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Dec. 14th, 2004 @ 05:03 pm (no subject)
This is the post I just made to Reef Central summarizing my tank. I figured you guys would appreciate all the pictures, at least. :)

( About 1MB of photos behind this cut plus all the details on my tank.Collapse )
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Dec. 8th, 2004 @ 07:41 pm (no subject)
So there are, as usual, some new inhabitants to my tank! Whee.

First of all, a brittle sea star. I love this thing. It hides all the time except for late at night, and when I feed the tank, it waves its arms around like mad from underneath whatever rock it's hiding under. It's a great scavenger, helps keep the excess food to a minimum in my tank.



Also - finally!! - a frogspawn coral! I've wanted one since I first started my tank and I finally got one yesterday. I. love. this. thing.



Snapped a great pic of the clowns today, too.



Enjoy!
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Dec. 2nd, 2004 @ 01:29 pm (no subject)
Well... Gobiwon has returned whence he came. It was sad, but he was ruining my tank. I'm sure he'll be happy in a much, much bigger tank. Without corals on the sand. :)

I was excited when I got there though, because they had gotten a couple yellow watchman gobies in! They're much smaller, not sand-sifters, and best of all, bright yellow. Woo, yellow!

I went to snap a picture of him - named Gobiwon Jr. - and amazingly enough Lady even held still for the shot. I'm quite pleased with it. :)

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Nov. 24th, 2004 @ 12:31 pm (no subject)
Hello. My name is Gobiwon Kenobi. I am an orange diamond goby and Kris was oh-so-lucky to buy me yesterday at Ocean Exotics and bring me home to her nice, quiet, clear-watered haven of a reef tank. Indeed. EVERY tank should have an orange diamond goby. We are feng shui masters.

Am I not cute? Look at me. I perch oh-so-cutely on my little fins.



But you have been mislead!! This face is indeed THE FACE OF PURE UNADULTERATED EVIL!!!



In the past 12 hours I have wreaked havoc on Kris's nice quiet tank! Her sand particles, they were not in the right places! The ones under the rocks, they had to come out! Mountains had to be built! Trenches dug! Corals, they had to be covered!



So now, since Kris is going home for 5 days for Thanksgiving, I get my run of the tank with nobody around to destroy my art! Which means Kris had to put her plate coral in a BOWL, full of sand, so that I wouldn't get to it and cover it! And all her sand-dwelling corals are now rock-dwelling ones!

I think, perhaps, she does not like me. But she can't catch me anyways. For I am GOBIWON, JEDI FISH OF ASSHOLISHNESS.
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Nov. 22nd, 2004 @ 10:00 pm (no subject)
Some new photos I snapped today of some of the newer inhabitants of my tank...

Fighting Conch



Peek-a-boo!



Green star polyps (given to me by Jon a while ago, they've really started to grow!)





A colony of zoanthids.



A picture of my tank from the side. Not the best, but I kinda like it. :)



I went to Ocean Exotics the other day and Christian helped me a ton with figuring out skimmers and sumps and all that stuff. So hopefully after Christmas, I'll be able to upgrade to a 55 gallon (pre-drilled, reef ready) with a sump. Move my heater and skimmer and all that down to the sump, have a bigger, prettier display tank. :) We'll see, of course, it depends on the money, but it would be awfully nice. I'm rapidly outgrowing this 29 gallon setup and would like to upgrade before I get so much stuff established in it that it's a huge task to move...
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Nov. 5th, 2004 @ 07:41 pm (no subject)
So I went into Ocean Exotics yet again today to get some PhosGuard to run in my tank. And guess what some of the first words out of the mouth of one of the guys who works there was? "Hey, I saw you on Reef Central." Apparantly he saw me post on there, followed my profile link to this journal, and figured out who I was. Hehehe. Cool, but somewhat embarassing, because looking over my earlier entries, I was kinda dorking out over this whole tank thing. I really didn't need to name everything. ;) Oh well. I harass him mercilessly at the store, so it's not like he doesn't already realize I'm a total geek.

Anyways!

