Travis: What's up, guys. Welcome back to FishOfHex. My name is Travis. Today, we're going to be doing a little bit of an update on the 300-gallon reef. We're going to talk about my preparation for the Walt Disney that I'll be adding here soon, also the race to the top of the tank, and just some general updates and how the system is doing cutting coral within it, fragging them out, all that good stuff. You guys see here the frag tank, so let's go to get started.
Now, when it comes to preparing for the Walt Disney, I've decided I was going to remove this FishOfHex Milli colony since I already have one up here, which is kind of my main colony.
I've just been fragging this one for a while to put frags on the website. Now, I decided to go ahead and start cutting. It's going to be difficult to tell and probably the fish are going to be in the way, but you can see I've already started to get my finger there. I've cut off some pretty decent chunks and they're currently in the frag tank healing.
You guys can see that this millepora down here is starting to come up and get up underneath that acro anyway, so it's a good thing that I'm starting to remove it. Now, I'm going to take about a month or so to completely remove this colony. Once I get down to the base, I'll go ahead and kind of scrape it off with my bone cutters to make sure that it doesn't continue to encrust and grow in another direction.
Once that colony is completely gone, I will have the Walt Disney frag that will go in its place, the exact same spot, and then hopefully grow outward over to the left-hand side and back where it will be just a really good piece to have in the tank. Of course, once it completely grows out and looks decent, I'll start fragging it and put it up on the website just like everything else that we have here in the 300-gallon.
Within the next 30 days or so, that colony will be completely gone. Look forward to having a lot of that on the website. Of course, I need to give it at least two to three weeks per frag for it to heal before I feel comfortable enough to go ahead and ship it out. Now, over here to the center-right rock structure, we have the race to the top of the tank. I think, what, four months ago, the fish went ahead and knocked off a huge chunk of this green acro or this green staghorn.
It would have been at the top by now. I think I posted a picture on Instagram. I have to check and see exactly which one it was. It's either that one or the darker green one, which is in the front. Either way, the race to the top is kind of underway here. We have the purple stag here. It's more of a blue in real life, kind of looks purple on the filter here. Of course, the fish affects Milli. I definitely think it's between this guy and the green staghorn.
Obviously, the green staghorn seems to be pulling ahead. Now, they're getting about 750 par right there. Of course, once they get up to the top, they're going to be closer to that 1,000 range. I'm going to wait until it starts actually coming out of the tank to see how it reacts to that kind of light before I cut it down just enough to let it to continue to grow. It's pretty crazy if you think that that's a 31-inch tall tank.
Of course, the rock structures are kind of up pretty high, but that's definitely quite a bit of growth in such a short period of time for this system. Now, as you guys can see, I went ahead and added this frag rack. Not something that I like. I hate that it's in here. It looks like crap. I mean, it's just, ugh. It's not fun. I don't like it. Unfortunately, the frag tank is pretty much full. The stuff over to the right-hand side is what's healing.
Once it's healed, it comes over here on this rack down the bottom. You guys can probably barely see. I'll take pictures of it and then I'll go ahead and put it in the numbered section here. Definitely looking to add another frag tank to the 300 just because it is pretty full. To be honest with you, I'm coming in here every few days and cutting the tank just to keep the corals happy.
I know it's natural for them to come together and kind of have the little coral war and see whoever the biggest, baddest wins and keeps going, but I don't like that. When I see coral and Acropora touching each other, I just see money being flushed down the drain. I like to come in here and kind of snip them. You could probably see. It's like dark finger day right here between these two acros. I got there too late. They pretty much kind of infuse together and continue to grow.
I'll come down here and knock out a piece of that before he touches that Acropora. I just come in here, see what's close together. As you guys can see down here, the fish do a lot of fragging for me too, that rainbow granulosa. Got to come in here and grab him at the end of the video, frag him up, heal him, and then it's good to go. The fish do a lot of fragging for me which pretty awesome. They usually frag stuff that I don't really necessarily want to break, but it's just kind of part of the whole process.
