First Corals and Other Things
by
, 01-03-2011 at 02:39 PM (1771 Views)
I'm scaling up the cliff that I fell off of. Nothing unusual kept me away from Reef Addicts, but I just got lazy
The biggest news is that I added my first two corals yesterday! The bad news is that they're acclimating to the light, so my lamp hasn't turned on yet; I'll post photos later. I have a small colony of zoanthids (Zoanthus, orange with green tentacles green) and single head of branching hammer coral (Euphyllia parancora, green tips on brown tentacles). I drip acclimated them for an hour and then dipped them in Coral ReVive. The hammer was a little stressed—it retracted for many hours and expelled some zooxanthellae—but it's much better now. I've read that it's not usually for hammers and their kin to show acclimation stress, so I'm not worried.
When the cycle ended last month, I added Trochus and Stomatella varia snails from a local reef store, and I ordered from Indo-Pacific Sea Farms to fit my Indo-Pacific reef goal:
Dwarf zebra hermit crabs (Calcinus laevimanus)
Periwinkle snails (Littoraria)
Amphipods (Grammarus)
Bristle worms
Spaghetti worm
Sandbed clams (Tapes)
I really like watching the hermit crabs run around and climb over everything like kittens.
The hair algae was practically eliminated. I dropped a few pellets of Ocean Nutrition Formula Two to test my clean up crew further, and it takes a little while but they'll eventually eat it up, especially the amphipods and hermits.
Not long after my last post in November, I upgraded from 10g to 15g. I realized my existing equipment could support it, I had some extra rocks and sand, and it would be easier if I upgraded before I added coral. I just can't go bigger than 15g without buying new equipment and taking a sledge hammer to the wall. When I move into a bigger apartment someday I'll probably get a stand with room for a proper sump.
Tank with cheap eBay LED moonlight. I'm not sure if I like the spotlighting effect or if I should buy another LED strip. The tank is a little cloudy right now, but I hope that will clear up soon with filter floss and activated carbon.
View from above. I removed the mounting legs and secured the light fixture directly onto my tank to increase light at no extra cost! The glass cover has reduced evaporation a lot and the heaters work less (my room is somewhat cold), and it now protects the fixture as well.
Reverse lighting AquaClear-70-turned refugium running with Chaetomorpha, filter floss, activated carbon, heaters, temperature probe, grounding probe, top-off airline. It's crowded and not exactly pretty, but it works. It keeps the mess out of the main tank.
I'm a big fan of taking reasonable precautions and going on vacations. There are now two heaters, ReefKeeper Lite controller, Penn-Plax B11 automatic emergency air pump, and dual switch auto-top-off with snail guards (from AutoTopOff.com). I think I'm now reasonably guarded against heater failing to turn on, heater failing to turn off, power outages that aren't too long, and mischievous snails that want to ruin it for everybody. All this should work without my presence. I strapped everything to a peg board to organize the resulting mess.
FYI, my ReefKeeper Lite is set to Celsius so don't panic about the 25.3 you see in the photo (about 77.5°F). One of the many annoying quirks of the RKL is that it doesn't show what temperature scale it's using, but otherwise it works well. I got used to Celsius in college, and I calibrated the temperature probe using an old but accurate lab thermometer that only has Celsius.