eschaton
Fishaholic
I moved out of my old apartment this week, and set up all my tanks, moving all of my tanks to my Girlfriend's apartment until our house gets in order (I hear drying paint is bad for fish, so they'll be hanging there for two weeks). All my freshwater stuff moved fine (okay, two out of 40-some fish and countless shrimp didn't make it), but I think my nano-reef is set to crash.. I moved it Wednesday night. It was/is a 20-gallon with LR, inverts, and forgiving soft corals (mushrooms, yellow polyps, xenia, star polyps). Here were my steps.
1. I drained a now empty 20-gallon FW tank I had, and gave it to my girlfriend.
2. She mixed up 7 gallons worth of salt water. She got the salinity right, but she mistook my instructions to leave the water in the trunk so it wasn't room temperature, and actually warmed the water up almost to 90 degrees! Thankfully we got it a bit cooler.
3. Filled two buckets with water, and quickly placed LR rubble and major soft corals within. Made sure to keep totally submerged a few which had cool sponges on them. Took them to her place.
4. Did the same with my four large chunks of LR. One (a large bit of staghorn rubble) wouldn't fit in a bucket. It never had much life on it except some algae, so I just wrapped it in a garbage back for transit.
5. The difficult bit - scooping out all the live sand. Kept it all wet, and got stung by a few fireworms in the process. I wish I could have put the sand in first, but it was too coarse to siphon, so dumping it in after rocks and coral were placed was the only choice. Moved all rocks with cool life/corals on them onto one side of the tank, and slowly dropped sand into the other end. Took two days to totally clear up, but no one of note appears to have been buried.
While all this was going on I was moving critters (snails, shrimp, various mushrooms I found unattached to rocks).
Anyway, this morning, I found two dead snails (stomatela) and one dead sexy shrimp. I also saw what I'm pretty sure was a dead worm floating on by. The corals largely seem alright, but I'm terrified the tank will cycle again and kill most of the macrolife - only to need to be moved again in like 3 weeks. Though, the temp was really high for some reason this morning (lady doesn't have AC, and I was using a heater set to a slightly higher temp, so maybe that killed em).
So yeah, I'd like some tips.
1. I drained a now empty 20-gallon FW tank I had, and gave it to my girlfriend.
2. She mixed up 7 gallons worth of salt water. She got the salinity right, but she mistook my instructions to leave the water in the trunk so it wasn't room temperature, and actually warmed the water up almost to 90 degrees! Thankfully we got it a bit cooler.
3. Filled two buckets with water, and quickly placed LR rubble and major soft corals within. Made sure to keep totally submerged a few which had cool sponges on them. Took them to her place.
4. Did the same with my four large chunks of LR. One (a large bit of staghorn rubble) wouldn't fit in a bucket. It never had much life on it except some algae, so I just wrapped it in a garbage back for transit.
5. The difficult bit - scooping out all the live sand. Kept it all wet, and got stung by a few fireworms in the process. I wish I could have put the sand in first, but it was too coarse to siphon, so dumping it in after rocks and coral were placed was the only choice. Moved all rocks with cool life/corals on them onto one side of the tank, and slowly dropped sand into the other end. Took two days to totally clear up, but no one of note appears to have been buried.
While all this was going on I was moving critters (snails, shrimp, various mushrooms I found unattached to rocks).
Anyway, this morning, I found two dead snails (stomatela) and one dead sexy shrimp. I also saw what I'm pretty sure was a dead worm floating on by. The corals largely seem alright, but I'm terrified the tank will cycle again and kill most of the macrolife - only to need to be moved again in like 3 weeks. Though, the temp was really high for some reason this morning (lady doesn't have AC, and I was using a heater set to a slightly higher temp, so maybe that killed em).
So yeah, I'd like some tips.
