Cool stuff

Ryan and I went to the fish store to find a fish for the baby to enjoy, and came home with some early birthday presents (for me!) Is she the best or what?
Oh, we also brought a fish. :-)

This is the big guy- a gorgeous hammer coral (Euphyllia ancora).




























And that is the new fish, of course! It is a longfin fairy wrasse Cirrhilabrus rubriventralis; similar to the ones that Evie enjoyed watching at the Aquarium. Here are some more photos of him:



























Lastly, we got a nice captive-propogated birdsnest (Seriatopora hystrix) coral colony. We could not tell in the store, but it actually has a greenish color tint that I haven't seen before. Here it is at the bottom of the tank adjusting to the lighting:















Here it is in its final location, kind of like the angel at the top of the Christmas Tree!

More Photos

As I mentioned, we placed a few of our "old" corals into the display tank a few days ago. They seem to be doing really well.

Sarcophyton sp. Toadstool Leather Coral. One of our favorite; it has puffed up quite a bit since it was introduced (easy to do of course since their bodies are mostly water!)















Purple Sea Plume gorgonian (Pseudopterogorgia bipinnata) This was actually fragged from one of our first corals, which was stung to death by a C. florida anemone... The polyp extension looks really good.















Lime Green Candy Cane Coral (Caulastrea furcata) Since it has been in the display tank, it has been extending feeding tentacles out in the evening and at night- which was a behavior I had not seen in the past. I've fed it mysis shrimp a couple of times already- pretty cool. (Not a very good photo- I'll try later to get one with the feeding tentacles extended.)














Here are some photos of the tank with all of the current critters in place:






































I did some additional tests today- Nitrates: 0.5 (still!); Nitrates: 2; 0 Ammonia. A little concerned that there are still detectable nitrites, so I'm feeding very conservatively for now.

Corals!

Since the water parameters have been looking good, we decided it was time to stock more than snails and hermits. I had placed a small colony of Caribbean Zoanthids in the tank, and they were doing well after several days so this seemed to be a good "bioindicator" that the conditions were stable (these Zoanthids seem to close up consistently when the conditions are not.)

I went by the local fish store (LFS) and picked up a couple of "buy one get one free" coral frags. I specifically purchased frags that were un-mounted. The cement frag mounts are useful to propagators for mounting specimens into egg crate, but in my experience are both difficult to epoxy onto rocks and also don't look very natural.

Acropora spp. (staghorn form) "Starry Night" (similar to Acropora cerviconis, one of my long time diving favorites.) It may seem that the coral should be mounted base down, but it will actually grow faster by affixing it flat so as to "reverse" its growth patterns so that the former radial (slower) growth patterns will become multiple axial growth patterns as it encrusts onto the rock and reorients itself as such. This makes sense when you consider that these corals reproduce extensively by growing new colonies from fragments broken off by storms, etc. [ref: Eric Borneman lecture] Hopefully I will be posting growth pics! (You can see the aforementioned Zoanthids in the background.)















Encrusting Montipora coral. Not sure of the species, but it may be a nodosa.















Soft "Colt" Coral. Not sure yet of the genus- probably either Capnella or Cladiella. This was growing "wild" on the glass of the coral tank at the store, and the reddish patterns weren't similar to any of the larger colonies that I saw at the time.















Monitpora capricornis (at last I can make a definite ID!) This coral is extremely common in the hobby, and reasonably hardy and fast-growing. Same color morph that Payton gave us last year. The frag is a really good size, and is mounted for best viewing from our computer desk. :-) It is a really bright orange under the aquarium lighting.














I tested the water again and was surprised to find that there were trace levels of nitrites. I dosed some Seachem Pure and made up some water for a water change tonight... The other parameters look OK for now.

A day at the aquarium

Ryan, Evelyn and I enjoyed the first full day of our Staycation today. We all went to the GA Aquarium, and I was very pleasantly surprised to see that little Evie is even more entertained by watching the fishies than her Daddy is!



















She had a great time checking out the Indo-Pacific Reef exhibit, and was spellbound by the Caribbean Pygmy Angel display. At the latter, she spent a lot of time just staring into the lower part of the tank (at her height- about 18") and watching the wrasses and surgeon fish swim by (the angels weren't quite that interesting I guess.) I can't wait until we have some fishies for her to watch at home in our living room!

Here are what seemed to be a couple of Evie's favorite fish in the Indo-Pacific exhibit:

Yellow finned flasher wrasse:














Yellow tang: (There were a ton of them!)

End of cycle?

Yesterday, Ammonia and nitrate levels were zero and nitrates were two or less. So... I put the toadstool leather and the nicest purple gorgonian frag back in the aquarium, after a 4 gallon water change.

It has been fun to watch the little hermit crabs crawling around, but only so much fun. We want to see some corals!

