From STOCK to STUNNING! Loaded Mixed Reef Tank Showcase!

What's going on, reefers? We are continuing on with our tank tour trip down here in Miami. I'm here with Connor. Connor, thank you so much for having me. Uh, beautiful system. We're going to get right into the specs. Let's talk about the tank itself. What type of tank do we have here? What's the size and all the dimensions? Yeah, it's an all glass red C 850. Uh, it's their S model, so it's got a pretty cool sump setup. I think it's about 225 230 gallons total. And then when it comes to everything inside, this is a packed system. You went all out. You've got a pretty much a mixed reef. We'll get into the corals here soon, but let's talk about your fish. You've got a really cool selection of fish and uh let's talk about them. Yeah, it's truly a mixed reef. We've got, you know, the big hitters or the the gem tank. We've got four borbonius splotchy antheus. Uh there's a leopard leopard rass in there. We got a mystery rass. Uh you know, some pseudos. The chromies were here. They were cycling the tank originally, so they're my uh my OG fish. Uh some bang guys, which have been breeding. So, really a cool mix of uh of fish in here. A lot of people tend to have issues with chromies keeping and maintaining a group. You've said they've been the first fish in the tank. Obviously, they've been able to maintain. Do you have any tips or tricks to be able to keep them happy and keep the whole group together? Yeah, I mean, you know, schooling concept is always really important to me. So, we've loved having them, but uh you know, I love the planks. We have the Avast auto feeder, which is pretty awesome. So, that thing feeds really small amounts, but it's feeding six times a day. And it's seems like you also have a mixture of some utility fish with your, you know, tangs and things like that, but then you also have some nice kind of showcasing fish, right? The Borbs, the BAC antheus, the clown fish, too. Uh, was there, you know, a idea in mind when you're getting ready to choose your livestock or did you kind of just pick and choose as things kind of developed? No, exactly as you said. I mean, my one regret is not putting more tangs in originally. I we have a purple tang who's been [music] a bit uh of a jerk to everyone else. you know, he's uh he's chewed through about six yellow tangs. So, uh I wish I'd done a bigger tang gang originally, but yeah, just having a mix of utility and uh showcase fish is important. You said four borbonius in total. Have you seen any of them start to pair off with each other? One is definitely dominant. One is a is a monster. The other three have stayed kind of small. So, I don't know if one is uh you know, king of the tank and the rest are kind of the herm, but uh we haven't seen them pair off yet. And then let's talk about the bang guys. You said they were breeding in tank. seen before in some other tank tours where we've had people showcase that their band guys were breeding. They ended up pulling out the babies. You said [music] you kind of went all natural like it's in the wild and they kind of stayed in the system, but you were able to rear a couple of the fries. Yeah, we I think I mean I don't I don't know how many we started with, but there's three that survive and they're they're doing great. They're pretty good size now. I mean, I was feeding roafers at first, some Daphnneia and then cyclopes [music] and and uh they were doing okay. I I tried spot feeding a little bit. Didn't need to. just kind of broadcast fed the whole tank and they did great. I feel like feeding the roifers too was kind of like a little enrichment for all the corals too. Yeah. Not just the fish were getting it was also the corals. Now the you've got a ton of shrimp in the tank. Was there an idea in mind when you were thinking about putting in all these cleaner shrimp? How many cleaner shrimp do you had and blood shrimp do you have? Yeah, there's 10 cleaner shrimp. I think there's eight blood shrimp now. I just love shrimp. I love inverts. So it's uh you know part of the I keep the tank really overfed. So part of it is uh I think they're pretty happy as well. They've all set up their own little cleaner stations, too. You can see them kind of throughout the tank. Now, we'll get into the stars of the show. You've got This tank is packed, man. You've got a ton of corals. When you were deciding what you wanted to put into the tank, it seems like, you know, kind of like a normal reef tank setup. You've got the SPS up top. As you work your way down, you get into some of the lower light LPS and softies. What were some of the first corals that came into the tank, and then how did you get to this point? Yeah, we start with the zoas, the softies first, just like everyone does. You know, I I tried I've