Just a couple pictures showing the size of the mangroves since the last post where we looked at growth rates from December 3rd 2009 to February 17th 2010. These are the most recent pictures taken on 3/23/2010.

In the time since the last post, the grape culpera strand has grown more than 5x its original size. If any of you have ordered from reefcleaners.org, they offer a strand of grape culpera for $.01 to add on to any order – that is the size my piece started as (probably 2-3 inches long with just a straight stalk and no “leaves” forming). The chaeto has just about doubled in size as well.

without further delay…click images to expand

Mangroves in refugium

mangroves in refugium

mangroves chaeto and grape culpera in refugium

As you can see, the mangroves have grown up to the bottom of my stand, and it is now time to trim them. I am under the impression that to trim a mangrove, you must cut it right above the first set of leaves on the stalk. I will test this on a few of my taller ones and see if the plant is able to recover and as always, I will post the results here.

My last update was also to show that I had finally upgraded from a bio-ball sump, to a refugium. Unfortunately, due to reasons I have not been able to pin point, the refugium has not slowed the spread of algae. When I first installed the add on tank, I filled it with 10 lbs of live sand, as well as 2 large hand fulls of culpera and another type of macro algae (the name escapes me). It only took about 3 days for the green hair algae to grow onto my refugium pump and then spread into the refugium, which suffocated and killed the other macro algae I placed into the refugium. So far, it has been a failure.

Without further ado, here are the newest pictures.

As you can see, the green hair algae in my aquarium is still a major problem. My next water change I plan to take a tooth brush to all the rock and then sypon all the lose algae out.

enjoy!

Also, I have been avoiding posting pictures of the tank recently because it looks really bad and overun by algae. However, I have been taking the necessary steps to try to track down the problem. In the past month I have bought numerous animals to test and see if they will impact the levels of green hair algae to no avail. The first animal I bought was a lawnmower blenny. This fish has done a great job of eating algae off my glass, but has not touched the rocks as of yet. This is a problem because I already had snails doing a pretty good job keeping the glass clean, so he was pretty much a waste so far. He does look cool though, I just wish he would perform.

Recently, I bought 3 large mexican turbo snails. Since they were acclimated, only 1 has moved around on the glass and has not touched the rocks. I strategicly placed one on a rock that wasnt near the glass to see if he might mow down some algae on the way to the glass, but instead he has only moved about 2 inches on the rock signifying to me that he may be confused or doesnt think he can make it anywhere else. He has been on the rock for a week already. The 3rd one I bought moved around on the glass a lot, but I havnt seen him in 3 days. All 3 of them are quite large, I dont know how I cant find it.

My most recent purchse is a long spined urchin (just got him 2 days ago). He hasnt moved much since I put him in, but thats to be expected with a newly acclimated animal. Im excited to see if he will make an impact on the algae.

I also bought a simple HOB refugium on ebay that should be here by friday. Cant wait to get rid of my bio balls and get this bad boy installed.

without further delay, here are some new pictures of my “swamp”

Still have not found the charger for my camera, so I snapped a couple pics with the iPhone. They arnt the best quality, but I’m trying to work with what I have right now.

Enjoy!