Elbeau

I'm looking for some of those very bright barbie-pink zoanthids. If you have any, please describe or send a picture & price. Thanks.

That's cool, I hadn't heard of that before

Hatching brine shrimp eggs is easy and fun. The best way I've done it is with this "base" thingey you can buy at some fish stores. It's basically just a 6" X 6" piece of rubber with a threaded area in the center that you can screw a 2-liter bottle into and an air-hose inlet on the side to attach to your air pump. All you do is cut a 2-liter bottle in half and screw it into the base thingey, then attach your air pump. You can use table salt for hatching the eggs, it's much cheaper than using reef salt. Let the little buggers boil for a night or two and then take the whole thingey into a dark room and shine a flashlight into the side of the 2-liter bottle. The little buggers will all flock to the light and then you can extract them using a baster. Pour the salt water/little bugger mixture through a brine shrimp net so that you don't squirt the horrid water into your good tank, then let the buggers loose from the net into your tank (don't forget to turn off filtration). Your fish and inverts will LOVE it. It's a real treat for them.

No, the office we're in stays pretty moderate after hours and weekends. I don't know if it's because they keep the AC on or if it's just well insulated.

Hey ARC...it's been a while since I've posted, but I wanted to tell the story of the nano I set up last year. The company I work for moved to Austin one year ago and I came along with them. Once I settled in, one of my first orders of business was to set up a reef tank on my desk at work. Since it's at work, there are several very limiting factors for a tank: *I can't maintain it during business hours, and I don't want to stay late for maintenance *It has to be quiet *It can't make a mess ...so having done a few tanks in the past with varying success, I put my reef experience to work and designed what would turn out to be the easiest to maintain reef tank in the history of reefkeeping. I bought an Eclipse 6 tank with dual bulb compact fluorescent lighting and an extra, small powerhead. Using a 1.5" aragonite base and PLENTY of live rock, I created the landscape that I knew it needed. I was VERY patient with my water cycle and didn't add expensive livestock until the tank had balanced out well. Once my levels were non-toxic, I bought a good clownfish, jawfish, red scooter blenny, cleaner shrimp, and peppermint shrimp...along with various crabs and snails. My only casualty in the last year was the blenny. Investigators have named the clownfish as a "person of interest" in their investigation into his death. I also bought a variety of hardy, soft corals, feather dusters, etc. The tank did well from the start. It had a few cyano and algea breakouts at first, like most tanks, so I decided to try a refugium for the first time. I cannot say enough for how well a refugium balances out a tank. WOW! I haven't done a water change since last October. I haven't added any suppliments whatsoever. All I do is add dried fish food and makup water. Other than that and the lighting, the tank is a self-sufficient ecosystem. It's thriving...without calcium supliments, without trace minerals, without water changes, and I almost never have to even clean any algae off the tank walls (I've only had to clean one wall since last October when I set up the fuge. I have large colonies of micro stars of many varieties. I have a great population of snails. I have little insect buggers galore. It's fun. Anyways, my formula now is: refugium + hardy livestock = easy nano

I ordered online one time. I ordered a lot of livestock for a tank that had just finished it's cycle. There was only one casualty, a cleaner shrimp. Without even showing the pics to the store, they agreed to give us credit toward a later order. All the livestock was healthy...actually a little TOO healthy. I ordered a "medium" maroon clown. I got a clownfish that was at least 6" long. I could have made a full meal out of that thing. It was HUGE, meaty and fat. I put the clown in first, then I put in some shrimp. The clown ate the shrimp before they even got to the bottom. It was pretty traumatic to watch. Among other things I ordered I got some carbon for my filter. After I got all the livestock aclimated, I put the carbon in the filter and turned it on.....BIG OOPS - I forgot to rinse it out first!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I like to call the result the "Black Plague". To make a long story short, the black plague solved my problem with the huge clownfish, along with all my other livestock in VERY short order. In the end, the experience was bad, but not necessarily because of the online store. They could have sent me a smaller clownfish, but other than that I got a lot of good stuff that might have lived fine if it weren't for my little mistake. I'd order online again if I couldn't find it at a LFS.

I'd love to get a small startup kenya tree. I'll trade a cutting of a colt coral...or I'll just pay you for it.

It's still available, but I'm not for a couple of days. I'm feeling sick...fun. When I join the land of the living again I can bring it to my work at Burnett/183 for you to pick up.

The arrow crab in this picture is AWESOME...but...he has totally outgrown this little tank. He needs a new home. We have not had any problems with him acting bad in the tank, but he is so big he just dominates everything and he eats like a pig...really. His golden coloring is gorgeous. Trust me, the pic really doesn't do him justice...but it's the best I can do with a camera phone.

I finally got my cameraphone paired with my home computer so I can download pics. Here are our two tanks, the smaller one is the 6-gallon Eclipse on my desk at work, the other is a NanoCube 14 that my wife takes care of at home:

How much for #'s 15 & 16?

