Donya's 55-Gallon

[lljdma06]

I hate it when glue doesn't hold. Sigh...

What are you presenting a paper on? C'mon, you knew I'd ask.

 

[Donya]

The glue held fine - it's the blasted ceramic that refused to stay in one piece! LOL

The paper is on some computer music stuff: some additional mathematical formalization of chord spaces (grouping chords based on some music theoretic principals, which sounds easy/intuitive but is mathematically a PITA). It'll be at the International Computer Music Conference in Slovenia. Here's the abstract:

Computing with Chord Spaces
Donya Quick and Paul Hudak

The number of solutions involved in many algorithmic composition problems is too large to be tractable without simplification. Given this, it is critical that composition algorithms be able to move through different levels of abstraction while maintaining a well-organized solution space. In this paper we present the following contributions: (1) extended formalizations and proofs needed to implement the chord spaces defined by Tymoczko and Callender et al., (2) a generalized framework for moving between levels of abstraction using quotient spaces that can easily be integrated with existing algorithmic composition algorithms, and (3) an application of both to voice-leading assignment.

 

[Donya]

Well I just had my first "what the [explative of choice] was that?!" moments in a looooong time. Lights were out on the tank, was switching off the lights on my other ones...turned my head back to the 55gal and something had apparently come out to watch me from the top of a rock, but it zipped back into a crevice pretty blindingly fast as soon as I got my head round far enough to try to focus on it. All other critters were accounted for in wrong locations and not matching in size or shape...dangit. While the behavior is very mantis-ish, I'm very doubtful that's what I saw. It looked very oval, about 3/4" long. Sort of wondering if I could've ended up with a mole crab or something similar in there somehow...of course, if figures that it has decided to pop up two weeks before I go out of the country. I'm not too worried though, since whatever it is will have been in there for an awfully long time, like the "pistol bros" (husband's term) that I didn't find out about until fairly recently.

 

[Donya]

Trip went smoothly, tanks went smoothly too. One of the urchins apparently stole and hid the coco worm but I'll find it eventually. Anyway, for those doing similar travel things with filter-feeding-intenstive tanks, I strongly recommend doing the following: premix a bunch of little bottles of the food for whoever is feeding the tank. That way there is no risk of over/under-feeding and everything is in the right proportion.

Of course, I got back, and that very night the BTA leaned over and had a turf war with the hitchhiker polyps...le sigh. I can't safely move either of them because of the anemone's placement/attachment in the rocks, so this is just one of those hazards of reef systems with anemones. If you're gonna do a nem you just have to accept that it can happen. The BTA is fine, seems to have decided it wasn't such a great place to explore so maybe it will decide to grow int he other direction for a change, and a couple polyps are burned and shrunken but it looks like they might recover.

 

[gregswimm]

Pics taken with flash after lights out showing the hitchhiker NPS polyps I've been trying to grow and the recovering sun:

You sure they aren't Phyllangia sp? They look a lot like mine.

Edit: sorry should have read further . But it looks more like Phyllangia mouchezii then americana (maybe?). Here is my lonely little fella http/i.imgur.com/yRyjv.jpg

I also wouldn't rule out Caryophyllia smithii or Pyrgoma anglicum

 

[Donya]

New bulbs in today...FINALLY. I waited way too long to do that; almost an entire year. It had slipped my mind with going out of town just how long it had been, but a patch of zoas started to look a little pale in the past week and that got me into action. That particular species bleaching a bit all of a sudden has been an alert in other tanks for me that the spectrum has gone off. They've always bounced back pretty quickly for me in the past so I'm not worried, but I'll bet it was the old bulbs to blame for it in this case. Why those zoas are more finicky than a BTA though is beyond me. The tank does look a bit bluer...so I guess those zoas need more blue than the other corals I've got.

Also have a new Bangai cardinal in QT right now. Well, it's in pseudo QT...there are no signs of illness and it's in a well-stocked invert-only tank rather than a sterile sort of tank. I need to see such a little fish eat regularly and eagerly before tossing it into such a proportionally big tank.

But it looks more like Phyllangia mouchezii then americana (maybe?).

P. mouchezii looks to be an unaccepted taxon. This place is usually pretty good at being up to date on things:

http/www.marinespecies.org/aphia.php?p=taxdetails&id=135164

so that would say that it's just a different flavor of P. americana.

 

[gregswimm]

Well if you wanted to get technical P. americana mouchezii a subspecies. Hell if I know for sure, I'm still new to this whole coral thing.

http/www.marinespecies.org/aphia.php?p=taxdetails&id=346430

Have you noticed any growth on yours?

