Red Sea-Squirt update.

It's dead.  It kept getting deeper and deeper red and the tip continued to disintegrate until nearly a quarter of it's length was gone, and the base was all light gray.  I reached in and pulled it out today and it was hardly able to hold itself together.  I have another gray squirt in the same tank that's doing fine.  It's a sad loss.

Thanks for the info.  As of today, the white stuff is gone and the hole in the tip is clear.  The color is really coming back into this thing.  I hope it survives.

Since this is the sponge topic lsit, I'd like to introduce myself and ask a question.  If you want to skip my intro and brief  ;-)  history, scroll down to the line of asterisks.

My Name is Trevis and I live in W. Jordan.  I am the proud new owner of a 2 yr old 120 gal Tenecor acrylic tank with Simplicty Plus filter system.  It originally contained 60 lbs of lace rock and 4 fish (yellow tail damsel, juv. french angel, sailfin tang, and flame angel) with a crushed coral substrate and simple 48" actinic lights; no coral, no inverts, no crustaceans, and very little algea.  I moved the whole tank to my house, keeping everything but the lace rock, and added in 120 lbs of pre-prepared live rock that liverocknreef.com in west valley had shipped in for me from Florida.  (BTW, Bill was great to work with.  He typically does internet business but, if you live within 30 miles of his warehouse in WVC, he'll deliver it to your door for free! No Shipping! And he gave me a bunch of 10%-off cards if you're looking to buy.) I added the rock, tested Nitrate, Nitrite, Ammonia, Phosphate, Calcium, Alk, and hardness levels after the change (I kept all the water, with the exception of a 20 gal water change since it was due) and everything looked good but the phospates.  I started with Phosguard and Phos-Lok and it's steadily coming down.  I treated the tank with Bacter-vital daily for 2 weeks per Bill's suggestion.  Twice a week I test the water and add super-buffer, kalkwasser, Reef-Vital DNA, and whatever else it needs.  I've had it 5 weeks now and have done 3 water changes of 20 gal each (I'll explain why later).

Here's my tank with lights off.  I haven't figured out how to take a nice lights-on pic yet.

The live rock came with TONS of Cor. Algea in purple, green, maroon, light-red, and bright orange.  It also had several plants, about 30 cockels, and one pretty red sponge.  On day 2, I noticed that the Sailfin tang had hole-in-head and started treating right away.  Melafix stopped the erosion and kept out further infection.  Metrozole capsules didn't seem to change anything.  One of those medications killed every cockel, mollusk, and clam on the live-rock.  I spent alot of time pulling those things out.  Here's a pic of the hole-in-head:

I contacted the guy at the office I bought it from and learned that these fish were rarely fed greens; mostly just mysis shrimp and flake food.  Hoping that the hole-in-head was caused by lack of veggies, I started soaking all of his food in Kent Zoe and feeding him green seaweed and lettuce/spinach.  They love veggies!

Soon after acquiring the tank, I decided to make some seemingly necessary upgrades.  I got a new 48" 260w Power Compact unit off E-bay for $140 and added fans to the sides of the hood for ventilation (the Odyssea unit I bought runs Hot!)  I'll post pics of the DIY job I did retro-fitting it into the acrylic black hood in the appropriate topic  list.  I also added an 18-watt Turbo-Twist UV light filter with a Rio 400 and the water clarity improved drastically.  Those 2 changes have made all the difference.  The new lights bring out colors in the rock and fish that I never knew were there!  They also made the copapods visible on the tank walls.  Through a jeweler's loop, they're very colorful!

The tank is 30" tall, 18" deep, and 48" wide, so it was meant to be a fish display tank.  With the new lights, I'm seeing great green algea growth all over the tank, not too much, but an increase over the slim-to-none that was there before.  The plants that came in on the live rock are doing well too, in-spite of the angels munching. There's no brown algea at all.  I added 25 cleaning crabs and a lawnmower blenny to keep the place clean.  I also added a chocolate chip starfish for looks.

But, newbies will learn from mistakes and here's what I learned.  In trying to lower the phosphates and heal the sailfin, I did a water change 2 weeks ago and put a few more gallons in than I took out.  Those extra gallons went into the reef-plus system in the back and submerged the previously drip-fed bioballs, causing them to release all of their green-slime micro algea into the water.  I didn't notice the water level in the back before, so I didn't know the difference.  The next day, my wter was a green cloud, so thick I could see from one end to the other.  The fish were fine, but it looked ugly.  After consulting a friend who'd seen this reef type before (apparently they're not very common), I syphoned 3 gallons ot of the back reef and did another water change (the 2nd in a week).  FYI, the water level in the back should be between 5 and 9 inches deep.  To see the reef type I'm talking about, see below or goto tenecor.com/filtration.php.

This is the structure built into the back of the tank.  It's about 4 inches deep and 44 inches wide, leaving 2 inches to the wall on both sides.  With the extra 3-5 gallons, my water level in this back sump area was more than half-way to the top.  I like the design since there's no external plumbing and therefore no chance of flooding a lower refugium or sump.  I just didn't take note of the tank's working parameters before fiddling with it, and I payed the price.

The water is crystal-clear now and all of the element levels are ideal in the aquarium, except for phospates.  That's steadily coming down as I change out the Phos-guard every 4 days.  I attribute the clarity to cleaning my micron filter daily, adding the Turbo-twist UV filter, dropping the sump level back to normal so the Bioballs can regrow micro, and adding the pricey but effective Coralife Marine Tank Clarifier as prescribed.

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Now for my sponge related question:

Here's a pic of the sponge, which was round and plump when it came in on the rock, but shriveled up when I started adding melafix and metrozole.  I ran out of melafix a few days ago and it's starting to regain shape and it's bright-red color, but today it spewed out a white fleshy substance from the hole in the tip(see pic).  The fish won't eat the white stuff, and never bothered the sponge to begin with.  The stuff resembles crustacean flesh; stringy and a milky color.  Can anyone tell me what kind of sponge it is and what it's doing?

Amonia is 0, PH is 8, Alk is 15, calcium is 450, Nitrates and nitrates read "safe" on the test strips I use, and phosphates are higher than they should be, but coming down.

I've been reading the site for about 3 months now and I'm way impressed at the knowlege floating around here.  Your site was very helpful is deciding what changes to make and species to plan for/buy.  I hope someone can help me with this question.  Info on sponges is hard to find, probably because there are so many types.  And, though I didn't pay for it, I'd like to save it.  It's a pretty red contrast to the other coraline algea colors in the tank. Plus, of you look closely at the base, you'll see an off-shoot that was doing well when it arrived. 

In the near future, once the phosphate leves are acceptable, I'll add a purple tang, a juv. emperor, and 3 or 4 soft corals.  I hope that I can keep the angels well enough fed that they'll leave the alone.  They've not been near any coral for over 2 years now.  Maybe they forgot how to eat them. One can hope.  The CCS will probably have to go then too.  For now, I'm really enjoying what I have!

I'm not a real fan of calcium or buffer additives as well.  I've seen Kalkwasser ruin as many tanks as I've seen it help. 

Almost always due to over dosing, so not the fault of the product, but of the user.

Adam

Jfinch believes strongly in the ability of Kalkwasser to provide suffficient Ca for continual Halimeda growth

My only assursion is that kalkwasser provides approxamately 3.1 gms of Ca++ per gallon (or 7.7 gms of CaCO3).  I don't know what Halimeda needs for continual growth, perhaps calcium isn't the only thing?  The problem with kalkwasser is you're limited to how much can be added as it severely effects pH, hence my quest for a pH probe.

Mark, have you ever kept a tank using calcium and alkalinity additives?  What levels did you maintain?  What additives did you use?  If you haven't done it before, you aught to try it.  If you did, you must have had a bad experience... what happened?

(edit:  my math mistake on kalkwasser concentration)