One coral that I'm definitely regretting putting in here now is this pink bird's nest. As you can see, it's kind of in between the gap of these two rock structures and I call it the fish killer. I've really messed up a lot of fish with this. Actually, one of these black chromises, which you probably barely see on the video, got slammed in the eye. My phone's buzzing. Got hit in the eye. I actually saw it happen when I was feeding him.
He got scared. He ran right into it and it swelled up. It was just nasty. I'm probably going to come in here and rip that whole colony out and this other colony of a different type of pink bird's nest. I don't know. It looks weird. I don't like the way it's growing, so I'm probably going to pull that out too. Pink bird's nest is cool. As you guys can see, it's like flowing to the right-hand side. Not a fan of that.
It's just one of those things. I got to get into there and do it, cut it out, and then frag it up, of course. Overall, the tank is doing very well. I'm at about 2.8 gallons per hour of the calcium reactor dosing. You guys know that I actually got rid of the Kamoer dosing pump. A local hobbyist end up picking it up for me. It just wasn't enough. It didn't dose fast enough for me, so I'm back to the needle valve.
Now, what I'm planning on doing is adding a controllable DC pump as the feed pump for that calcium reactor and then just opening up the valve all the way so I don't have to worry about it clogging and then dialing the flow in based off the percentage of the pump speed. We'll see how that works out. I know a couple of local hobbyists that do that when they have big Acropora tanks and they find that that's more safe. Less chances of the valve clogging up because, essentially, it's not really there. It's just the pump.
You just got to keep the pump clean every six months. Go in there and do your normal pump maintenance. You don't have to worry about if you go away for a week and the valve gets clogged, you don't have to worry about alkalinity plummeting because that's one thing with this tank. I have to test out alkalinity every three days now and make adjustments because it doesn't take much for it to plummet.
I'm sitting at 8.5. For a very short period of time, I got it back up to nine. It felt like the tank didn't like that adjustment. I'm just keeping it about 8.5 and slowly getting my way up to 9.5. Again, once you go through those different ranges of alkalinity, you have to keep an eye on your nutrients. You got to make sure that your NO3 and your PO4 are in a good range before you start going out to those higher alkalinity levels because you'll stress the coral out and kill them.
It's just a battle with this tank at this point. If it's happy at 8.5, if things are growing and it's doing well, the nutrients are under control, the fish are happy and healthy, I'm not going to mess with it. I'm just going to let it do its thing and then, of course, frag it and continue to pay for the hobby or pay for the tank and the salt amount of stuff should be coral sales. I really love the tank. It's doing great.
What else can I say? The lighting. Let's see. You guys know. If you've been following the build, you know it's here, but I'll just show you anyways. This is going to be blue. We have the eight XR15s and the four T5 bulbs, which I'm going to be changing out in the next month or so. We have two actinics and two Blue Plus per aquatic life, 48-inch retrofit kits. It's pretty cool, really liked it, and happy with the setup overall.
Now, if you guys have any questions about this, let me know. If you want to know about a specific coral or you're interested in getting a specific frag from this because I get emails people saying, "Hey," it's interesting when people take screenshots of the tank and then they just start circling colonies that they want to frag up. If there's something that you want in this tank, feel free to let me know because there's probably a 99% chance that I already have it fragged and it's currently healing up.
It's something that I can set aside for you. I have no problem doing that, so just let me know. All right. Well, that's about it for this video. I'm looking to get three videos out this week. I know Scott from Rascals Reef is going to be over here on Friday to help me cut up a big coral shipment that I'm getting in actually tomorrow. Tomorrow or Wednesday, it's going to be here. Of course, I'm going to give it some time in the tank before we start cutting it. I just added about 90 frags to the website this morning.
It's just a lot of work. We'll get into that whole process if you guys really want to know how I prepare coral, take the pictures, get them on the website, kind of the overall process because it's a lot more in-depth than it was just a year ago. I made a lot of changes over the last four or five months. Of course, there's been really good results, so I'm just going to keep doing that stuff. That's about it for this video. I hope you guys enjoyed it and I will see you later. Peace.