 

[Donya]

Thing is I am highly dubious of the usage of divisions like subspecies with inverts (or even a lot of other animals for that matter) It's a poorly enough defined type of division that it may as well be flavor most of the time lol. Anyway the mouchezii variety seems to be eastern Atlantic. So, if yours is from gulf rock then it would be the plane vanilla Phyllangia americana americana.

Growth-wise I started with just one polyp. It then made 4 new ones around the edge, and then I had another bunch of them recently up to 10 I think, with the new ones all still being fairly small. Unfortunately two of them (one big one and one smaller one) got completely toasted recently by the BTA getting adventurous, but there are still plenty left.

 

[Donya]

You know what time it is? It's time for some more of my awful pics.

I don't know what the BTA ate just now, but apparently it's finger-lickin' good. Both fish are accounted for...yes I had to check. One of these days I need to get a vid of this thing eating; it's frightening.

And the monstrosity to its left...

Well, I was thinking how I have a bare spot on the rocks that would look really nice with some of that. I was only thinking about doing some trimming. Apparently these corals can read minds, since this is what I came home to yesterday:

And that is the exact spot where I was going to put a frag. It dropped an arm that drifted over there and attached firmly within a span of about 4 hours. Pretty impressive. I've read about this limb-dropping behavior and that they can take over new areas really fast, but I've never seen it before except in response to some sort of physical damage (but there is none of that here).


EDIT: forgot one.

I do apologize for the thermometer front and center. I moved it this morning for cleaning and apparently forgot to put it back lol.

 

[Xraymark]

Haha. I had read your post initially and came back to ask for a FTS. Great looking tank.

Do you have a lot of live rock in your external?

 

[Donya]

Not too much; it's enough that it would be a moderately sized lump of small pieces if in the display, but they'd probably all end up getting buried in the sand because of their size. My recollection is that it's 5lbs or so of chunks but I don't recall for certain. Funny thing is the flow never decreases in that canister unless the prefilter gets clogged from serious neglect. It's a whole ecosystem in there of pods and worms. I popped it open just to have a peak before I went out of town to make sure there were no surprises lurking, and everything in there is so encrusted I actually had to wear gloves to not risk cutting up my hands on the tube worms.

 

[Xraymark]

Well, congratulations. It has the look of a tank with a sump which hides the live rock.

 

[Donya]

Thanks! That was indeed part of the reason for the 2nd canister having those rock bits; I wanted to avoid piles of stuff. Overall though, this tank is also lighter on net volume of rock than probably most 55gal tanks would be, so that will be contributing a bit to the sparse appearance. If I was going to do the same size tank with a thin sand bed and intending to go heavy on fish (there are only 2 small guys in there right now lol), I would probably have started with another 10 lbs in there, even with the extra canister holding spare bits. As it is, the sand bed has really done an impressive job as it has matured so even if I wanted to beef up the fish population I doubt I'd see a need for any more rock. This tank has been very low nutrient despite my crazy habits of throwing filter foods at it morning and evening.

Speaking of low-nutrients, how's this for strange: the chaeto in the 'fuge is struggling to compete with other nutrient sinks. It had a brief and massive growth spurt in the couple of days after I replaced the bulbs, but has actually started withering since that. I'm pretty sure the reason for this is that, also corresponding with the bulb change, I've been seeing a sudden surge in growth in other microalgaes in the tank (not GHA - they are all good ones, although some are annoying because they can blanket the front pane pretty quickly). Looks like they're out-competing the chaeto somehow. It wont be the first time I've seen chaeto get out-competed, although it is a rare thing to see since usually chaeto is the go-to macro for out-competing other things. Sort of like watching an algal game of rock paper scissors.

 

[gregswimm]

Dose some iron . My chaeto wasn't growing at all till I dosed iron over 5 days, then it exploded. Not like it is going to take up the iron instead of the nitrates, but with the nitrates.

 

[Donya]

...

*nuclear facepalm*

You know what? I actually was dosing that LOL. Was, past tense. I hadn't been doing it for long since I only found a bottle of the stuff a month or so back and was mainly using it on another tank that I use as a macro factory, but I did start it on the 55gal too (yes I've turned into one of those baddies that throws a bajillion supplements at my tank these days lol). Why did I stop? Because round about the time I did the bulb change, I put the bottle somewhere strange, couldn't find it again, and promptly forgot about it until you just now reminded me of it. It could be that my macro factory has also stalled a bit too, but it's so dense that it's really hard to tell what the growth rate is when I'm not pruning it regularly (which I haven't for the last couple weeks). Perhaps I aught to tidy up the fish room a bit and find that bottle again.

I should probably also do a post here describing the current madness that I throw at this tank on a daily basis...it's a lot of stuff at this point.