The new additions seem to be adjusting well. The zebra moray has settled into the cave I built for him. Knowing that zebra morays are crustacean eaters, I went to the local Asian market (huge affair that has expanded beyond Asian fare to include central/south american and eastern european foods) and got some conch and some fresh frozen soft-shelled crab. They have live soft-shelled crabs, but that would be a bit much for one feeding, and I don't know if I could just kill and dismember the crab...

Yesterday some fairly violent storms rolled through our area and knocked out power to our subdivision. Power stayed off for about 1.5 hours. I turned off the electricity to the tank at the breaker box, in case it came up again very flickery, which it did when it went out. The UPS I have on the powerheads did its job, keeping the powerheads going the entire time, so that the tank had some circulation/aeration going.

Chris, the LFS owner, mailed me today that he could bring over...

I put about a liter of a zeolite in the sump to soak up the nitrite and nitrate, and within six days nitrite was gone and nitrate was down to about 12 ppm. Good enough to add the lionfish back in. He pretty much lapped the tank for a couple days before calming down. He hadn't eaten for roughly three weeks - he wouldn't even snap at offered food. After a couple days of acclimation, he starting eating normally.

A batch of the old rock which I had air dried/bleached then recured...

We have no idea how high the nitrite got in the tank. Actually we still don't, as the test kit only goes up to 2 ppm. Even diluting with fresh SW it pegged the test kit. Nitrate was over the 25ppm limit of that kit as well. So we did a change of about 90 gallons yesterday. The nitrite is still pegged, though it didn't darken to that quite as quickly as before. The nitrate wasn't pegged, but somewhere between 10ppm and 25ppm. Better than it was, but I hate the lack of precision of most colorimetric...

Chris came over and fixed the leaky bulkhead on the sump. After he left, I fired up the skimmer pump, which led to finding two more leaks - one from where two pieces of PVC were glued together and the threads leading into the skimmer pump. Put glue around the seam on the PVC yesterday, will test how well that holds tonight. The threads were a bit loose, I will probably want to keep an eye on both pumps initially, to see if the vibration of the pumps running loosen things up more.

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