Happy New Year – not much has happened in the tank. Project baby has kept me busy, but now it pays of. The aquarium is a great baby pacifier and now little Sigrun is big enough to sit herself in front of the tank.
Still struggling with high nitrates (around 15 mg/l) but the phospates are reduced from 0,3 mg/l to 0,1mg/l. The coralline algae is starting to show through the thick carpets of green and red algae. The sharks are thriving on Mysis and small herring.
Guess I was too optimistic about how many fishes the aquarium could house. I have measured nitrate and phosphate a couple of times the last months and they were at a steady high despite using rowaphos and reef pellets for removing nitrate. I have added a reactor chamber run by a small eheim pump (around 400 l/h), but it did not help much, nitrates where still around 2-4 mg/l and phosphate around 0,4 mg/l.
So last weekend I changed 600 liters of water and cleaned the sump and the upper filter aquarium. It also seems that the upper filter aquarium did acts as a filter as I hoped, so I removed some of the live rocks and placed them in the sump. Now the upper aquariums acts as a crustacean zoo, with at least 4 species of crustaceans, to keep them from eating my snails and being eaten by the turbot.
The turbot by the way ate the small lumpsucker after just one week. After the water change the nitrate and phosphate is much lower, the big fishes are gone, so I hope that will help.
Here is a photo of the upper filter aquarium and one of the squatlobsters.