never done I've been reefing since I was 8 years old, literally. So, been uh decades of reefing, but I've never done a this reverse bonsai concept before. So, first time doing it. I think it was really cool. I don't know if I do it again. Uh I like real estate as you can see. There's literally not not an aim to put something else. So, uh I would have liked a little more real estate, but you know, pretty cool concept. Um we started with the softies, then we went to euphilas and then some encrusters Monty's and then finally the SPS towards the end. And then you've got a really beautiful scoli garden. You've got a lot of larger LPS pieces, uh, the eanthos, the scolies. Are you doing anything in particular to feed those directly or are you just letting the tank feed it? I I only broadcast feed. I mean, I know spot feeding is like the thing to do with the canthos and scolies, but uh, for me, it's a true mixed reef. I try to emulate nature as best as possible. And so, it's actually a natural seawater, but um, so we broadcast feed uh, again with the Avast. We do it six times a day, just a little tiny bit. And then I travel a lot for work. So whenever [music] I'm home, I try to do like a a larger feed for them. I think that's something people tend to forget when it comes to those kind of sholing fish, the chromies, the antheus. It's really important to do a lot of feedings. You said you do six total feedings a day. Yeah, six little tiny ones. So it basically runs for a minute um at a time and it runs the pump for a minute. Wow. And then what is in the feeder that you're actually feeding? That's they call it reef jerky. It's a and I make it. It's I buy their reef jerky. It's a combination of reefroids and there's a uh a Brightwell product too that we put in there. For the water, you said you're utilizing natural sea water. Have you seen that to be something really good for the tank? Obviously, you're close to the ocean, so it helps out a lot. Yeah, we're super close to the ocean. Uh we use natural sea water here, but uh you know, hard to say. You know, it's hard to say. I think I do notice a little more stability with it, but uh we're still dosing a ton like everyone. So, [music] um overall, you know, my goal is hopefully we get some uh plankton and some other stuff that might be beneficial for the tank. Right. When you bring that in, whether it be the maintenance team or yourself coming off of your boat, are you putting it through any kind of filtration system at all? Yeah, we do it through a sponge, number one, and then just through a filter sock, number two. So, you know, the the really small stuff will still get through, but the bigger uh stuff we don't want will not get through. Awesome. Let's talk about some of the equipment in the tank. You do one of my favorite things in the world. You keep it minimal in the system, right? Trying to focus on the reef itself rather than the equipment. I see some big gys. Let's talk about all the different equipment. We can start with your lights and kind of work our way down. Yeah, for sure. They're the uh we have four of the RedC [music] 160s. Uh we started with three and I had to add a four just cuz it wasn't enough coverage. Um you know, I like them. They're great. The uh I wish they had a little more UV, you know, not enough purple. And uh so at night time when I'm sitting here after work enjoying the tank, there's not a lot of fluoresence with it. So uh that would be something I would change in the future. Uh we've got the Avast plank like I talked about a couple times, we've [music] got the two uh you know, Red Seas here. And then down below, it's all the stock equipment with the RedC 850S, except we added a uh a pretty mega UV sterilizer as well. Gotcha. Are you enjoying all the Red Sea product that you got on the tank right now? Yeah, I think they're great. The only thing that, you know, I like these um you know, the the power heads a lot. Uh they're different than the ones I used to have, but they encrust with with coraline so quickly. So, that's the only challenge I see with them is like, you know, they're time to clean already. There's pretty little flow coming out of them as we speak. For sure. I think this is one of the first systems we've done a tour on that actually have the Red Sea lights running on it and we have them back in the retail store running on one of our display tanks [music] in the studio. We've started to really like them. Curious to hear what the schedule is for these when they're up and running. I know I asked you to turn them on a little early today, but what's the normal schedule for these lights? Yeah, I mean 8 to 8 it ramps up pretty slow. So 8 a.m. a little bit of blue comes on. around 10:00 a.m. we start seeing uh about 25% uh [music] white and then we maintain that