All gone

I cleared the tank out last night, and cleaned all of the equipment. It kind of feels better to see it totally empty as opposed to ugly and barren...

Clearing the tank...

I just removed the last of the livestock into the 10 gallon. As you can see, all of the live rock above the sand bed is already gone and in a bucket (originally for "cooking"...) Losing the live rock is a real shame, but the only thing live on it now is algae, bacteria, and some miscellaneous bivalves. It is now waiting to be taken to the local fish store- Keen Reef, to be cooked by Tim and enjoyed in a few months by someone else.

This was aquacultured rock from the Florida Keys that is cultured and sold by our friend Ken Nedimeyer (sealifeinc.net) Until a few months ago, it was loaded with feather dusters, tunicates, worms, etc. Really good stuff, and a sustainable resource unlike most of the live rock being sold. There was a lot more life on the rocks we received from Ken than on anything I've seen in a local store.

Rebooting

Well, I made the commitment last night to totally break the tank down and start from scratch. Ryan had been advocating this for a while, but I persisted in thinking that I could deal with the endless cycle of algae (mostly bryopsis) irradication and resulting nutrient spikes and restart of the cycle. Of course, this is hard on the (remaining) livestock... Crustaceans seem to persist well: orange claw and blue leg hermits, peppermint shrimp, miscellaneous *pods.

"Cooking" the live rock might have been an option, but at a cost of about 2 months of downtime. There is a really good thread on cooking here: http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=650985

I feel pretty bad that my wife is sitting at home looking at this wasteland, and 2 months seems to add insult to injury so the rock is going to Keen Reef to be cooked by someone else, and I'm ordering some dry rock with which to start over with.

Anyway, I thought it might be good to start with some photos of the system in its heyday (late 2008.) RIP "Skit" (the fairy basslet.)