Correct...Amonia and Nitrite will balance themselves in about a month, but nitrate will keep building up. Sometimes after about 4-6 months colonies of bacteria will develop to combat the nitrate problem, but usually by then your tank is covered in all kinds of hairy junk that you don't want and your fish might periodically die. You NEED a plan for nitrates. The plan could be as simple as doing periodic water changes. Skimming also works great, as long as your skimmer works great. Refugiums with large quantities of Cheatomorpha handle the problem well too.

I agree, you need a short-term strategy - namely water changes...then a long-term strategy. For the long term, skimming is a good choice, just be sure to add trace elements if you skim. By skimming you remove the proteins from the water before they join the amonia/nitrogen cycle. You can also do things to make a more complete amonia/nitrogen cycle. A lot of people create "Plenum" systems, which is a way of creating a substrate with an open area underneath that allows certain bacteria to grow which transform nitrates into harmless chemicals. Another option is to grow large amounts of macroalgae under proper lighting. Now this doesn't usually look good in your display aquarium, but if a refugium is an option for you, then it can be a great solution. I did this recently and the results were great: http://www.austinreefclub.com/index.php?showtopic=2381 Using a refugium also creates a lot more biodiversity by allowing copopods and other crustations (?spelling?) to grow...properly designed, these can then wander from the refugium into your reef tank providing food for your livestock. Anyways, there are a lot of options and often people combine them for good results. Good luck.

Welcome, great to have you on the site!

Wow...I'd never heard of red bugs. Are they mainly an SPS problem? or do they come in on other stuff?

Welcome to the club and to the hobby! I agree that buying live rock form local shops or craigs list is by far the best way to go. Also, the advice to add each piece slowly is true. Each new piece could destabilize your tank a bit, but don't let that deter you, live rock is a must-have. The fish you have are good choices for starting up. Some people might disagree with me on this, but I've started up several different tanks over the years and I've found that pearly jawfish are hardy enough to survive the cycle plus they are wonderful characters to have in your tank. Also, I've always put a cleaner shrimp in right away. It seems to make a big difference protecting the fish from Cryptocaryon disease which has hit every single startup I've ever done. I've also never lost a cleaner shrimp during the first month cycle. I won't go on with too much advice except to say that no matter how much live rock or sand you put in, every tank goes through so many changes the first month that you cannot ever assume you're safe from a nasty cycle. Patience is key...I say that because it's my biggest weakness Anyways, if you want to learn a lot of things not to do, take a look at my blog entry about my first tank: http://www.austinreefclub.com/blog/elbeau/...p?showentry=204 Have fun and enjoy!

...continued from last week. After enjoying my first reef tank, despite it's challenges, I took a break from reefkeeping for a while. My wallet and I started getting along a lot better then. Of course, once an addict, always an addict, and I always had that itch to start a tank back up again. As it turned out, I got a job at a place where my boss gave me a lot of freedom. As long as my work was getting done, he didn't care how I managed my affairs...so...I decided to put a little tank on my desk at work. The tank had to be small and quiet, and the Eclipse 6 fit the bill. I didn't go into the Eclipse blind, I know that a lot of reefkeepers don't consider it a decent setup, but I had enough experience by then to know what was hardy and how to manage it. I set it up, and put a couple pounds of live rock and a couple of damsels in it. This time I didn't succomb to the temptation to stock the tank too soon. My co-workers thought it was great, and loved the little damsels...so some of them were quite sad when the amonia and nitrite cycles completed and I returned the fish. I then bought some small live rocks, and several rocks covered with soft corals - buttons, mushrooms, star polyps, etc.. I stocked it with a nice little percula clown, a pearly jawfish (the ultimate fish for a reef tank), and a firefish, along with various hermit crabs, starfish, snails, etc.. The tank was overstocked, so I had to do water changes every week or two, about a gallon at a time - no biggie. Also...at that time I still hadn't learned that crushed coral was bad as a substrate and would leach phosphates into the water, so I had high phosphates along with the nitrates. This caused green hair algae to bloom, so I got a lawnmower blenny. He kept the hedge trimmed quite well. Then...I just let the tank grow...and it did grow. The soft corals all reproduced like rabbits, I had a wide variety of micro-stars, and I had a certain species of common small snail (white with brown stripes) that reproduced extremely fast...so fast that by about 5:00pm every day, you would litteraly see hundreds of them on the glass...but by morning, you could only find one or two...they were magnificent at hiding during the day. Those little snails probably grew so out-of-control because of the algae blooms resulting from the nitrates and phosphates - Isn't it interesting to see nature start to balance itself out like that. The tank just grew and grew, with corals propagating everywhere until my I found employment elsewhere. When that happened, my new boss wasn't nearly so cool...so I gave up my little nano for another season and gave my livestock to my wife for her tank. I've got about three more tanks to tell you about...so keep expecting these longwinded, overindulgent articles for a while .