for about 5 to 6 hours and then it starts to ramp down. My one big complaint with the rescue system is with the moonlight. Sounds silly, but you can only schedule moonlight at the end of the day. You can't do a morning moonlight. So, when I'm up early, you know, 5 6 a.m. for work, I'd love to enjoy the tank for a little bit of having a coffee and uh there's no way to add an additional moonlight cycle. We've talked about that in past interviews. I think that's something that we tend to do. You know, obviously we're playing kind of God in a way with these systems and so kind of starting [music] our lights either earlier or letting them go later so that way we can actually come home either from work or whatever we're doing and to enjoy them. I saw down in the sump you've got some crazy stuff going on down in the sump. What have you decided to do with that sump space outside of just [music] having some equipment down there? Got something else kind of going on. Yeah, we got a little frag farm down there. So, I'm doing a ton of zoas. We got some cool acro going on uh and some encrusting Monty's. But, uh some of my my cooler zoas down there. We got some strats, some GNKs, some great owls. So, got some cool stuff. But again, you know, I try to move them up into the tank once they uh get a nice little colony on a plate. But again, it's just the real estate I'm missing up here. So, and it's nice, too. It's like an extra little [music] system down there. Sometimes people always ask us at the store, you know, what do I do with this extra space? And it's like, oh, a refugeium. You could do this. You could put more equipment. [music] I like the idea of making it almost a secondary tank. Yeah, it's it's super cool. Cool. I mean, what I would do without if I didn't have the frags down there, I probably did the Triton method [music] and make a pretty nice refugeium down there. Uh my last tank I did Triton. I think I prefer Triton to this Red C4 part. Uh it seemed more stable. I had some better SPS growth, but uh without having a refugeium, it's it's you can't do Triton. [music] So, you're utilizing the red C4 part. Is that what you're dosing this system right now? Yeah, I I you know, it was a they sold me on it. Uh you know, it I probably would transition off of it. It's it's hard with such a mixed reef so much. I find the euphilia just suck up the mag so quickly. Uh yeah, the hard stuff sucks up the alkalinity. So, it's really hard to stay balanced. So, I find myself their calculator doesn't really work that well. I find myself kind of fine-tuning it all the time. And you said you utilize the Triton method before. What have you seen kind of the difference in the tank that you ran the Triton method on to now with the Red Sea? With Triton, it was kind of set and forget. You're just you're just targeting alkalinity numbers with that. Uh and everything else is balanced. with this. You know, I know they say it's supposed to be uh you know, correlative, but I'm I'm doing uh ICP testing, so I'm also doing a a Reef Moonshiners program, too. Okay. Um that I have no idea if it works. I just figure why not try it. Um so, between the two, I think we've got it dialed in, but I do find, you know, pH is really hard to, you know, in these Florida houses, it's so well uh sealed here. So, I've got a CO2 scrubber on the um protein skimmer down there. And, you know, just a lot of testing. We use the um Aqua Spin as well. All we've been here. Okay. And then outside of the CO2 scrubber, the skimmer itself, [music] anything else for equipment wise down in the sump? I mean, heaters, uh, you know, the UV sterilizer we talked about, [music] um, and we have a bunch of reef bricks just for additional uh, bio bol load. Seems like it's almost like a hybrid style of the reef moonshiner method with the Red Sea fourpart and the reef moonshiner. Have you seen yourself kind of really chasing after certain trace elements in any shape, way or form or are you kind of just going alpha your ICPs? No, I mean manganesees for some reason like I'm always going after manganesees for some reason. Um randomly like lithium as well is always I don't I've never seen that before but I'm always low on that. And then iodine I just I'm just not good about dosing iodine. So I think iodine is one of those really key trace elements that people tend to forget in their reef tanks. You know, I always try to harp on people, you know, if they're trying to figure out what's going on with their tank, do an ICP can really start [music] to figure things out a little bit better, get to know the water a little bit more. When it comes to maintenance for this tank, what are you doing for maintenance? How often and how frequent? Yeah, I probably spend 30 minutes a day just doing just general stuff, either filling up the