 State
of the Tank 1/04
(cont.) |
time outside the tank, enjoying it. Well, I guess there's always '05. Clearly, this month picked up where December left off; maybe even worse, as it was during this month that my spirits regarding the tank and quite possibly, my involvement in the hobby period, hit rock bottom. (Another irony was that this was the month that both my photos in The Reef
Tank's
calendar and my FeaturedTank of the
Month article in Reefs.org's
AdvancedAquarist magazine were being
published.) It was as
though this 'rtn' event
was beginning to develop a
rhythm; meaning that it would only
seem to affect one
coral at a time and the moment that
situation was 'fixed',
it would trigger an event in another
coral…sometimes
the very next day. In no particular
order, the pieces
affected during the first TWO WEEKS
were as follows:
Acro #25  , completely lost, Acro
#18 ,
fragged and saved, Acro #10 ,
fragged and saved,
Acro #27 , completely lost, and
Acro #29 ,
severely fragged, saved.
I'm sure you can imagine my frustration,
for although this event seemed to have
a rhythm, it certainly didn't
have a pattern. Only one of the aforementioned
pieces was a recent 'wild caught'
specimen, a prime candidate for these
type of things. The others ranged from
fairly recent entries to colonies
I've had for years , to
DAUGHTER colonies of colonies I've
had for years . It just didn't
make any sense and I was at the point
where I truly dreaded coming down to
look at the tank in the mornings. I
knew something was going to be wrong,
it was just a matter |
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of which piece today! And mind you, though out all of this, we'd keep a complete record of our water parameters, sometimes double and triple checking our test results
which, occasional high alk excluded,
all continued to fall well within
acceptable limits. We would also
perform as many water changes
as possible, run a little carbon.
Obviously,
I posted for advice all over the
boards and this time got quite
a bit of sympathetic response.
There seemed to be two major schools
of thought. The first theory was
that perhaps due to a build up
of detritus and other gunk behind
the rockwork over the years, my
organic phosphates (the type that
are harder to test for) just may
be waaaay high. The second was
that, despite conventional wisdom
('uh-oh'), raising
certain parameters artificially
high, in my case the alk, might
be having a long term adverse effect
on the corals; 'burning them
out' was an operative phrase.
Other responses ranged from the
somewhat fatalistic “It's
all part of the game” approach
to the even more ominous, “It
may be an after effect of last
year's Crystal Sea/Instant
Ocean fiasco”.
I
do what I can in regards to phosphates:
I try to restrict their input as
much I can through not terribly
overfeeding and even tossing out
the tank water I use to thaw the
fish food in (a really good idea,
btw. This is an often overlooked
major source of phosphates). |
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