June 11, 2011 - We've got Eggs!
Made a cool discovery tonight after dinner... clown fish eggs in my original 30 gallon hex. Now I need to figure out how to raise the little buggers.Christmas Eve 2009
Okay, the 45 gallon tank in the living room provided some unexpected entertainment tonight at our first Christmas Eve party.
I decided to throw a little food in to get the tank moving for everyone at the party and forgot that I had not fed the eel and lionfish anything substantial for a few days prior. Dumb move.
While they were both trying to go after food that was way too small for them, the eel proceeded to bite off the lion's head... right when half of the party was staring at the tank. I was seriously bummed, though everyone that saw it was amazed at the graphic display of nature. My uncle has now nick-named me the 'Aquatic Michael Vick'.
Hmmmm......
December 2009
Well, I awoke to a trickling sound the other morning and went downstairs to discover a leak in the side of my 30 gallon hex tank (the older of the two main reef tanks). I frantically put everything in to buckets, drive out to Lancaster to buy a replacement tank, and reconstructed the reef.
Somehow, everything survived and one of my anemones actually split twice as a result (bringing me up to 5). Craziness!
October 2008
All has been going very well for the past two months.
Only two failures where corals did not make it, but they were both purchased from the same store (which I do not plan on buying from again). Besides that everything is healthy and growing.
I have added a number of new inhabitants to the system including a nice big Derasa clam that my son picked out as his birthday present to me. Some other additions include a blue linkia star, a thorny star, a hammer coral, a small pink bird's nest frag and a couple of small maze brains.
This have been shaping up nicely in the new tank. Onlt one or two more stony corals, then I will fill in the gaps with some zoos and shrooms.
August 2008
It's official, I have gone off the deep end now.
I decided to switch the 45 gallon tank in our living room over to salt as well. I did all of the plumbing to connect it to the same refugium in the basement that is filtering the original reef and married the two systems after the rock in the new tank was ready.
At first this was going to be a FOWLR (fish only with live rock) tank, but it not take long for us to desire another reef so we upgraded the lighting and were off. So far we have two lionfish, a snowflake eel, a yellow tang, a comet and a coral beauty along with some stony corals and a clam.
June 2008
Victory is Mine!
I finally got that camel shrimp out of the tank. Unfortunately he killed off a most of my corals before I finally gave in and tore the entiire tank apart so I could catch him. Now we can start on the road to recovery.
As a funny side note... when moving all of the rock around the anemone ended up splitting into two. Pretty neat to see. I ended up giving one of them to Mike at the Frazer Zoo because the tank is not big enough to have two anemones roaming around.
May 2008
Still no luck getting this stupid camel shrimp out of the tank. I have been trying every night without success. I have caught every other shrimp and crab, but he just keeps eating corals instead of the bait.
What an a-hole!
April 2008
Okay, adding the camel shrimp into a coral tank was a Big Mistake. The little deamon shrimp is eating my corals!
I have started laying out some traps at night to get him out of there, but no luck yet.
March 2008
This have been going relatively well with the reef. I have added a number of different fish (not all have made it), a few new corals and a camel shrimp.
I also relocarted the "Slimey" the dottyback to my nano because I figured out that he was the main reason I was having trouble adding any new fish. He was bullying them all to death.
I also tried a small clam, but I don't think the water/lighting was right for him and he unfortunately did not make it. Will have to try again some other time.
January 2008
Wow, so much has happened since my last update that it is too much to cover in this posting. I started a new job so things have been pretty crazy adjusting, not to mention the holidays. Now I get to work from home though and was inspired to start a second nano reef tank on my new desk.
As for the main tank, things have been going great. There have been some losses along the way, but in general things have been developiong very nicely. I have added a number of soft and stoney corals as well as a handful of new invertebrates to keep up the movement. Around the holidays the tanks was the center of everyone's attention at a number of gatherings. I will try to keep up with updates a little better from now on, but I can't promise anything.
September 20, 2007
Okay, it has been a while since my last update and I have experienced a number of failures and a few successes.
The anemone mentioned in the last post did not survive what will forever be known as "the skimmer incident", but I did get a Long Tentacle Anemone in its place. This one did well for a week, then retreated to the back of the tank and began to look stringy. I did some reading and decided that he needed more sufficient lighting so I bought a metal halide light for him and put it on today.
Within a few hours he was back up in the front of the tank basking in the "sun". The Wrasse and the star did not make it either, but I did recently add a new zoo coral, some crabs, snails, a serpent star and a flame scallop, which are all doing very well.
Live and learn.
September 3, 2007
I woke up this morning prepared to show my son Jason all of the cool stuff that was added last night only to find that the anemone had attempted to commit suicide by getting caught up in the skimmer. I got him out and moved him to a quarantine tank for the rest of the day. He is still moving some, but it does not look good.September 2, 2007
Okay, we went a little crazy today. We took a trip out to That Fish Place and wanted to make the hour ride worthwhile. I picked out a nice bulb anemone, Stacie picked a starfish, a leopard wrasse and another clown fish and Jason picked out a skunk cleaner shrimp. Because I was adding so much I did a very slow acclimation and was not able to put them into the tank until Jason was asleep.
Stacie and I watched the anemone moving around after dark trying to find its final resting spot. It got caught up in the power head at one point so I turned that off for the night and it easily freed itself. We will just have to wait and see where he lands.
August 29, 2007
Jason, Shawn and I took a little trip out to The Frazer Zoo today in search of a long tentacle anemone for the clown fish. Unfortunately they did not have any there, but we did pick up a nice little hairy mushroom/false coral that was added to the tank.
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