atto, scraping the glass, or uh you know, changing a a you know, a sponge. And then uh we have there's an amazing company local here, Strictly Fish. Can't plug them enough. They've got great stock, a great little farm, [music] and they come every uh every two weeks and do just kind of a deeper a deeper clean for me because I travel so much. It's nice. You know, I feel like sometimes people will have a maintenance company and they're not hands-on with their system. They just kind of enjoy it. But it's cool to see that you're super invested in your tank itself rather [music] than, you know, just letting them kind of take rain and take control over it. I do see the big clam up front. Let's talk about your clam. I know a lot of people want to get clams in their system. How are you [music] doing so well with your clam here? I think phyto I mean when they're you know they're they're at this size they're photosynthetic [music] which is pretty cool. So you know we've got two babies next to it so they're they're taking the phyto and everything else but uh filter [music] feeding but the bigger one is photosynthetic. Um he's been great. You know we moved him a couple times. You know he's got the the foot that's going the Bissell threads going down. So we've had to move him a couple times but he's pretty happy. Um you know actually I think he came from top shelf actually. Nice. Look at that. And then for the rest of the cleanup crew I know we talked about the shrimp. What other members of the cleaner crew are you using for this tank here? There's a lot. I mean, we started with a diamond goi. Uh, you know, frankly, it was too much of a challenge moving all the sand. Like, I liked it, but you couldn't have a scolie garden. It just got to be too much. So, [music] um, he, you know, found his way out of the tank. But, we've got a ton of cleanup crew in here. We've got a, you know, conchk, we've got some, uh, nut bronx, and there's a bunch of lettuce noodle bronx going around. I think we've got 10 or 12 lettuce, uh, nudies going. Uh, we talked about the shrimp already. There's probably a couple hundred snails and hermit crabs. Um, trying to think. And that's pretty much it. No, there's a couple little mitex crabs in there, too. [music] I think you have probably one of the cleanest sand beds I've ever seen. Uh, genuinely, it's one of the cleaner sand beds. It seems like the sand is like brand new. It's so white. It's probably the sand sifting stars. I mean, I I it bothers me to see anything on the sand. So, I that's probably my biggest point of like making sure it's looking good all the time. Yeah, it's uh really amazing to see. You know, I think people [music] tend to forget that the sand bed's something you need to work on. It's not something you can just kind of set and forget. It's something that you need to actively keep working through. We talked about it a little bit off camera. Every tank, even the tanks that look super beautiful on camera, just like your system, they go through some woes. They go through some battles and things that make things difficult. Reefing is a, you know, a pretty hard hobby for some people, and it's a why a lot of people end up getting out in that first year. We talked a little bit about brown jelly, right? You've got a ton of euphilia. It's like a euphilia person's nightmare, right? Brown jelly. So, let's talk about that situation, how you ended up dealing with it, and some of the repercussions that ended up happening for the Yeah, for sure. So, before the brown jelly, we had briopsis, which was a total nightmare. So, it started, I think it came in on one of the frags that didn't dip well enough. It came in, it took over the whole left side of the tank. Uh, we were plucking it, scrubbing it, just kind of manually doing it all the time. Uh, we tried the lettuce, nut bronx, didn't help. So finally went flux RX worked amazingly well. Um Flux RX is basically just fluconazol and antifungal which for some reason attacks the biopsis. Killed it all. Didn't have any side effects at all in the tank. [music] It was awesome. For the brown jelly um started about I would say 4 months ago. I think one of our heads might have come in uh infected. You see the little brown jelly coming off. At first I was trying to dip it, fix it, whatever. I'm much more aggressive now. Now we clip it. Uh we take the head out. that colony gets quarantined. And we've tried cypro um uh dosing. So we did first we would do cypro [music] uh dips. So we do a 6 hour or 8 hour dip of the head itself in a cypro bat. Uh it works pretty well and that actually will save the head most of the time once we cut the infected head off. We have dosed the tank now twice with broadspectctrum cypro. Um [music] it it works great for the brown jelly. It has some negative side