Lulus 30 Gallon

[littlest reef]

Hi,

My daughter Lulu is 8 and she started her first reef tank this weekend. Setup was with equipment we owned, she will choose the corals and the fish. This tank has been cycling for 7 months (!) with baby clownfish we bred.

Equipment is a mighty jet pump, heater, and Hydra32 light. Tank is a 30 long IM with a nice scratch right on the front of it. No dosing or any other tinkering, we’re changing 20 gallons of water a week together.

So far tank has Rasta and dragon eye zoas, one deformed clownfish with the smushed face we kept (“Squishy”), diamond goby, and 2 orange spotted file fish.

Lu took the attached photos (except the one she’s in). Tomorrow she wants to post a video of the filefish.

 

[Duds]

Her tank looks awesome, keep it up!! Great choices!

 

[littlest reef]

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These are our filefish feeding on masstick / homemade fish paste.

 

[littlest reef]

More shots. Male is below, female above.

 

[littlest reef]

Lucy has encountered her first reef challenge, the filefish are eating the zoas! I warned her this was a possibility. I explained the choice is then the fish or the corals. She has countered with “both” but just more tanks.

We are reworking our plan. Her birthday is in a month so she is angling for a 20 gallon IM in her room. She does not want to part with the filefish as they are extremely cool and also we’ve already got them moved onto dry food. We’re thinking of reworking this tank as a macroalgae tank.

We have a lot of equipment at our disposal and a couple different cycled tanks so we should be able to get this going quickly.

This is her scanning WWC to make her coral wish list.

 

[littlest reef]

Update: We have set up a 20 gallon IM bare bottom tank. Simple setup - return, autotopoff, one gyre, heater, and filter pads. Lighting is a Kessil AP9X, we're waiting on the mount. We used a single piece of Haitian dry rock I've had in storage since I was 14 (full circle moment!).

On the fish front we went through some tough times. We lost a file fish some type of flukes. It happened very quickly and soon after I posted the above. All of the fish were removed and treated in QT with prazi, and then went through a 14 day copper power treatment. Those fish are now back in a 30 gallon that will not have coral. The male filefish is doing great and eats probiotix small pellet / looks very fat.

In the spirit of learning something together, we switched from QT as a reaction to agreeing to QTing everything new which is something I have not done before. This weekend we picked up a purple firefish, a small bangaii cardinal, and a kupang damsel from OSA. Those went into QT with our runt clownfish "squishy" since even though he was born in this house we have no way of knowing if he carries disease as he was mixed with the aforementioned filefish at one point. These guys all went into observational QT Sunday, no medication, and despite eating and swimming around Sunday night, found the firefish DOA the next morning. Checked and not ammonia spike - the spongefilter has been cycling in another tank for 3 weeks and ammonia read 0. Who knows.

Over the last 24 hours raised copper from 0 to 2.0, and will raise from 2.0 to 2.5 today for 14 days. All other fish are eating and doing well.

 

[littlest reef]