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The Pappone Method - Pictures!

Week 1 : 3/10/07

The Pappone Method

I have been slowly making the transition to SPS. This has made my wife anything BUT happy. She really liked the movement of all of the soft corals. Someday, I may have 2 tanks and this one will be converted back to softies. I need to get a new full tank shot up. I will try to get the FTS up sometime this weekend. Anyway, I am trying the Pappone method for feeding my SPS. This will be a diary of that. I will edit this post as I continue the feedings. For those of you that don't know about it, you can check out a thread on Reef Central - CLICK HERE

The recipe is as follows:

“Pappone” Recipe – Italian Coral Food (Updated 1/14/2007)

Materials:
5 Oysters
5 Mussels
5 Clams
5 Shrimp (NOT cocktail shrimp, the big scampi type w/o the head and the shell)
1 Tablespoon of Sugar (not corn syrup, etc.)
200 mL of RO/DI water
10 g of Red Algae (Palmaria palmata; Bisck uses Julian Sprung's brand)
and/or 10 g of Spirulina, 10 g of Nori (spirulina is what Bisck prefers)

Methods: Make SURE that all ingredients are the freshest possible and DO NOT use frozen foods (unless it is impossible for you). Make sure everything "live" is rinsed and cleaned before putting it into the blender. Put all the ingredients into the blender and blend for 5 min, wait 2 min for it to cool, 5 more min blending, 2 min of waiting again, then finally another 5 min of blending (the pausing is so that the solution doesn't get too hot and "cook" from the heat of the blender/blades). Pour into cube forms (approx 10 mL each). Then freeze it all—you want to minimize how long everything is at room temperature.

Procedure: One hour prior to turning off your lights, you have the option of adding Amino acids to the tank*. (For example, 11pm Halides off, add AA’s, 12am, actinics off, then add pappone). Take off the cup of your skimmer, but leave the skimmer running (so you don’t have a massive drop in O2 levels overnight). After the lights are off, start with only a ¼ of a cube per WEEK for every 400 L of tank water (approx 100 gallons). Be sure to measure NO3 and PO4 the next morning so that these parameters don't spike after feeding. You can reduce the amount fed if you are having nutrient problems. Also don’t forget to put the skimmer cup back on the next morning before the lights go back on.

*If everything is going well. It is good to wait and see how the tank is doing for awhile before trying this. The whole point here is that you don't want to change anything too fast, because nothing good happens quickly in this hobby. (Another method to grind up amino acid pills in the next batch of food; however Bisck found that it sometimes causes diatom outbreaks in his tank).

So, now for my beginning pics. They will be in my next post.

October 2006

My newest Tank Shot.

Snails...Gone

Well, in my last post you can see that I have a serious problem with pyramid snails. Unfortunately, all other snails have lost the battle. I am going to leave my system snail free for about 6-8 weeks and see if they die off. They need a host, so I am not going to give them one. I am experiencing a bit of an algae problem. But, it will get better when I replenish my snail population.
-Chuck

Pyramid Snails

Within the last two days I have had three of my large snails die. Curiously, as the crabs were devouring the upside down snails, I noticed a bunch of tiny white snails along the bottom of the shell. They were positioned just on the exterior edge of the shell where the occupying snail can be seen.
In these two pictures, you can see where the tiny snails are located. Every single astrea snail I have, has these small snails on them. Oddly, my Margarita snails and ceriths do not have these on them. When I first saw them, I thought that maybe they were baby astrea or cerith snails. With the sudden deaths, I soon realized they were not.

I will have to do research on these. From what I have found so far, these are typically clam predators. There have been a few reports of some types of pyramid snails that go after astrea snails. From what I have read, the best course of action is to knock off the adults and use a brush to remove any eggs. Without a host, they cannot survive. With a clam, you would need to remove the clam to another tank and wait for the snails to die off. I will not be able to remove all of the snails, so I will have to pick them out, and brush them off. One by one.

My Tank In The Living Room

My local reef club asked members to post pictures of our tanks and the rooms that they are in. So, here is mine. I am not a big fan of where we live right now. But, you will get the idea.

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Check out DFWMAS for a ton of information about Marine Aquaria. Our President, Marc Levenson, owns Melevsreef.com