effects. You know the clams. We've lost a couple clams this size before uh the shrimp don't do well. So the inverts really struggle with the cypro. But um you know my biggest fear is building an anti you know [music] basically a MRSA of uh you know brown jelly in the tank. So we're careful when we do it right. Something that people tend to forget too right that the brown jelly they can kind of fend away all that different medication. We talked a little bit about the aqua spin that you're using. What are the numbers that you're either a shooting for in the tank or what the numbers are currently? Yeah the ALC is 88 8.5. You know I struggle chronicle with the pH. you know, it's usually 7.98, which is way too low for my my comfort. So, we put the CO2 scrubber on. I think I'm going to start doing calc pretty soon to bring that up. Um, everything else is pretty good. I do run the mag a little high. I run mag at like400 1425 and the calcium is in the high 400. So, um, everything else is pretty stable. Um, you know, phosphate I try to keep below 0.1.1 and then, um, you know, salinity I do a little bit high as well, about 1.026, 1.025. You know, calc [music] has become such a strong it's had such a strong resurgence. You know, originally it was an older old school method, right? And it was kind of dwindled away at one point. Not sure exactly when that time period was, but it seems like the past 5 years or so. We've really seen a big push for it. We use it a ton at TopShelf. It's really good to be able to maintain that pH for these systems. Now, when we're looking at the tank, you know, grass is always greener. I know I I usually tend to ask this same question to everyone. I look at this tank and I think about my tank at home and I'm like, man, I I have a lot of things I wish I could change. If there are a couple things you'd want to change in this system, what would you want to do? Would you want to go bigger? Would you want to, you know, what would be the kind of things you'd want to change? I mean, everyone always wants bigger, right? That's uh, you know, bigger tank is for sure. Next, the [music] uh I think for me the rock scapes I would change and I this this guy came in did this beautiful rockcape. [music] I think for a fish only or a couple corals would have been awesome, but uh now with my style, I know I just need I just need a big little wall I can keep putting stuff on. So, you know, with those the detritus pile up is always the challenge. So, [music] I do appreciate how much space I have in the back of it. The other thing that I think we made a mistake with this tank [music] is it's it's hard to access. So, it's very hard for me with the amount of equipment I want to put in here. I have no room. There's a closet behind this. So, I think in hindsight I probably would have punched a hole in the wall, taken over some of the closet. Uh might have gotten divorced doing that, but you know, I don't know if that's worth, you know, right? I think that's something people honestly forget is the fact that you get so wrapped up with the tank itself, [music] the corals, the fish, all that thing. You tend to forget about the equipment, the access of the equipment, be able to work on the equipment, take things out, get rid of them, put in new stuff, whatever that may be. So, I think that's a really great point. Something I was curious about, you've got a ton of different [music] species in here, like a wide range. Truly a super wide range. Whether it be, you know, all the SPS up top, you've got all the LPS, the softies, the clam, all these things. Do you see coral warfare occurring in the tank itself? And then how do you combat that? How do you deal with it? I think that's the biggest issue with mixed reef tanks in general as people truly do struggle with coral warfare. And how are you able to maintain with all these different species in here? That's nature, right? That's the whole point is trying to emulate nature. So, you know, it's we do see a lot of coral warfare. I would say my biggest offenders are [music] obviously the the torches. Uh we see them putting sweepers out and grabbing stuff. You know, some of the acros wage warfare too when they're touching. you'll see them burning each other. Uh that takes a little bit longer time obviously, [music] but I think with the uh the torches, I just try to just kind of knock off the sweeper whenever I can. But I think proper planning is the biggest thing. Um so planning the placement [music] of all the the corals ahead of time. And you know, I could probably improve the look of it. But I've done a [music] a pretty, you know, um intentional job of keeping the low and all the SPS high as well. And there's kind of a natural barrier there. the coral's grown in, you know, extremely well to this point where it's