First Marine Tank :)

[indir-emir]

Yes i know they do James He is in the sump until i set up his tank. He will be a in a 10G tank, i find them intersting to watch. My cousin has one and it always facinates me.

 

[jameshughes1989]

Oh okay cool. I jumped to the conclusion that he was going in your display tank. They are cool things.

So, whats your future additions to this tank?

 

[indir-emir]

Hehe thanks for the concern mate!

Next addition is my torch coral (which should be here within the hour, waiting for the guy to deliver it ). And soon after will be a Longnose butterfly fish (which will sit in quarantine for 4 weeks, assuming no disease outbreaks), it is at the LFS eating well. I just need to pick it up

 

[indir-emir]

Ok here is the new updates. Clowns have left the goni alone for the past 8 hours, and touched the torch coral once but quickly swam away (got stung?). So heres to hoping that they take to the troch and the torch doesnt mind it so the goni can finally open up and look as beautiful as it used too! Fingers crossed!

That big snail continues to bury itself almost copmletely.
The torch coral settled in nicely and is fully open (counted 16 heads, very nice piece) within an hour of being in teh tank (even with lights off).
Goni has nearly fully opened up.
I have glued a mushroom that was floating aoround the tank to the shell with some other mushrooms, and moved them closer to the mushrooms on the left.
Rearranged some corals, and have the hammer next to the frogspawn, have read that this will be fine.. So hoping its the same for me.

Mantis is doing well in the sump for now. It is a G. Falcatus, im pretty sure. Has eaten a crab that was living in my sump tha i totally forgot about, caught it last night. So i wont feed it the piece of prawn/krill or something for a few days.

Anyway, here athe pictures.

Torch coral (with flash):

Torch Coral (without flash):

Left side of the tank:

Right side of the tank:

Full Tank Shot - 20/12/2010:

I am considering letting mandy back into the tank as she is eating frozen food. I feed a mix of mysis and brine to her twice a day and she gobbles it up. But seems to never like eating out of the bottle, but will sometimes jump into it and push the food around and i assume eat atleast a few little bits of food.. What are everyones thoughts on letting her back in and just turning the pumps off to feed her (and pushin the food straight to the ground for her).

 

[ben1987]

Lovely duncans! you keep feeding them like that and the skeleton will soone be covered in heads

 

[indir-emir]

Haha yeah i do feed em, havnt really target fed them much in the past few weeks though. They get the stray food form the fish AND i feed tropic marin phyto, reef snow, and zooton. Which im sure they eat too.

The duncan has gone from ~20 heads to ~70 heads since ive gotten it a few months ago Im stoked! They also gained alot of colour after the first few weeks of target feeding every other day and gained a great green colour to its centre.

Tank is ocming along well I think

 

[ben1987]

Yes you have a few really nice pieces. The torch is stunning! big too!

 

[indir-emir]

Yeah ive managed to source a few nicer pieces, searching makes it worthwhile i guess. Nee dto buy some frag plugs though, so i can try and propagate the goni buds when they drop (there is about 7 buds waiting to drop off). The one bud that dropped ages ago is doing nicely Has about doubled in size i recon.

 

[indir-emir]

Mandarin fish is back in the tank today. She is eating frozen, but doesnt like her bottle. Im hoping she will learn while in the tank and have a feed, if not im sure the worms and critters will enjoy the feed lol.

My clowns have no gone to my goni since it was moved! Musnt like the middle of the tank much lol. The female has been swimming VERY close to the torch now and then, i think she's rubbing her face in the tentacles sometimes. She is sometimes doing this to the anemone too. So heres to hoping that she finally takes on something else (the anemone!!) and continues to leave my goni alone!! The male clown however, seems to host the mushroom coral on the left pretty much all day. He will swim after his girl though, then darts to the shroom again.

Theres a #40## crab that i cant seem to get out either! Kinda big, no damage to anything yet just dont like crabs and his going to the mantis for a feed because he stared me down and grabbed my skewer when i was tryna catch it lol. Any tips on getting this guy out?

 

[indir-emir]

Ok back for an update. Some good news and a new addition!

