Donya's Pico Experiment

Two words: Aiptasia bomb. Not much interesting going on outside of that unfortunately.

There are two main types of Aips I've run across on the gulf-cultured rock: one that tends to get very large as an individual and doesn't divide much (if at all) and another that is incredibly aggressive, stays small, multiplies like crazy, and even chokes out macro given the opportunity. I would be very surprised if these two variants are just different strains of the same species because of the day and night-like difference bewteen them, but when they are small I can't tell the difference. The large ones that are practically hosting-sized do look a little unusual though by the time they get that big.

Anyway, it's not the large ones in this tank. I ended up reintroducing the incredibly aggressive one into this tank at some point since January and haven't been set up to deal with it yet. The tank is going to have to be mostly drained again, scrubbed, and the rock replaced at least temporarly (have to dry the current one and re-culture) before the end of the summer, but I haven't gotten there yet. Then two more peps are going to go in again as a preventative measure to try to make sure there is no more of this. They had been moved out, which is part of what led to this. All of those nems are filtering the water - so the water is great lol. But it is an ungodly horror in every other way.

None of my other picos have been prone to this issue for some reason...I've got a 0.9gal with just hermits and snails that's kind of mucky looking because they constantly stir the sand, but not a single nem in it. Similarly, my 3gal mantis tank just has the one large Aip still (the type that never seems to split); none of this total takeover business.

By the way, word of warning...the initial explosion in this last round seemed to be specifically triggered by the use of Aip-X. I had maybe 10 individuals at most, went after a few, and then by the next morning morning, the treated nems had simply split themselves into 50billion nubs that ran all over the tank in the coming days. I saw basically the same problem with Aip-X in my 55 (and therefore gave up on it), but with peps in there it was a different story. Joes Juice never seems to allow that response and has worked great for me, but it also seems to be more caustic, so I don't trust using it in such a small volume of water. It has the strongest effect on the nems when allowed to linger and degrade on its own rather than being siphoned out, which means it could send the pH all over the place in a 1.5gal.

That stinks, Donya. What is it with us and bombs lately?

Good thing is that I think the crash killed my aiptasia too. Hehehehe...

L

Well, if there is a probability p of something going wrong with a given tank per unit time, then having n tanks means that everything going right through t iterations of that unit time is (1-p)^(nt). If p = 0.05 (totally made up, but what many people would consider a low probability) and n=12 (number of tanks I have), and the unit time of a month, then the chance of all of them going smoothly during a single month is a measly 60% (just better than a coin toss) and the chance of all of them going smoothly for a year is 0.06% if I just ran the numbers correctly. Hows that for reassuring! Obviously what I just did there is an incredibly overly simplified model, but it gets the point across. More systems to observe = more likely to see rare bad events. I have to remind myself of that sometimes when more than one of my tanks decide to be a pest at the same time.

Donya said:

Well, if there is a probability p of something going wrong with a given tank per unit time, then having n tanks means that everything going right through t iterations of that unit time is (1-p)^(nt). If p = 0.05 (totally made up, but what many people would consider a low probability) and n=12 (number of tanks I have), and the unit time of a month, then the chance of all of them going smoothly during a single month is a measly 60% (just better than a coin toss) and the chance of all of them going smoothly for a year is 0.06% if I just ran the numbers correctly. Hows that for reassuring! Obviously what I just did there is an incredibly overly simplified model, but it gets the point across. More systems to observe = more likely to see rare bad events. I have to remind myself of that sometimes when more than one of my tanks decide to be a pest at the same time.

Click to expand...

I somehow don't feel so bad now about what happened to my tank. Thanks for cheering me up!

Yeah tanks seem to turn nasty at the nine month and 12 month marks. There truly is no safe zone is there haha.

Time, planning, and going slowly works wonders. Not an Aiptasia in sight. The Aip removal was months of work by a peppermint pair - no intervention on my part. It has been Aip-free for most of 2013. The coral went in a couple weeks ago and is already showing some new polyps. The munch marks in the leaves are the work of that little blue-striped goblin peering out of the hole in the sand; I'm not sure why he does it. The same hermit pair from last year is still in there.
 