Algae!

I came home today to find a little bit of brown algae growing on the glass. Evie and I took a walk, then scraped it off together. She really seemed to enjoy watching me!

This was quicker than I thought- it seemed that the algae may have spread from the live sand. Hopefully it won't spread quicker than the coraline algae, but I may pick up some snails- just in case...

Rock On

The live rock and sand arrived yesterday from Sealife. I should say live rocks, since instead of the one I ordered Ken sent three- as usual throwing a free bonus in the order. The rocks have a ton of coralline algae, as well as some macro algae. We should see in a day or two what survived the trip out of water.











Here is a closeup:




















Did a couple tests. pH is 8.15; Annonia 0,25; Nitrites are 1.5 tonight. SG is 1.023.

Aspirations

Last weekend, Ryan, Evie and I went to our local fish store (LFS) to check out what we might enjoy in our "new" aquarium. Here are some photos of what we aspire to keep (and hopefully for many years!)















Picasso Trigger (Picture by the wifey in Bora Bora) Our current system is too small, but we can aspire, right?





















Hammer Coral




















Favia spp.

On the way!

Well, over the weekend (after Evie went to bed) we got the aquarium started up again. As of today, it is basically all set up and waiting to cycle. Not too exciting at the moment, but I think it will be an even better platform on which to display corals than the old setup was (more about that later.)



















Here is a list of what we've used:

• 40 pounds Seachem Oolite Sand (from Keen Reef) This is nice, consistently fine sand, however there was a lot of dust and dead seaweed in it. It has taken longer for the water to clear up than what I'm used to.
  
• About 30 pounds of CaribSea dry lace rock- less than a whole box (from Premium Aquatics) I decided to use dry rock instead of (wet) live rock to save some money and to limit the amount of nutrients going into the aquarium- yes I'm pretty paranoid about that now. This product exceeded my expectations; there were plenty of larger pieces, and it looks quite interesting. This was my first purchase from PA, and it was a good experience- they filled and shipped the order really quickly. The price was also much better than anything else I could find.
  
• Reef Crystals Salt Mix. It's interesting that the water volume after all the rock and sand was added is about 19 gallons! (This is from a bucket that I've had forever.)
  

We have an order in for a single piece of premium, cultured live rock, as well as some cultured live sand, from SeaLife, Inc. The sand is to seed the sandbed with benthic critters and beneficial microbes; the live rock will hopefully have some cool "hitch hikers" on it, as well as seed the other (dead) rock with coraline algae and beneficial nitifying bacteria. The last rock and sand we ordered was really great- it had plants, corals, worms of all sorts, etc. so I'm looking forward to seeing what we get. I'm hopeful that none of the hitchikers if any will be lost when the rock cures, since we are only adding one at a time.











Cultured live rock is a sustainable alternative to live rock that has been pulled from areas around the reefs in the Pacific or places like Haiti. It has been illegal to take live rock in Florida for a long time, and very recently from Fiji as well. From what I've seen in fish stores, cultured rock from places like SeaLife is also superior in terms of the amount and quality of decorative life that actually survives from the sea to the living room.

Ground Zero

Everything clean... time to get started again. I thought this might be a good time to capture the most important "lessons learned" from the last year and a half of reefkeeping. No doubt, I've learned some important lessons above and beyond what I knew from 5+ years of keeping marine fish. Starting out with a smallish (28 gallon nominal) system may have been a little more challenging than a larger water volume, but nothing could be cooler than having a 24" square reef in your living room...

Lessons learned:

1- Metal Halide lamps really do need to be changed every 6-9 months; toward the low end of the range for magnetic, HQI ballasts.

2- There may be such as thing as too much live rock- I think that the more surface area you have in the tank, the more flow you need to ensure that detritus cannot build up to the point where there are anoxic zones, etc. I started with about 50 pounds; restarted with about 30 pounds. Instead of piling it up from the bottom, it is now placed on 3/4" PVC sections daisy-chained together with zip-ties to ensure that the sand bed is continuous below the rock.

3- You need a good protein skimmer. I'm now using a CPR Remora hang-on-back model driven by a Maxijet 1200 pump. Previously, we had the stock, air-driven JBJ skimmer. Unless you have a lot of time to devote to tweaking/optimizing the skimmer, a product like the Remora that can be pretty much set and forgotten once it is up and running is the way to go, IMHO. Worth every penney.

4- Quarantining corals is a good idea... Having a simple T5HO setup that gives you time to ensure that monitpora eating nudi's, AEFW, etc. aren't present on that new frag cannot be a bad idea... We took care of this with a 10gallon and Coralife light fixture- but not before losing a couple of really nice Montipora spp. frags that had grown out really nicely. (Thanks Payton!)