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Killer Powerheads & My Dying Acropora Colony

By Fish of Hex on

Travis: What's up guys? Welcome back to FishOfHex. My name is Travis. Today's video we're going to be talking about a little bit of an issue that I ran into here with the 300 gallon and also the frag system over the last two weeks. Now it has to do with the powerheads and during a feed mode. Now I did post a picture here on Instagram probably a couple of hours ago about my four-year-old starfish that end up getting killed by one of the powerheads this morning during a feed mode.

Basically, what happens is when I do a feed mode which I'll show you guys here in a second.

What it does is it turns off the return pump all the powerheads and the skimmers in both systems. Now what this does is allows the fish to feed and then 10 minutes later the powerheads will kick back on and it will kind of move the food around which then gives the coral an opportunity to feed. And then after that, the return pump will kick on and all of the excess food and all that stuff will go down into the filter sucks and be filtered out of the tank. Let's go and do that feed mode now and we'll just keep on going. Alexa, tell Apex fusion to feed fish.

Alexa: Starting feed fish.

Travis: You guys probably didn't hear it but the skimmer and everything turned off and you can definitely see the fish. You guys already ate today so I don't know what's going on. You can hear everything got turned off. Basically, this power had down here turns off for 10 minutes and then you can actually see my other serpent star underneath there.

Now what happens is once they feed they come out and he kind of climbed into this power head and then of course 10 minutes later when it kicked on it shredded him to pieces. There's chunks of him all over the tank. If maybe it was just one of his legs or something like that he would've been okay, but no, he had his whole body in there and it was awful. There's something in there for you guys to think about. Then the next example which was actually last week the top tank up here my six line Wrasse did the same thing.

He went inside this little powerhead. Was chewing and eating and then it kicked back on and it shredded him to pieces. There was a little bit left of him in there but the rest of it was floating around so I definitely knew the power head got him. What I have done or will be doing is leaving the powerheads on-- Get back into zoom there. See if I can get that to work. What I'm going be doing is leaving the powerheads on at 30% instead of having them turn off.

Now makes a little bit of a pain when it comes to fish-eating because I like them to actually have opportunity to kind of chomp on the pieces in the chunks of food and then let it mix around by the powerheads later. That's going to be the change that I'm going make after I just do this quick example of the flow and everything turning off. Definitely irritated. He's a four-year-old starfish, he got crushed real quick and hopefully, he didn't feel anything.

We all learn lessons and that's the point of these videos I wanted to share it with you guys because you can see actually that blue Chromis just getting on the inside of that powerhead. I'm going to fix this now before somebody else climbs in and gets shredded and that's just kind of the luck I have. Now a quick update on the Acropora here. This big blue acro I did just put a frag of it up on the website because I'm trying to save it.

Now you probably can't see. No. Right there with all the damn fish. It's a little bit STN. This Molly is just destroying this Acropora. I'm going to do a video probably tomorrow or the day after. We're going to come in here and actually remove this entire colony which is just a big part of this particular rock scape and I've got to pull it out. What I'm going to do is take a frag of it put it down here because I think this is the only open spot I have because I do have a colony coming out which I'll be putting that Walt Disney.

Right here where this colony is. I don't really have too much room to put one in. I really want to keep that frag. As I mentioned in a previous video I was going to put a piece of it to the left-hand side and let it grow out but with the lighting the way it is it's just not going to grow out. They're just reaching for the light. You can see we're almost at the top of the water there. We know who's going to win that race and we talked about that later too. See if I can get an angle there.

They're reaching there and you can see that Molly is just doing a ton of damage. It sucks. Now if I could go back in time I probably would’ve made it so he couldn't have access to that and probably would have just spread those two out and really just kept Mollies together like I do down here but I live and learn lessons. That's just how the hobby is no matter how long you been in and all that kind of stuff.

We're just learning stuff every single day.

That's about it for this video. Hope you guys enjoyed it. I should have at least one or two out again before the end of the week. All right. I'll talk to you later. Peace.

About Fish of Hex

Travis’ main reef display tank featuring many small-polyp stony coral (SPS) is a 300-gallon custom glass aquarium setting on a welded iron stand, both from Custom Aquariums.

"Here you will find everything you need to know to be successful in the saltwater aquarium hobby. I have several video series such as "Beginner Guide to Saltwater Aquariums", "300 Gallon Build" and "How to & Diy". I will teach you how to avoid common mistakes and prevent tank disasters. With thirteen years of experience in the hobby, I plan on sharing all of it with my subscribers. I take great pride in helping others and seeing their tanks grow into amazing works of art makes the time I put into making these videos worth it. Follow me and you will have an amazing reef tank in no time!"

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