I love reading your journals Donya, just spent an hour going through this one.
 
I know it's been a while since you were writing about having somewhere to grow larvae up and have probably sorted it by now but would a container partly submerged in the parental tank with water pumped in and allowed to overflow back into it work? If it was washing the larvae out you could put the fine mesh around the top so the water almost leaks out. Sort of like a HOB but with much lower flow.

Unfortunately I never sorted out a suitable rearing system for the larvae. Catching them proved simple enough after a while just by waiting around when I knew it would happen and using a turkey baster. Getting the flow right and everything in an in-tank or HOTB sort of setup was problematic but seemed doable. I considered using an air-driven HOTB unit with fine mesh to protect the output (probably just enough flow) but I never got it tested thoroughly since there were more serious problems that made me give up. What really did it in for me was the feeding - that is nearly impossible without having both a lot of time to manage it at multiple points every day or some sort of auto-feeding system releasing new food every couple of hours and a LARGE body of water (probably a deadicated 20gal at smallest) to avoid pollution between maintenance opportunities. It's something I do plan to give another try at some point in the future when I can be technologically equipped to handle the feeding better.

Been ages since I updated this journal; I actually had the tank going until this past winter. I only stopped with it when I got fed up with an annoying problem it had developed: salt somehow got under the rim around the top of the tank (glue was dissolved in places maybe?) and was constantly streaming down the sides as a result. I couldn't seem to pry the rim off to clean it, so it just made for constant excessive salt creep that was way faster than what I've had on any of my other tanks. Daily wipe-downs didn't control it sufficiently, so something had to change. The buildup is still obvious even after trying to clean it up to break it down. I'll try to remember to get a picture of the issue before the tank gets tossed, since it's really weird. Anyway, I did small upgrade to a 2.6gal fluval spec - which is really not much bigger dimension-wise, but more importantly it's glass. So, I won't have the scratch and suction cup mark issues the acrylic one had. The lid has a tiny gap around the edges so there's more air circulation and it seems to have zero salt creep as a result, which is nice. It's also got a compartment in the back, which I've really decided is a must for itty bitty tanks. It's so much nicer to have a way to hide tiny heaters, filters, etc. to stop the livestock from pulling at it and rearranging it constantly. Because everything is so small, even pretty small hermits can be a real pest about that and dislodge suction cups.
 
Stock-wise I also lost one of the hermit pair this winter, and the other's behavior indicated to me that it might be winding down a bit with age, so I moved it to another tank for the rest of its days (it hasn't molted in months and basically just sits and waits for food to be put in front of it; being a majorly lazy blob is common with old hermits). So, I moved that hermit to peaceful tank where I won't need to rely on it doing any cleaning to have the tank work. In its place in the small tank, I added a few Clibanarius digueti (red tip hermits) to do actual CUC work shortly before I swapped out the old tank for the newer fluval tank. After the swap, I've still got the C. digueti and neon goby, who lives in the same rock. I also apparently can't keep macro, because he eats it all eventually. He also started not letting snails on his rock, so there's always a bit of green fluff there - which is bit of a pain, but it doesn't spread anywhere else in the tank. I just have to give the rock a manual shave periodically. Most recently I've also added a bumblebee shrimp, which is truly the weirdest little thing I have ever kept. 
 
So, here's what this thread's pico tank ultimately turned into. 
 

 
It's more of a normal reef now than has been the case in the past. For a few months I used the light it came with, which was just enough for some mushrooms, but then decided this past week to give it a small lighting upgrade (got one of the 6" wavepoint LED clip-on lights) so I could add some other coral frags I've been growing out in my various larger tanks. At some point I might try another Ciliopagurus strigatus pair in the fluval spec, but hermit-wise I'm more focused on some larger species at the moment in other tanks. If I did another C. strigatus pair, the way I'd want to do it would be to get a bunch and wait for two to pair off in an obvious way, and I can't do that easily in any of my other tanks at the moment.