The good news is, the cyano seems to be mostly gone thanks to the Chemi-clean and I've got the PhosGuard in the skimmer to try and keep it from coming back. If the stupid thing won't skim anything out, it may as well work as a filter for me. :)

Oh, and the emerald crab went to live at Ocean Exotics today, too. I caught it eating the finger leather's polyps. That was the last straw. In exchange I came home with a conch... much more useful for my current situation anyways, as it's a sand-sifter whereas the crab was just a algae eater pain in the ass.

I want my zoo rock from there that I have on hold. That would involve money, though, and I'm overdrawn at the moment, so it'll be another couple days before I can go pick it up. Grr. I have it held until the 10th... that's... Wednesday. Yeah, I'll be alright by then.

(ps, Christian - if you're still reading this, hi! haha.)
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Nov. 4th, 2004 @ 07:02 pm (no subject)
Oh, and here's an updated full tank shot.



The Chemi-clean seems to have done really well at killing off most of the cyano leftover. Tomorrow I'm going to start running Phos-guard in my skimmer to see if that helps. Stupid cyano.

When I got into this hobby, I envisioned myself balancing a complex and delicate environment, somewhat Godlike in my powers. Now, my best friend is a turkey baster and my worse enemy is a bacteria. Hah!
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Nov. 4th, 2004 @ 01:48 pm (no subject)
Here's a couple fun new pictures...

This is my finger leather coral normally. All stretched out, very pretty if you ask me! It's a soft coral so it moves a bit with the water current.



However, when I came home today, I got worried, because the thing looked like it needed a major dose of Viagra! I'd never seen it looking like this! Turns out it had a little visitor that was pissing it off. Damn crab! :-D

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Nov. 3rd, 2004 @ 06:24 pm (no subject)
Well, as would be expected, having a tank that relies so heavily on biological balances means sometimes things go a bit awry. My first big challenge has been dealing with an outbreak of cyanobacteria - aka red slime - nasty stuff that just grows like crazy and covers anything. I've been cutting back on feeding and light lately to try and starve it out, but no luck. It's been getting progressively worse, and I've noticed my corals have been looking more and more stressed lately, so I finally gave in and used some Chemi-clean today. In a day or two I'll start running Phos-guard or something like that in my skimmer to keep the phosphate levels down to prevent it from coming back like this. The nasty part was trying to pull out as much of the slime by hand as I could. I got all of the big patches off the sand, but ewwww.

I've also been learning from experience some things about aquascaping and corals... namely how to do the first so that the second is easy to place and keep. My poor finger leather has been moved twice now, but I think this last position should be good. It's set a bit deep into the rocks but trying to set it anywhere else led to it tipping over! I think it was trying to get to the best light in the center of the tank or something... so now it's much closer to the middle and set down between three rocks so it has some more support. We'll see how it does.

No other news. I have a zoo rock on hold at Ocean Exotics that has a bunch of pretty colors on it, mostly baby blue-streaked ones. The guy there is being awesome and holding it for a full week so that I can make sure my tank makes it through the Chemi-clean treatment alright and that my corals stop looking so stressed before popping anything new in there. I'm excited. I love pretty zoanthids.

Also, once I get some superglue gel, I'm going to take my GSP colony off the weird-shaped rock it's on and settle it on the empty shell the rock is currently sitting in. They're already spreading so I want them to cover the shell. How cool would that look?? Especially if they spread into the shell, too.

Sorry, no pics this time, but I'll try and take some more tonight now that my tank's looking cleaner and less... hairy. :)
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Nov. 2nd, 2004 @ 04:11 pm (no subject)
I need to get a new full-tank shot! I've rearranged my rocks to provide a more reef-friendly setup. It looks really good, except for the horrible cyanobacteria outbreak I'm dealing with. Everyone swears it's just part of setting up a tank. I think it's ugly and it looks like my sandbed has grown red hair. Meh.

I do have a new coral - a really neat looking green finger leather. Again, I need a full picture of it, but here's a macro I took the other day.



Here's my trumpet/candy cane coral, looking much more normal than the first picture I posted of it (when it was all insanely puffed up).



Keep an eye out, I'll take a good full-tank shot soon. :)
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