Today's numbers:
- Ca 360ppm
- alkalinity 8.5dkh
- Mg 1350ppm
- PO4 1.36 (ack!) (Hanna checker)
- NH3 0
- NO2 0
- NO3 0

The bryopsis and hair algae are nearly gone, and the giant patch of sea lettuce that cropped up disappeared within 36h of the turbo snails' arrival. The rocks are nearly bare again!

Yesterday new goodies arrived in the mail -- a Sea Squirt target feeder, test kits, filter sock, a powerhead, and some...

Well, we travelled FAR, to a big store in another city, and I'm very pleased with our purchases. Five blueleg hermits, five good-sized turbo snails, and some frags I couldn't resist (parameters are back to normal).

After acclimating the snails I placed three of them directly onto the algae-covered flat rock at the top of the tank and they began to DEVOUR the buffet before them! The rock is half clear already, and they're still working away.

The frags are small --...

Just tracking my progress...

After yesterday's scrub and clean-a-thon, the tank has readable nitrites (barely). To me this is just proof that it's still very young and still quite unstable!

The algae is bizarre; there is Bryopsis, and now some sort of blade-shaped light green algae is emerging, growing at roughly the speed of light. It's rather Caulerpa-like in shape, without the stem/roots (not sure the technical term here). It seems to grow directly from the rock....

I tell my son that reading is fun, but the reading I did last night wasn't fun at all. I love identifying all the things that pop up out of live rock as time goes by, and identifying algae is always interesting... unless you discover, as I did last night, that you've been plagued with Bryopsis.

I read hundreds of posts about this stuff and all I got was confused. Sea hares, rabbitfish, tangs, turbo snails, manual removal, nutrient starvation... everyone uses a different method (or...

I had no idea this tank was going to speed through the cycling process the way it has. I'm wondering if, because it was a seasoned African cichlid tank and got added buffer and salts, maybe it was somehow primed to become a SW tank? We're using the same lace rock (with added live rock), the same sand (heavily vacuumed but not rinsed), and I wonder if there weren't already some bacteria just waiting for ideal conditions. Adding LR that had been sitting in an undisturbed tank for months seems to have...