Hello folks. I've been meaning to write this post since my nephew and I found the talkingreef forums and podcast a few weeks ago. Finally finished my taxes and found some time to put together this post.
I have kept fish most of my life. A few years ago a friend persuaded me to set up a marine tank. I was intoxicated. I had a 37 bow with an eclipse hood. I had fish, mushrooms, shrimp and a small cleanup crew. When I moved to Oklahoma from Colorado i decided not to move the tank and gave it to my friend who still maintains it today.
When my nephew expressed an interest in setting up a fish tank, I jumped at the chance. The concept of this tank is to be as complete a habitat as possible for Dragonets and soft flowing corals. The emphasis is as much science experiment as display tank. Here is a recent picture.
The tank is only about 30 days olds. Before i give you the particulars let me tell you what we've done so far. We started with a 65g tank and stand. We added 80 pounds of uncured
live rock. We bought Lalo Island premium rock from liveaquaria.com. We cured it until
NH3, NI, NO were zero. Then we added 3-4 inches of crushed coral and
aragonite sand, along with a large bag of live sand.
We began adding Dwarf reef crabs and snails. A week ago or so we added a young Lawnmower Blenny and 10 more pounds of rock. We have had an algae bloom and recently an explosion of copepods on everything. The rock came with lots of critters, We have identified several sea fans and quite a few small polyps. I'd love some help with id but I have an old digital camera and it just wont take a good picture of things that small. One i'm fairly certain is a green star polyp. Nothing was quarantined up to this point. However that has changed and we will now quarantine everything else that goes in there. So far i haven't seen anything suspicious cept for two brown jellies. I'm watching a few small things. I'm worried that some of them may be hydriods.
My nephew did all the plumbing with the help of talkingreef and other internet sources. The
sump will get bigger once we find a good match for the space we
have. We want a plastic tub or feed trough but it can't be more than 24 inches wide. I don't know much about the plumbing. It is all
DIY and was done by my nephew. He plans to post some himself. We have been listening to/watching the talkingreef podcast. They have been very helpful, as has the
LFS here.
Here is a rundown on the tank and equipment:
65g (36lx18wx24t) display, 15g
sump, 10g
refugium, 1g
refugium (converted Emperor 400), Prizm
skimmer, 4 T-5 lights, wave maker (power strip type), lettuce cage and copepod condo. There were several hitchhikers on the rock. This soft coral was on one rock. A tiny identical coral is in a crevice of the large flat rock we have. This is what it looked like when it got here.
This is what it looks like now.
If anyone knows exactly what it is, id love to know. I've been treating it in standard soft leather fashion. It seems to have no defenses at all. Copepods, crabs and snails crawl all over it. The crabs arn't in it much now that it doesn't have a lot of dead tissue on it any more.
I also have this crab. Who i don't think is a dwarf reef hermit. I may have bought him or he may have been a hitchhiker. He has one big claw and one small claw. Here is the best picture of the hundreds i took of him. He's the one in the foreground. There is a scarlet hermit behind him. This morning we isolated this scarlet because he was attacking a Nassarius Snail. I thought these guys were peaceful, but we've seen some aggression.
I want to add a few crabs but i need to get the quarantine tank set up first. Nothing else for another few weeks. We are feeding just a little phyto & vitamins about every 5 days for the coral. We have about 30 each snails and crabs. Four of the crabs are Scarlet Hermit crabs. The rest of them are Dwarf Reef Hermits, previous exception noted. The snails are Mexican turbos, Cerith snails and Margarete snails.
Well thats about it. There are a few more pictures of the
sump,
fuges and critters
here for anyone who is interested.
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