Well, the Reefkeeper’s life is a sine wave… Once your tank thrives, exploding with colors, making you proud of it and once it looks like a decaying matter, the corals are dying and you cannot find out why. This post will be about the last two months of my reefkeeping adventure and why I promised to make some videos and podcast and they are still not issued.
At the end of May my tank looked really amazing and I was so proud that after a few months of stagnation the corals started to color and grow like crazy. Unfortunately a few weeks later everything crashed and I really can’t find the reason. Some of my corals simply started to die one day. The first thing I did was buying an ICP test to check, if everything was ok with the water. When the results were ready I’ve analysed them carefully, but almost everything was perfect, maybe except of the shortage of some trace elements (cobalt, molybdenum, etc.), relatively low level of iodine and pretty high phosphates (0.616 ppm). I’ve corrected the levels gradually, but with no effect to my corals. In the meantime I added a new fish – Tuka Anthias, which still does not eat the frozen food, so I have to breed my own live plankton (brine shrimp nauplii), which is the only food this fish eats. In the beginning I fed it heavily with different types of frozen food, what probably resulted is an immediate increase of phosphates. My test kit was showing 0.03 ppm, so I decided to buy Hanna Instrument Checker. The first test has shown 0.63 ppm, so extremely high and that was probably the main reason of my corals death.
One of the most painful loses – my Caulastrea furcata 
Luckily these spotted mushrooms grow pretty good 
Definitely the biggest SPS coral in my tank
I lost over 50 polyps of green Caulastrea, some of my Acans and Lobophyllias and the rest of my corals are in pretty bad condition. I’m still struggling and trying to improve the water quality by more frequent water changes (20 l two times a week, which is a bit over 10% of my system’s volume; in a typical maintenance schedule I made one 20 l water change, which was probably too less to remove all the nutrients). I also adjusted and cleaned my protein skimmer, add 1 kg of Maxspect Nano-Tech Bio-Spheres and improve the spectrum of my lights by adding 2 T5 bulbs (ATI True Actinic and ATI Blue Plus). Now I’m acclimating my system and gradually increase the lighting time and reducing the power of white LEDs in my lamp. Hopefully all of these changes and improvements will help. My corals look a little bit better now, but there’s still a lot to do. And basically that’s the main reason, why I stop to post photos on Instagram and Facebook, making YouTube videos, blog posts and other social media stuff. When your tank is going bad, you simply spend every single moment of your free time to help it and make it better – I’ve watched tons of YouTube videos on how to deal with these problems (BRS TV was particularly useful) and spend hours on reading forums and articles in the Internet. Now, when the things are getting better I hope to get back, so stay tuned and see you soon on my social media channels!
Greetings,
Adam