Have added a longnose butterfly fish to the tank (was unable to QT as had no room but was at the LFS for a few weeks and i visited it every day to check up on it and all seemed fine). It started of rather aggresive but has since stopped being so aggresive and he sometimes has a scuffle with the coral beauty but no damage is done. It is a very beautiful fish and the yellow really stands out nicely!

And onto the good news, my clownfish female is hosting the anemone! She coped a few stings it seems but is now fine with it and is in hte anemone quite a bit now I have left teh goni covered till the new year then i will remove it just to give the clowns some more time. The male is not yet hosting the anemone but he wasnt hosting hte goni either so no problems there. Was very very happy to see this happen when i got home. I was at my girlfriends for xmas party and got an sms from my brother telling me its hosting so got him to snap a few pictures And she conitnued hosting since then!

Here are some pics as words are boring

Best picture i could get of the longnose for now:

Clown Hosting 1:

Clown Hosting 2:

 

[indir-emir]

Just a real small quick update. Made a DIY frag rack out of a magnet power head holder that i had laying around, some egg crate, and 3 cable ties Looks nice a neat IMO, the white isnt too distracting to me so doesnt bother me. Is in the upper, middle of the tank to get plenty of lights and nice amount of flow for all types of frags.

Currently there is 3 frags. At the moment the left one is a couple of zoas that were on the bottom of another coral, middle is the hitchiker SPS which i thought was dead (it is bleached on one side and am hoping this will fix itself up, it is still opening on the bleached part though...) and on the right is my goni frag

Here is a quick snap:

P.S - The clown is still in the nem And is sleeping there but it keeps closing at night so im not sure whre it goes after that lol. Little still hasnt joined her but is looking like he will be more and more.

 

[indir-emir]

Just another small update. Tank is doing well so far The clown has decided she likes the goni during the day, and the anemone during the night. Which really pisses me off as the goni was back to its former glory within 2 hours of the egg crate coming off, then the clown saw it again! Grrrr.

Made some DIY fish food today, with the missus (Thanks for the help <3). She helped make and clean up, even though it stunk and nearly made her puke a few times haha (she dislikes sea food). Used marina mix (clam meat, shrimp, muscel, and another creature or two which ive forget now), and mixed in most of the pack of enriched brine shrimp, mysis, marine green dinner, marine dinner, rotifiers, baby brine shrimp, a chopped/crushed small clove of garlic, and a few sheets of nori (nori absoluteyl stinks when its wet, my god :dead: ). Mushed it up (took a bit of tinkering with haha) into small bite size chunks so the fish take a go of it all, included smaller things/chunks to feed the corals/filter feeders to feed the entire tank in one go Took a small chunk of the partially frozen mix off and fed it to the fish, hoping it would be a big hit with the fish and to my luck/suprise the fish went nuts for it! Infact, they wernt the only ones. My white snail (see other thread), bristleworms, and im sure other critters went nuts for it, AND my 2 peppermint shrimp were devouring it haha, they usualy come out to feed but will hide in teh rocks. With the new mix they were on the front glass, on the substrate, everywhere there was bits hitting the floor they were there! Man am i happy about the new food, covers all bases and has a huge variety of foods for the fish. This will be the staple food, i will however feed other things every so often just to keep the fish keen on feeding vigerously.

Also left about 1/3 - 1/2 of the marina mix to feed the corals/anemone/mantis shrimp. The mantis got himself a nice bit of shrimp from the fix and went nuts for it, which was cool to watch for me and the missus.

Am going to get a male mandarin to add with my female to see if they become a mated pair (in which case, i am VERY interested in tryin to breed them). There is huge amoutns of pods in the tank and the female is fat and healthy and loving the tank so i would liek to try it. Should i see a depletion in pods, i intend on going to the beach (few beaches near my university) and shaking some sea weed for pods to keep the pod culture going strong. :crossfingers: all goes well.

Thats about all i can think of to update, so here is a pic of the tank as of today

FTS - 7/1/11:

 

[indir-emir]

Ok here is an update.

First ill start with the picture to the second goni bud and the gear i used to mount it. It is mounted on a frag plug, using super glue and put on the frag rack for a while:

Here it is all mounted up ready to go in the tank:

And here it is sitting in the frag rack with the rest of the coral frags (alongside another goni bud...). The zoo's are only temporarily there as i didnt know where to put them at the time so they stayed there lol.

