Timfish

If it's open and waggly that's good. Can you tell if the skeleton on that polyp is separate from the rest? This would be the best indicator of a polyp ball.

Sorry to hear about your loss! Not to be the bearer of more bad news but I'd be expecting some kind of algae bloom in the next week or so and would encourage you to start looking at how to deal with it.

+1 I'm definitely in the scavenger camp on this one. GARF swears there are species which eat SPS and there might be but I haven't seen it. I also have both the white and grey in the same tank and think it's just variable coloration. If they bother you just syphon them off when you do water changes.

If it's just one lobe that's sagging it might be a polyp ball forming, I see this regularly in frogspawn. Frequently as candycanes grow the tissue between the polyps seperates and this might be happening. I would be worried something else is going on though. You definitely need to keep an eye out for any kind of necrosis (brown, black or white slime).

Add another vote for the six-line.

It's a bristle worm. Definitely don't want to handle them, those bristle along the side break off real easy. Good scavengers and ubiquitous in saltwater aquariums.

My experience corals will grow over it.

+1, I would reiterate being patient. I've seen green hair algae and other nuisance algae problems clear up on their own without any intervention outside of manual removal during water changes and I've seen tanks all screwed up because too many things were done to fast. Neilson and Fossa i Vol 1 of "The Modern Coral Reef Aquarium" have some good pictures and charts of a big reef system going through it's algae cycles and it looks horrible at first. Definitely keep an eye on your pH, Alk and calcium.

What are the questions you have about one? Here's an elliptical I built in 2004 but it was taken out by the owners in 2009 so they could sell the Condo. Biggest issue was accessability to clean it.

Yes you can but I think there will be more of a guess factor in getting corals that will thrive under just actinics. A lot of corals utilize the red part of the spectrum and may not thrive long term under just blue. This doesn't mean you can't have reds. Corals that are flourescing red will be red under just blue light. Corals that are reflecting red will loose a lot of their color under blue light. This article http://www.advanceda...08/3/aafeature1 is about color and corals and while the first half may not be relevant to your question there are pictures of 11 corals grown under 20,000K MH, 10,000K MH and T5 and the ones that grew best under 20,000K or the ones that did well under all three would be possibilities.

Bear in mind there have been many, many doctorial thesis on lighting so we are not even buffing the surface here. There's really is no such thing as "optimal" lighting. Some corals are highly adaptable others are not. If you are happy with the coral and lighting combination in your 120 by all means duplicate it in your 55. If you are wanting something different ask around and do some research to match your corals and light to each other. Dana Riddle and Joshi Sanjey have numerous articles on Advanced Aquarist looking at different aspects of lighting on reef aquariums. Looking at some of the LED fixtures while they are still expensive the payoff is around the 5, 6, 7 year mark so if they do last as long as they are being advertised you're easily looking at less than half the cost of T5's of MH over the life of the fixtures.

Sorry, I can't tell if it's a sponge or a hydroid. Sponge is harmless but if it's a hydroid it would most likely win any territorial dispute with a coral.

For starters here's what Sprung and Delbeck have to say in their discussion of Berlin Systems Vol , Ch 5 of The Reef Aquarium ". . . one can build a healthy reef tank in one day using well-seeded live rock . . . " (They use the terms "seeded", "cycled" and "cured" interchangably, see their discussion in Vol 3.) I for one can attest to it's effectiveness. For over 10 years I've been using cured liverock, live sand and 10 - 20% water from an established tank to start new systems and not seen any ammonia cycle. I want to emphasize to be safe I expect an ammonia cycle and test for it but since I started doing this I haven't seen it happen and can be adding fish and corals within just a few days. I will use cultured liverock interchangably with wild collected and haven't seen a difference except live usually looks better with more nooks and crannies and cultured I've seen doesn't need curing. To cure liverock I put it in a spare tank or barrel with water from an established tank (new wouldn't bother me though) and a small powerhead for water movement for three or four weeks. I also keep scrubbing to a minimum, just what's obviously dead. Regarding potential pests from my experience few survive shipping (I've found this curious as I'll open a box to find dead brittle/serpent stars,snails and shrimps/crabs but small coral colonies survive on the rock). Fewer still hide all the way through the curing process and make it to a display tank. In over 15 years I've only had to pull two mantis shrimp out of tanks I've worked on. One did require tearing down a 500 gal. but the other was surprisingly easy as it's hiding hole was known and the rock was easily removed and salt dumped in the hole. (It was exciting trying to catch it as it scooted around on the floor .) I think Nelson and Fossa do a good job discussing the potential pests in Vol 1 of their book "The Modern Coral Reef Aquarium". One thing they point out is a species that causes problems in one tank doesn't necessarily cause problems in another. I've seen some discussion regarding the ethics of using live rock and don't see a problem with it. For one it's a renewable resource and can take only a few years to form and is part of the natural processes on a reef. The second, and this is specifically referred to by Sprung & Delbeck and by Alf Neslon in "Reef Secrets", live rock brings in a great deal more income to these island nations than using it as building material and road base, giving them a significant economic incentive to preserve their reefs.

I'm using calcium reactors on a couple of tanks. The regulators can be twicthy when I first hook up a full CO2 bottle but usually work fine with just weekly checks. Most of my tanks just get Araga-Might added to the R.O. water for water changes.

