Kaybee's 65gal Reef

[kaybee]

I know nothing about SW fishkeeping, but how did you handle that worm?...you can't touch them with your bare hands, right?

WOW and Yikes too. Those just creep me out and it looks huge-even though you said it came out to 4.5"....Also curious as to how you scooped it back in.

I believe I use the flat end (not the prong end) of a some tweezers. A 1" bristleworm the width of thin spaghetti (or less) seems to have bristles barely 1mm in length that can create a very itchy irritation which seems to persist for about 2-3 days.

This bristleworm has bristles that were easily 3-4mm in length. I'm not chancing getting into contact this those. Probably not has painful as the similarly looking yet aptly named fireworms.

[kaybee]

...BTW the current set up is just amazing...

Thanks, I am still trying to get caught up to present day. That's how my tank looked a year ago.

[Boundava]

Silly me, I am stuck in 2019-staring at the label and wondering what I missed... The older I get the more I realize that the oncologist was right when they told my Mom all the chemo/radiation would affect me later in life!

[kaybee]

Picture from Jan 2019 of the sump's refugium compartment.

I had a pre-existing large-apple sized clump of chaetomorpha macro algae (completely obscured in the below photo), which I previously kept on this tank (when it was fish-only) in a CPR hang on back refugium.

I added the chaeto to the sump and introduced other types of macro algae's (ulva, various gracilaria, some caulerpa).

The refugium is primarily illuminated by a pre-existing 7-watt CPR LED refugium LED (white light) and a 9-watt chaetomax LED fixture (blue, magenta, violet and red light). Currently I run the chaetomax light 9pm-6am and the CPR LED 2am-5am.

In hindsight I suppose I should have just stuck with the chaetomorpha that I already had on hand as it has since out-competed nearly all of the other macroalgae's (still have some spike sphere gracilaria here and there but all of the other macroalgae vanished, displaced by a huge mass of chaetomorpha.

As the refugium compartment appeared in Jan 2019:
refugium.jpg

Water enters the sump at the far left, passes through the refugium compartment, then continues onward to the protein skimmer compartment (partially seen at the right side of the above pic) and then passes into the return section where the water is pumped back into the tank.