There’s never any shortage of things to do around the Reef Builders Studio and topics to bring to the Reef Builders Studio video series. Instead of focusing on a single thing this week, we thought we’d combine two different topics to bring you a little bit of reef aquarium gear, and reef aquarium life.
To satisfy these two aquarium themes at opposite ends of the spectrum, we’re installing that new Ultra Reef Akula Skimmer we got our hands on earlier this week, and fragged up an extra large, overgrown Duncanopsammia ‘Duncan’ coral from our soft coral reef tank. The Akula skimmer uses a Sicce PSK 1000+ and should be comparable in performance to the Red Sea Reefer Skimmer on our Reefer Peninsula XL and with that capacious sump, made for a very easy swapping out.
Secondly and the primary focus of this week’s video is fragging up the completely homegrown Duncan coral that we’ve had for about 10 years. We got this D. axifuga when it was only four or five corallites and it’s grown substantially through the six or seven different setups that we’ve kept it in while in our care.
It’s been well beyond time to frag up this Duncan coral because the corallites have grown in three dimensions, resulting in lots of crowding and self shading of the inner corallites. More importantly, an attractive but unwelcome stringy blue sponge has made a home all in between the corallite branches, resulting in blocking water flow, and suffocating the already stunted polyps.
We pulled out the Waterpik miniature pressure washer to do some serious work on that blue sponge and made a reasonable number of small frags and four medium sized colonies to put back into the reef display from where they came. Definitely let us know in the video comments how you like this kind of mixed-topic video format and if you do what you’d like to see us cover next; if we can touch upon more than one topic per video we’ll definitely have more opportunities to bring a more our viewers a wider range of reef aquarium ideas.
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