What they said, Basket Star. That is so cool! The problem is feeding them, is this in your seahorse tank? It's conjecture but you may have a combination of animals in your tank that it's food source isn't being consumed by something else. How long has it been since you added any live rock to your tank, I'm wondering how it got there and how long it might have been there?

One of the more humbling experiences I've had was trying to keep a species tank with 300 - 400 Neons in a 140 gal system. Reef tanks are a lot easier (diversity, what a cool idea). To reiterate Vwmike and others, QT and dip and get healthy stock form reputable sources and be patient and research your animals and maintain a stable system. I have a lot of fish and inverts that have been maintained for 10+ years and I'm pretty sure I'm seeing fish die of old age.

I'd say it depends on your sense of aesthetics as to whether or not it's to much water flow. I don't know of any corals that would do well in the direct output from those pumps but you can have a nice tank with that much flow (24x). From my experience it also doesn't matter how much flow you have you will end up with areas that don't have any flow where detritus will collect. I wouldn't go with really high turnover rates with the expectation it will eliminate all the dead spots in the rockwork.

I wouldn't be inclined to blame the tap water. I've seen this happen in tanks I've moved that religiously used RO and I've been using dechlorinated tap water for biweekly water changes in this tank for for over three years, additionally the original acrylic tank (original owner appears to have gotten an used tank) blew a top seam 3 months ago and when the tank was replaced a 50 gal water change was done and there were no algae cycles I often see in a move or swap out. If this was my tank besides using the chemiclean (once) and increasing the frequency and/or size of the water changes I would also get 2 - 4 urchins. What I would be worried about is seeing a hair algae out break in a few weeks and in my experience urchins are the only animals that will actually scour the rocks. I wouldn't at this point be thinking about more than 20-30% water changes weekly or replacing the rocks. The move has disrupted the previous equilibrium of the tank and I would prefer the system work through the algae cycle than keep disrupting the ecosystem with huge water changes or replacing rocks that have a lot of good bacteria on them. In a 6-8 weeks if there hasn't been any improvement or there is a bad hair algae outbreak I would revisit that reasoning. Regarding the discussion about ammonia if you test a bucket of fresh saltwater made with RO/DI water you'll probably see something like 1 ppm. If you test your aquarium water an hour after doing a water change you should see a proportionate amount of ammonia, 20% water change - .2ppm ammonia. If you keep testing every hour it will gradually drop and have all been consumed in 12-24 hrs. It's important to remember ammonia is a food source for corals and their zooxanthellae algae, I don't know the conversion factors for determining how much ammonia is converted from one gram of food but I wouldn't be surprised if much larger amounts of ammonia was being generated by the fish daily than is added in a typical water change.

If you want a number try 8.34 turnovers per hour in the tank (sumps/refugiums work fine with just one or two turnovers per hour). I've got tanks running 30X in tank so there obviously isn't a magic number. The 8.34 is based on research referenced by Sprung & Delbeck in vol 3 of "the Reef Aquarium" pg 377 of flow rates across a reef crest. I prefer propeller type powerheads to reduce heat vs impeller type. If you're going to put them on a simple wave timer each one probably should be rated for the flow you want plus at least 20% for performance loss as algae and gunk grows on the pump. (You should be able to find pumps in the $20 - $40 range.)

I like alot of surface agitation also. I read somewhere a long time ago it's a lot harder to get CO2 out of water than to get O2 into water. With it's adverse affect on pH that's something I've always been sensitive to. A simple test to see how well your system is getting rid of CO2 is remove a bucket from the middle of the water and areate it heavily for 24 hours then test the pH if the pH in the tank is lower than the pH of the water in the bucket steps should be taken to increase surface agitation. It's better to use an airline or airstone since the heat from a pump might have some effect on the saturation levels.

I'm guessing you're asking about the water draining over the overflow after the pump shuts off. If the return line opening is above the water line after the water drains down to the bottom edge of the overflow lip or "comb" a syphon hole is not needed (although I would still be inclined to drill one anyways). Almost always I see the return output below this waterline and water would keep syphoning until air was sucked into the return line and depending on the setup this can be a significant amount of water which may overflow the sump. The syphon hole needs to be cleaned regularly. Also, make sure the syphon hole is pointed down (didn't pay attention once and was very embarrassed when I turned on the pump ).

+1 and never ever use check valves or float valves on an aquarium, fresh or salt, they WILL fail.

I haven't read the link but it seems this is a good argument for (local) captive raised animals since they have grown in aquariums. An unfortunate example of this is Calurpa taxofolia's adaptation to cool water. An aquarium acclimated strain was accidentally released into the Mediteranian and is creating monospecies "deserts". The aquarium adapted strain will tolerate much colder water than any of the wild species and has also has adapted to produce high amounts of just a single toxin instead of small amounts of different toxins as found in wild species. Some people might think Xenia is another unfortunate example , when I first started saltwater it was considered impossible to keep (can you say nutrient export? ).

A nice and simple tank I saw a few years ago was a 75 with a pair of clowns and a Long Tentacle with an oral disc 6 - 8" dia. The guy had it running for several years with just a Penguin 400 (the kind that had a couple of biowheels) and did biweekly 10 gal water changes. The only problem I see with adding an anemonie to what you have now is the risk of the anemonie getting sucked into the intake of one of your filters. If you monitor the water, maintain the filters and do your water changes you can have a nice tank with what you have. If you do get an anemonie you will have much better success with a aquacultured one.

This is a good question, sometimes these animals are artificially dyed which is pretty much a kiss of death.