melev

My reef turns nine months old today and some thoughts about the past few weeks.




To start off, I'd like to showcase some of the newest additions.

Here's the Branching Tubastrea, usually called a black suncoral. You can see the tissue is dark green. Each night the polyps come out so I can spot feed them.


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Last night while I was watching a movie, I saw a lot of bright red lights race past my home. We've had paramedics out here for some of my older neighbors in the past, but something made me double check. When I looked up the street, I saw a neighbor's home on fire. So I grabbed my Nikon and a 50mm lens to see if I could get some pictures. Late night shooting isn't easy, and I figured this was a good excuse to try. I shot in Manual mode at a high ISO, and kept the aperture around f/8.
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As requested, here are a few fishy pictures.





Yellow Tangs



Potter's Angel


Some of the ORA fish I got in last week, which include a Blue Mandarin, Canary Blennies, Orchid Dottybacks, ...

Six months ago, I ordered two components for my drinking water, and yesterday it was finally installed. The first was a bladder tank. This holds the drinking water (RO water, not RO/DI) under pressure for quick on-demand water use. It holds 3g of water, so I can use it to make coffee, ice tea, and fill up water bottles like the wind.

Blue tubing was run from the RO system behind the refrigerator and dishwasher to the bladder tank under the sink. A small hole had to be drilled through ...

For some reason, I can't seem to get enough fish for my tank, but I'm putting my foot down and stopping the madness.

Two weeks ago, I added the 30 Chromis plus the two little clowns you saw in my frag tank. Then last Friday I received 19 fish from ORA that I acclimated directly into my tank since I had to fly out to SoCal for Reefapalooza. I couldn't expect my tank sitter to care for them in a small cube holding 14g of water with no active filtration.

Then yesterday ...