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I tested my water today, and still have wild numbers. It really is discouraging, as I was hoping for things to level out. Phosphates don't seem to be coming down whatsoever, but my refugium is very empty currently. I need to quit sharing macros until that section is dense with plants again.

I made the time to vacuum the sump of detritus. I know this question comes up often enough on RC about how to clean your sump out, since it is level with the floor. What I did was use what I had handy:

Phosphate.

My PO4 levels have been elevating for a couple of months. If you refer to this page, you'll see they were going down, but rose up again for a few simple reasons. http://www.melevsreef.com/parms.html

Oceanic salt issues, lack of water changes, running out of PO4 media remover, skimmer not built for the system's bioload....

A Frogspawn Growth Sequence

Originaly, the coral was a single head, slightly oval-shaped when I got it.

April 2004 - you can see the mouth. I actually fed it tiny bits of shrimp occasionally.

May 2004 - for sense of scale, here it is in my 29g.

A few noteworthy things from today:

The copperband butterfly is still doing well, and was out briefly a few times. Looks like it got a few featherdusters, but the aiptasia population seems unchanged in the back of the tank. I'm hoping it will become more and more courageous, so that it can cruise the reef as it wishes.

Woohoo!!! The new sump is finally running!!!!!!!!!

For 8 months, all I've talked about is the new sump I was going to build. At last, it is done and installed.

The doorway got a little more crowded, but I'm happy.

I remember when my site was quietly doing its thing. I just checked the statistics for the first four months of this year, and melevsreef.com received about 8,000,000 hits; in other words a lot of traffic. It translates into 340 gigs of traffic, guys. Amazing!

Yesterday, I received two Aiptasia eating nudibranch Berghia verrucicornis and they were tiny. A club member did a group buy for six of these from someone on Reef Central, I believe. I've got a lot of aiptasia (btw, I've always spelled it 'aptasia' but noticed in Google that the 'i' was left out.) in my reef, and I've tried a few of the typical solutions but they continue to pop up out of everything including within corals themselves.

Okay, I'm calling it: Time of Death - 4:15 a.m. 

In honor of my lovely Mandarin, here are three beautiful portraits Travis Staut (Reef-Life.com) took in 2003.

Here is a new sump I built recently for a local club member.

Model G - modified

I created a new webpage today about editing images in Photoshop. Hopefully it will be helpful to others.

Photoshop 7.0 - editing technique