guy, kept peeking from behind the rocks and darting away so fast the picture was a blur



Overall tank seems healthy, I think I may have damaged the Acans by moving them at one point. The rainbow colony has finally recovered after being shrunken for the past week but the purple colony has been slower to progress. I dipped it this past weekend to see if it would help and it seems to have started to inflate a little so we will see what happens

 

Just a few more photos, almost at the 6 month mark since setup.

Frogspawn seems to be doing great and stays open throughout the day

The female clown has grown much larger than the male at this point still no signs of breeding though. They were sold as Perculas but I am still unsure if they are or not

And the new Flame Angel is still very difficult to capture a photo of! Seems to move so fast and likes to face the camera. Kind of chubby and now eating NLS pellets with the rest of the guys. I am hoping she acquires a diet for the pineapple sponges.

 

Quick update:
All the fish are doing great and eating like little pigs. Been feeding NLS pellets almsot exclusively from the start but then they started picking off some PE mysis I was feeding the corals once a week, past month or so I started to feed it more often in place of the pellets. Going to add in some Rods herbivore blend starting in a week or 2, can never have to much variety!

Corals are so so. The jasmine polyp has doubled in size or more since purchase and doing fantastic and the xenia is expanding like crazy as well. Seems to go through stretches where it pulses a lot and then other times barely at all but in always growing and expanding so must be healthy, I love the softies they are by far the easiest thing to care for. The Ricordea mushrooms are doing ok seems to be taking a long time for it to split, has been kind of stuck for awhile where the mother shroom swells up real large and the baby shroom kind of cups and doesnt extend as nicely as the parent, noticed what looks to be a new foot or something growing on the underside of it so maybe we will split soon. The new frogspawn seems to be doing great and extends more daily, I can not tell if it eats or not as I place the mysis and pellets on it from time to time and it kind of slimes them up into a ball but I never see it engulf them, but when I check back its gone either in the coral or in the tank and devoured by someone else.
My issues are with my acan frags mostly, do not inflate as well as they used too 1 looks downright awful at times but no white skeleton or melting, been this way for a few weeks now. Also the fungia stopped extending the tentacles for some reason. My current photoperiod is long 13 hours of a dual bulb T5HO, I always figured being a weaker light it would not harm the corals to keep it on so long. In an effort to problem solve I set the timer today so the new photoperiod will only be 10 hours. I am also going to bring a water sample to a lfs to get a second set of test on it to confirm my numbers which all seem to be well, the only thing I do not test is phosphates yet but am looking into a hannah checker.

 

So after decreasing the photo period and increasing feeding the acans have made a good recovery. The one colony still isnt back to what it was but getting close so at least it looks like its going to make it.
Unfortunately without a skimmer the increased heavy feeding results in some nitrates so theyre closer to 10ppm, also had my phosphates tested at a lfs which showed there are some in the system but not real bad. I decided to try and switch over to RO/DI water from tapwater since I am adding more corals and to eliminate the chance of phosphates from the tap so did a 10gal WC today with the new RO/DI water.
I also traded in the fungia since the flame angel seems to like it as much as I did, leaves everything else alone though. Sorry for the poor pictures everything is still acclimating and the tank cloudy from the WC.

 

Been awhile since Ive updated. Life gets busy and the tank gets put on the back burner sometimes.

The flame angel has yet to pick at any other corals since the fungia was removed, must have loved that one for some reason. All the fish remain healthy The has also been a lot of coralline growth!!

My xenia colony has become so large I finally started takign a razor to some of the stalks, I dont mind it looks so nice how it filled it. My Jasmine polyp colony also spread rather fast and is growing up the back of the rock and startling to crawl onto the top. I removed the original frag and relocated it to help it spread even further. The mushrooms are also doing great including the 2 new ones and I am thinking of adding some zoas into that areas to fill in between the mushrooms. My ORA monti confusa is growing slowly but changed and now looks like the one of their website. I had issues with my frogspawn and could not figure out what was going on until I noticed every time I added seachems marine buffer to the tank the frogspawn started to die off. I have since discontinued using the buffer and strictly use aquavitro products now and no further issues.

The only issues are the Duncan and the acans. The duncan died within a week or so but I left the skeleton in the tank, it has some fleshly looking bumps on it so we will see if it comes back. The two acan colonies take turns doing well and dyeing off not sure why, they seem to be the only corals struggling.

Today I added a ORA Purple Stylophora,I couldn't resist it even though I said I was not going to do an SPS tank.

Tank shot from today, you can see the purple coralline everywhere starting to link together, Wife said the rockwork looks diseased like chickenpox lol.


And the new coral!