65 Gallon Wife Approved Build

Quick Update:

Got through the diatom phase with some hair algae starting to crop up. Swapped the astrea snails to the sump and added 8 trochus to the display. Still looks real ugly but most of the diatoms are no longer growing.

Harvesting 75% of refugium macro weekly.

Added a doser for 6ml of alk overnight (spaced 1 ml 1 hr apart).

PH swings are much smaller now.

Purple firefish decided to die on us from unknown causes.

Tang fooled us and looked to be getting sick, shed it's mucus layer and hasn't missed a step since.

Zoas added new polyps. Digi has new growth tips on it. Cap and encrusting corals are in recovery but doing ok.

Good job getting through the ugliest without freaking out.


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Lesson Learned: Don't Throw out Frag Plugs just because you think the coral died.
I have 2 encrusting montis, 1 monti cap, 1 digi monti. When I added to the tank at the end of December they all freaked out and receded, loosing color and structure. The encrusting and caps bleached nearly white within 2 hours with tissue necrosis evident. That was weeks ago. I kept parameters at safe levels, kept up with water changes, and kept the flow/light schedule the same. I moved the corals to better positions based on their type (the cap is now tilted so that it's not acting as a sail catching all the halide light). I did not see any changes for weeks. 6 weeks later and every coral has started coming back, this week we started seeing them pop under the LEDs with 1-2 polyps forming again. What looked like a complete loss for 3 of frags has, over the course of 2 months, come back to full life. More pics to come once they fully heal!