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.