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that purple rimmed cap sure would go great in my cap collection

ill post pics when they grow more. it should be interesting to see what shapes they take on. i also have a separate green cap mountedup and down that has an interesting shape, more like knots and bulges instead of the typical plate, neat stuff.

Dang. I was hoping there was more to chose from. Maybe a couple tabling acros? I have red planet and some yellow one that turned lime green. A blue and purple one would be nice, maybe a pink.

I haven't tried to graft my caps yet, but I did put them close together in hopes that they'll spiral around each other

So I think I figured out where I wanna put all my caps in my tank. I already have several pieces mounted along the bottom. But now I have a pretty bare area in my tank that I think would look great to have different colored caps to plate out and spiral up. I already have bright green, dark red, lighter red, and lavender. What other colours do you guys have?

I live up near fort hood base lol. I do need to make it down to Austin sometime soon, hopefully Patrick has some macro left for me! I like to get our of town for a day or two and browse and have some fun so I end up going to either Austin, Dallas, or San Antonio pretty often :-)

if you don't find any in town *phone hit enter before I typed the whole msg

I have some extra hammer frags,we could meet up next time I'm in Austin

Forgot to mention, for those of you that have had trouble with the frags, I couldn't ever keep frags on my rocks until I started using the water weld putty stuff from lowes in addition to the super glue gel. I found some good tutorials with pics on google. I have several golfball sized turbos that haven't managed to knock anything down

You know, I haven't paid much attention to the snails at Austin fish stores, my attention is usually on strange inverts and corals lol. Mine came from a supplier in Dallas. I'm sure one of the Austin stores has zebra turbos. They have real pretty bright white shells with black stripes that look like lightning bolts.

As far as the sea hare goes, all they do is graze, all day and night. They're very efficient, but if the algae is outpacing the hare its going to look like the hare isn't doing a good job. I think things like snails and hares are a useful tool to keep it under control while you figure out what's really causing it to grow. Idk anything about your setup so idk how useful I can be. With my own tanks I kept phosphate under control with lanthanum chloride at first, then switched to a fuge. The fuge ate up all the nitrate first, then it stated eating up phosphates, and I haven't had algae or nitrate and phosphate ever since then.

Zebra turbos are pretty good ime. Unlike the Mexican turbos supposedly they're a warmer water species that does better in our aquariums. I've had Mexican turbos that didn't last long and didn't seem to do much. I've also got a sea hare that are a nice large patch of bryopsis and some cyano along with hair algae, not sure what species it is, but its a big grey chunky one. I have never seen a creature chow down on algae like a sea hare

That's incredible! Congrats!

I just use scissors, if we're talking about that white plastic egg crate.

That's really neat. I don't think I've seen mine split like that but I've had them scoot over a bit and leave 4-5 pieces of their feet behind which then turn into little baby mushrooms.

Might be a dumb question, but I'm guessing those are live sand dollars? I've never heard of them being kept in tanks, are they pretty easy to care for?

So we picked up this gorgeous salano tank complete with live rock, fish and coral yesterday, set it up, everything is working just fine. But the skimmer just kinda floats back there. Is that normal for it to not be snug in its place? We put a filter pad to help keep it in place but its still looser than I'd like it to be. I'm not familiar with this type of tank so any suggestions would be appreciated, TIA!

Really? Mine likes to crawl on top of frags and knock things over. Maybe I'll try a tongue coral that's significantly bigger than he is, maybe he won't try to bulldoze that one. I sure would love to have a plate or tongue Coral again

Beautiful, I love plates. Wish I could have them without the conchs walking on them in my tanks

Cool! I really wanted one or a few of those turquoise stags, or the clams, that sea world had, did any of the lfs get those in?

I too have never had a problem with six lines or my Coral beauty that I've had fit a while now. I like the six lines allot, have one in my living room and one in my bedroom tanks. I think the key is to not get a huge one, and to not put it in a small tank because they're very active fish. I've seen my beauty pick food or debris off corals but never irritate it or cause any damage.

Have you thought about one of the larger, bottom dwelling gobies? They're a good size but not to big and don't let themselves get bullied.

Totally forgot about this thread. Thanks Sascha! I don't even have pics of the old tank, full tank shots. I only had pics of the fish, some of which are still in here. The tank still looks so bare to me except the lps and softies. I never wanted to get larger pieces of sps cause I didn't wanna spend tons of money and have them die, but so far I've only lost two frags and wish I had gotten bigger pieces.

Neato! I also like live rock to see what interesting things end up in the tank

Patrick what would be a good time for us to meet up again?

George, mine never cleaned anything at first, for quite a while. The fish would swim up to him, he would ignore them, the fish would get irritated and swim away. I think he started cleaning because I stopped hand feeding him all the time, maybe? I used to feed him every day lol.

Wow I bet it wild be a huge challenge. Breeding sw fish or inverts in general seems like a ton of work. Sure would be great to have more t/r fish in the hobby though

Whenever I google pagoda cup, its the more fleshy one with the huge polyps. I have one actually, in a diff tank. This ones polyps are smaller than the polyps of the devils hand, they're pretty small. It has flesh like an sps and seems to be growing out into a plate.

As far as other livestock, There's some fish in here, the gobies, coral beauty, yellow tail blue damsel, six line, and the eel. There's the coral band shrimp, fire shrimp, various hermits and snails, sand sifting star, banded serpent star, a dwarf conch and a fighting conch. In the fuge there's diff macro, more little crabs, and the baby cowfish, and more macro in the sump lol.

We upgraded from a 72gal fowler to a 125 reef. been puting alot of money and time into this thing, its nice to see the stuff growing cause it was so bare and boring looking. some of the sps lost some color when we moved the tank a few weeks ago, and my poor ponape got MESSED up but its coming back. at first we had ALOT of trouble getting the frag plugs and rubble pieces to stay put until we started using the putty, after they got stuck on real good they started taking off. been having trouble with a plum crazy frag and a certain chalice, but other than that everything is doing good. i have way too many hammers in here, along with various other frags spewn about the floor that i need to find something to do with. also need to tweek some things and experiment to try to get the best colors of the sps to come out.

Since i cannot figure out how to put all these in line with the questions/commentary, hopefully this will make some sense:

The pic with the green rectangular hard coral with the little polyps and the yellow rim, is that a scroll coral? I thought it was, but cant find pics of a green one.

our first acans are doing so well, i want some more! Does anyone have frags of really pretty ones?

the other pics are of my "softie cove" that is in the middle of the tank with the pectinia (not reaally a softie but looks soft), the devils hand that has gotten really huge and likes to drop babies from KimP, a toadstool that grows slow, and a good sized piece of green nepthia that is settling in to its new position. theres a full tank shot, a pic of the right 1/3 of the tank (can you see that green cap, wow! its gotta be my fave cap, that one came from Razor), and a pic of one of my red planet frags that has grown a ton, it goes back and forth from red to green base color, and polyps dont come all the way out all the time. good grower though!