it's a jungle of coral and it kind of makes you forget how many fish are actually in [music] the tank. Do you know like a rough number of how many fish are in the system? It's hard to even see them at hard to get I mean I I have maybe 30 or so is there's [music] it's a fish heavy system and and keeping the phosphates down is a is a challenge for sure. Um you know, but it's it's it's a lot. I one of my big goals, what I love about really established reef tanks is for those like who are know what they're doing, you see the heavy hitters right away. I like you to be able to sit down, have a coffee, and and be like, "Oh, well, there's a there's a dragonet." Or start finding new stuff that you don't see originally. Did I see pipe fish in the back, too? Blue stripe pipe fish. Yeah, we got the red stripe. We got three pipe fish in here, which are pretty cool. So, uh we're trying them out. They're relatively new. They're about a month old. So, Okay. And are you still like actively feeding maybe, you know, roifers and things still in the tank for those guys specifically? Yeah. Yeah, I am. So, uh, we put copa pods in. So, I put a gallon of copods in once a month. There's a farm in central Florida that sends them once a month, which is great. So, we're doing a ton of, uh, copaods. You know, I struggle with the reef mat sucking them out, I think. So, trying to get them to propagate in the tank. But, yeah, Roafer still, we do cyclopes and then the live copods. People probably don't remember that at times. They put copaods in at the beginning of their tank. I do once and forget. I think that is really true, especially if you have specific [music] fish that are really hunting after that stuff. Mystery rass is you've got the pipe fish. The other thing too that's interesting about the pipe fish is a lot of people tend to think that they only want to be in like low flow systems. It seems like there's a decent amount of flow in this tank with the SPS and everything. Have you seen any issues with them getting near the gy or they're just kind of hanging out near the bottom? They're kind of hanging out. Like there's the mystery. He's awesome. He's cruising around. He's he's hunting. But no, they kind of float around in the rock base which is really cool. So you can see them down there. Um they're hunting right now. You can see. But they tend to stay in the back side of the reef, which is pretty cool. So again, with my goal of like you're standing here, over there, anywhere. I want you to see something new each time you look. Yeah, it's always exciting. Good spot, by the way. Good find for sure. I you know, they're one of my favorite fish, pipe fish in general. I I think they're like a really nice, you know, cherry on top kind of situation for a reef tank. I ask everyone, Jake Adams used to do it every single time you do a tank tour is a piece of advice. You know, I think a lot of different reefke keepers have all kinds of different [music] advice, different things they would want to be able to tell people. And so that's what I love about these tank tours is we get to come into people's homes. Again, thank you so much. But we get to check out their tanks [music] and I always kind of want to learn a new tip or trick, you know, something brand new that kind of interests me to learn a little bit more about this hobby. You're always learning about the hobby, right? So, a piece of advice you'd give any reef keeper, what would it be? My biggest thing is start slow and don't stop learning. Like I'm a huge fan of Reef Tar to Reef and the online forums. Uh [music] like everything in the world, you have to know where to get your information from, but I really appreciate Reef to Reef and the community of reefers because there are some very healthy and I would say some very spirited debates on topics. And so I think uh you know I'm a I'm a scuba diver and a pilot as well. So I think with all these hobbies, whether it's [music] uh diving, flying, or reefing, you can never stop learning. So keep educating yourself. You know, go to conferences, watch YouTube videos like this. Uh you know, engage with other reefers, too. It's uh it's a pretty cool community. Yeah, we definitely have some very high-spirited people that uh are going to die on hills when it comes to certain topics. Well, [music] Connor, thank you so much, man. This has been awesome. I really appreciate you letting us stop by. I want to let everybody know if you guys have any questions about the system. [music] I want to hear your favorite thing as well. Be sure to drop them down in the comments down below. If you guys have hung out with us all the way till the end, I want to say thank you guys so much. Be sure to like, subscribe, and hit the bell notification so you don't miss out on any future uploads. [music]