This is the goni after close up at night, this is to show the buds waiting to drop off. Quick question (will post this in the coral section just incase), would i be able to cut this off the mother colony and mount it or would i be better of just waiting for it to drop off instaed. Reason i ask is that i would like to mount it and grow it, as if it buds and i dont see in time it may disppear in the live rock somewhere never to be found again... The 2nd bud took about a month to detach form the mother colony.

This is an SPS frag i got a while ago and it has since grown alot, nearly covered the entire top of the frag plug. And a fair few new "branches" have grown, very nice And appears to be very healthy

This is the hitchhicker sps that i glue dto the frag plug recently.. Since putting it there, it was doing well until it was not extending its polyps as much as on the rock it was on at the bottom fo the tank, and today i picked it up to clean the frag rack of algae and noticed what looks to me like burn marks? Anyone have any idea what happened here (going to post this in the coral section too)?

And ofcourse, the FTS as of 20/1/2011:

Mantis is still in teh sump as i have not set up the tank yet, but it seems happy in there and i feed it every other day and it is a fantastic pet! Im happy to leave it there (just need to watch my hands when trimming the macro haha).

The male mandarin is eating brine shrimp no problems, along with the female (they are in seperate breeder nets). Both have taken some mysis , but are not officialy eating myssi readily just yet. They are however both very close. I am extremelly happy about this. I hope that i will be able to train them to eat out of the bottle this time though :\

Tank is coming along very nicely if i do say so myself. Just went thru my journal and man has it changed haha. The sinularia (my first coral) is huge compared to when i bought it, ready to frag i recon One of the hammer corals has about 10 buds on the bottom of it which im considering fragging soon (they are only a few mm at the moment). Since removing the clowns the goni extends to its full size pretty much all day every day (it has been in my tank for 6 months now). The duncans are huge compared t obefore. All in all, progressing nicely!

Also, have noticed more and more coraline algae growing!! Very happy about this also.

 

[indir-emir]

Its been a while since my last update, so I thought id come do an update for anyone interested in the tank still

Since last post, a lot has happen. Phosphate reducer added, down from 0.6 to 0.4 so far.. Getting there slowly. New live stock added. And im sure a bunch of other things Oh and I found the source of clicking in the tank, a pistol shrimp!

Have also moved house a week ago, and tank was moved and rescaped etc. Lots of effort and few sore days but it went good overall. However, sadly I lost my male mandarin a day or two after the tank move. Not sure why, parameters were all good and his colour was perfect still. Not sure what happen, probably just the stress of moving. Moved past that now. I will get another male in the future some time, but for now mandy the female mandarin will be on her own for a while. I also sadly lost one of my peppermint shrimp, sucks as they were breeding consistently.

The mother colony of goniopora is not taking to the move so well, hasn't opened up to much in the last week. But im hoping it pulls through the move!! The frags seem to be going well still though

I also found a strange, yet cool looking creature the other night when using my torch to spot creatures! It is probably a nudibranch or sea slug of some sort? Anyone able to ID it? Will post this elsewhere for an ID too

Purchased a red line cleaner shrimp as I have wanted one for quite some time He has settled in nicely so far Have also added a lawnmower blenny (not sure on exact species). I quite like the look of the blenny! Not your usual one, refer to pics. The blenny was named by me and the girlfriend as Johny The Blenny, named after John Howard for his bushy eyebrows

The tank has come a long way since the beginning! Im quite happy with it all!
Thats about all i can think of right now. So on with the pics!!

Let the pictures begin!

The frag rack is becoming more and more filled:

Red Line Cleaner Shrimp Just Chilling :

Red Line chasing some mysis:

The blenny - Look how fat he is!:

Johny The Blenny - I like his pattern and the blue spots quite alot! Looks awesome:

The creature I saw which I have no ID for yet: Can you id it?

And finally a full tank shot to show the tank in its current state. This was taken shortly after lights came on once the tank was moved. So most corals are not quite open yet. Dated 22/03/2011: