) it is about time I put together a journal for our propagation endeavour. So, here we go! I'll try to make this a pretty open look at the good and bad decisions we've made, how the systems run, the highs and lows of how things go and anything else that seems interesting to share with the broader community.So, a little about us at Morphology. I'm Holly, the one with the reefing obsession/hobby. I'm a chef by trade but am in the last throws of a master of psychology degree which means I will be reading people's minds' soon
. Jeremy, my partner, is an organic chemist by trade and works as a personal tutor, so is pretty special with all the science-based stuff. I've had a marine tank for approximately 10 years, but have only been relatively successful at keeping a full reef since becoming involved in marine forums 3-ish years ago, and then joining MASOV a year ago. Beginnings...
I started propagating morphs in my sump a year or more ago planning to eventually use them for swapsies at meets and frag days. In steps Jeremy, scientific calculator in hand, who suggests I should go a bit bigger if I want to be more efficient with my time. As you all know, this type of statement to a reefer is like blood in the water for a shark.
So, I started slowly expanding to separate bigger tanks, from this:
To this:
To this:
Then, Reeflections upgraded their tanks and suddenly we had an opportunity to expand way, way bigger. So, we sacrificed our garage and took the plunge.
The prop room
First steps involved resurfacing, patching, and painting the walls and fixing the concrete floor. We picked up 10 3ft tanks off Reeflections to use somehow (wasn't sure at that stage).
We built a stand to hold our QT and initial propagation tanks:
Then, the challenge of getting two 10ft tanks home. With the help of 15 friends including sscuz (Nathan) and timmeh1 (Tim) from MASOV we were able to get them home. There were hairy moments but everyone kept a cool head
The stands
Initially we were going to have the 10 feet tanks on the floor on playground foam, with a stand built around it with various levels of shallow troughs.
If the floor had been level we might have been okay. But, it had about seven different grades of slant over the two 10 foot areas so we gave up on that idea.
Then, we got some large pallets off a friend to fix up and add adjustable feet to.
That didn't work out so well. The damn wood was warped, the legs were going to be a royal PITA to fix on and we really didn't want to have to build giant heavy wooden stands that would be difficult to move if we needed to move house.
Back to the drawing board we went, tail between our legs. 
Jeremy happened upon a WA business that produced industrial grade 1-6 way connectors and adjustable feet that would hold insane weight. He did some calculations and a day later we had ordered parts needed to build our stands. They would go together with parts similar to cube block but with strong steel rivets, adjustable legs that could hold 800kgs EACH, connectors with mild steel cores etc. We were pretty chuffed.
Connector and leg:
Here is the bottom 'shelf' in connectors:
Completed:
So, we started setting up the prop tanks to hold stock in until the bigger systems were online.
We used a very thick foam we got from bunnings and marine grade ply to make up the tank stand surface:
With the help of 7 brave souls we moved the tanks out of the garage and back onto the stands
Things were looking up!
Despite what has been said about morphs, you can't use and abuse them with water quality. We lost a lot of stock over 6 months with this mindset. We had set them up without skimmers or any water quality buffers and very minimal (bi monthly) water changes thinking they would love the conditions
. Soon enough 2 months in, the odd morph would slime up and disappear. This is difficult to track as they weren't organised at all but this cycle of death would increase until measures were taken. An essential to success with these is having carbon running on the system and a skimmer. I think that the build up of organics and lack of aeration possibly leads to oxygen depletion and increased susceptibility to bacterial infections. The carbon could also deplete the tank of a particular build up of toxins/something that is produced by morphs. Nitrates would have obviously been an issue as well. The well read/experienced people reading this are likely a bit confused over the stupidity of it but we learned a lot from it. I still give myself the occasional face palm about it.So, we had a drink and (again) forged ahead.
More to come soon...
