at what point should i harvest my chaeto?

[100%hydrophylic]

i have about an 8 gal fuge on my 75g. i bought a small ball of chaeto about the size of my fist from my lfs like 2 months ago. its probably quadrupled in size and is taking over about half my fuge. its not very dense though because i regularly pull it out and rinse it in the water from my water change and it gets pulled apart (read somewhere to do this to prevent detritus buildup and that if its too dense light doesnt get to the center and it well start to die). when should i harvest it and how much should i pull out? about half?

[Frick-n-Frags]

that's one of those things you have to do and get the feel of. once you get the feel of the growth rate, you will know how much you need to pull, and how often.

half sounds good.

if you want max nutrient pulling, you want a larger wad, so maybe figure out what "full" is in your chaeto fuge, and when it gets there, pull half.

[lordofthereef]

If your are trying to keep it rolling, just remove some when it starts getting impeded. If not, just play it by ear as said above. Mine generally doubles in size about every months or two at which point I just cut it in half and toss it or give it away to a needy reefer.

[Felix T Cat]

Can you cut out too much ? When I set up my 135 I cut out a few huge chunks from my 40b HOB fuge. Probably removed about half of it to put in my new setup. Around that same time my 40B started to go downhill with algae and levels getting high.

Now, that said I also admit to slacking on the water changes / etc on the 40 while setting up the 135 around the same time so it could just be the timing.

[reefscape15]

yes you can remove too much. Try to take mostly the outter edges instead of just tearing it down the center.

[EllieSuz]

I would think rinsing it in old tank water would flush away a lot of the lifeforms we want to keep in the 'fuge, If you want to keep copepods breeding in the Chaeto, I'd stop flusing them away.

[alphaferret]

I would agree w/ ellie-I rinse and then add the rinsed water back into system-Mine is full of worms/pods and other goodies the fish and corals can feed off-I rip off a little bit more often than a large piece less often. I also trim from the edges, I have no reason just how I do it-good luck!

[sedor]

Although I agree that rinsing the ball in old tank water will wash away some of the goodies. I don't think it would be enough to make a lasting impression. Of course I wouldn't do a reenactment of Titanic for the pods, sloshing the ball around like a wild man, but I think a gentle rinse can't hurt.

[Frick-n-Frags]

You haven't lived until you have grabbed bristle worms in your chaeto wad. i used to keep a giant tub of it, sold a bunch on rc at one point. i had a big rio in a 20gal tub swirling the mess like a stuck toilet and 2 LOA 65w pc's. i also had lots of coral and was feeding the coral.

ironically, in my current war on macros, it starved out..just started going brownish/clearish and getting brittle, in big chunks. i eventually tossed the remains. a string pops up every now and then so the chaeto did its spore contribution too. i feed a few flakes to an algae blenny in a 100+ gallon system, like once a week and clean with a vengeance every week. even new caulerpa starts in my algae tub(i guess you could call it a fuge..it's for harvesting algae) die a few inches back from the front as it grows along. some small macros like a tiny acetabularia and some leafy calcerous crap are about all that will appear in any numbers now. of course there is the main brownish micro remaining from the thinning of the species. might even be diatoms..w/e, it should boil down to one dominant micro in the end here....

anyway, so it seems that there is a nutrition balance for good chaeto growth and i believe i am now below that threshold. fwiw.

edit: it's kind of a bittersweet thing if you think about it, heh.