Stefalopod's 4g Biorb Reef

[bluelife]

great tank with nice setup

[V]

hey, where you at girl, You mingling with known undesirables again????

[stefalopod]

Whooo-eeee! It has been a long time since I've come for a visit. I blame law school! And also the fact that I finished my build and have been left to calm enjoyment for the past, oh, year or so.


I've been looking around a little and was shell-shocked for a second by how nice everyone still is. It's easy to forget that these days.

I'm in a weird place re my biorb: Everything is running more or less smoothly. There are still occasional teething-troubles that I guess you'll get when an amature builds her own system from scratch. Most recently, my orb overflowed while I was visiting Denmark because algae had grown in the overflow. Word to the wise, clear plastic overflows may not be the best choice.

Unfortunately, the overflow on the DT evidently took out the sump lights. This wasn't too bad (except for the expense of replacing them) because they were only really there for the turf scrubber and I had to dismantle that because of similar overflowing on a different European trip. --Cause-effect, I immediately got huge amounts of nuisance algae since dismantling the scrubber.

Also, and very sadly, my original hi-fin gobie disappeared a few weeks before I left for Denmark. He had been with me since nearly the beginning and had trained me to feed him on command. Clever bugger. =(

In terms of livestock, that leaves a lot of red algae, a turbo snail, a pistol shrimp (still clicking along), and one micro hermit crab in my orb. Oh, and a population of flatworms that dwindles and recovers on about a two week schedule. No idea why. There's also some taro tree, one candy-cane polyp, a few washed out looking palys, and some gold-strike cloves.

I'm about a year from finishing law school and taking the bar and I have no idea what I'll be doing after that, so I definitely don't want to introduce any new livestock. The problem with the orb is that once a critter goes in, it only comes out if it goes over the overflow...

Half of me wants to take the opportunity to redesign the DT -- maybe a cube this time so I can get in and work on it, but the other half has no idea where I'll be in a year. Bit of a bummer, really.

On the personal front: Lawschool is almost over! I had an amazing summer of work and travel. Law school is almost over... =)

[CarmieJo]

Hi Stefani! Thanks for the update. I was just thinking that we hadn't heard from you in a while and chalked it up to law school.