I have two tanks right now. One at home and one on my desk at work. The one at work has a refugium I want to talk about. At my last job (in Las Vegas) I set up a little 6-gallon Eclipse tank as a nano reef right on my cubicle desk (don't try this unless you have a cool boss). I only stocked it with soft corals and reef-safe fish, and it did great for the three years I worked there. When I got another job my boss wasn't nearly cool enough for me to even ask if I could move in a tank, so my wife inherited all my stuff for her tank at home. Good fortune struck this year when our company's board of directors ousted my old boss and moved the whole operation to Austin - Hense I'm now an ARC member My new boss here is quite cool, so I quickly set up another tank similar to my old one. I did the Eclipse 6 again, not because I think it's the best tank design, but because it really is low maintenance and quiet...and just because it worked last time. Both of these tanks had the same main problem...me...I habitually overstock, resulting in high nitrate levels. In my old tank this meant I had to do very frequent water changes. My new tank went through the initial amonia and nitrite cycles as expected, but when they were finished, I found myself with obsurdly high nitrate levels again. Now, protein skimming would be a great solution, but this is still a fairly quiet office (except when my boss sneaks up behind me with his megaphone), so a gurgling protein skimmer really wouldn't work. So I decided to take my first stab at a refugium. Aquatek was IMMENSLY helpful in fitting me into a little 2 1/2 gallon glass aquarium for the fuge. The aquarium tucked away nicely beside the Eclipse, almost out of sight, but still visible enough to enjoy watching the refugium wildlife. Keeping the water flowing between tanks was the obvious challenge here, but my solution is working quite well so far. To make water flow between the tank and the fuge, I first installed a 3/4" siphon hose between the two tanks. With the hose filled with water, it keeps the two tanks level with each other. Then, to get a little water movement through the fuge, I simply attached a small air hose to the outlet (you know, the little air port that allows you to squirt bubbles using the suction the outlet produces) of my small powehead that I put in the eclipse. I filled the air hose with water and put it in my fuge, and viola...small but consistent water movement between the tanks. Now, using siphons you have the obvious danger of losing siphon, and flooding one of the tanks. This danger is mitigated by simply putting the siphon inlet and the air hose inlet just below the water surface. This way, if I lose siphon, only a small amount of water can flow into the Eclipse. I stocked the fuge with a bunch of Cheato, then a large variation of live substrates that the local stores were very helpful in providing at little, and sometimes NO cost, as well as some substrates that I ordered online, making a nice "stew" of different stuff. I put in some nice mini-compacts for lighting and the Cheato loves it. It has been running flawlessly for 1 1/2 months now and WOW!!!! There is life everywhere. It is teaming with copopods, little shrimp, micro stars, worms (some good, some bad), and wonderful little things that look like small squid or jellyfish or something. They're just too small to really identify. I've had tanks before and loved to look at the small life in the substrate, but I NEVER though so much could live in so small a place. There are little buggers EVERYWHERE...and the siphon tube allows them to wander into the stocked tank all the time. In fact, you can sit there and watch for a few minutes, and sure enough, something will wander right out of that tube. Not only this, but my nitrates and phosphates have dropped to almost indetectible levels - in an overstocked nano with no skimming. I highly recommend a small fuge for a nano reef.

I a FAR from being a clam expert, but I do have a tank with two successful (so-far) clams in it. I had a similar problem on my first tank many years ago. There was a clam that I thought was getting enough light, but slowly over time, the purple in his mantle was replaced with this brownish-whitish stuff that was not nearly as beautiful as the mantle was to start with. It lived for several months like that, but eventually died. I asked around the LFS's in my area at the time and got a bunch of mixed responses. Some said it was natural and not related to the death, others said it was bleaching, but the response that made the most sense with what I observed was that when clams don't get enough light, a bacteria or algae blooms in the cells of their mantle causing the discoloration. Because of the bloom, the clam slowly starves to death. Now, that may just be the reef equivelent of an urban legend. I really don't know. I think that bleaching starts at the edge of the mantle and works its way in, which is different than what my clam went through. Anyways, now I keep my clams at the very top of the water column right under the lights and they are doing well. I wish you the best with yours.

I just dumped a little in my refugium, in the back where I can't really see, and gave the rest to River City Aquatics. They said they might put it in their refugium, but I wouldn't blame them if they just got rid of it. If they did put it in their refugium, you might be able to go by and look. I dunno. I never could see a live one when I was looking through it. I think the guy just scoops some sand out of the ocean and sells it, which would be fine if there was anything alive in it, and if the living things came from the right climate.

It's true...like you said, there are people who really do know what they're talking about, but they're almost impossible to distinguish from workers who just want to look like they know what they're talking about and end up giving you bad advise. If you look around enough, you can find someone to tell you ANYTHING. I think a lot of the problem is what you pointed out...each tank has a personality, and what works in one tank doesn't always work in another. Then, when you ask a worker a particular question, there are so many interdependencies between different things in a tank, that even a good answer isn't good unless it is tied in with other subjects. Like protein skimming...everyone will tell you it's great....but they may not tell you that you also need to supliment trace elements because of it. One answer without the other hurts your tank.

...continued from last week: After my somewhat rocky start, I had a tank that looked great, but had several built in problems that I described in my last entry. It didn't take long before my wife and I started becoming mezmorized by the beautiful corals living in the fish store tanks. We were told that you have to have actinic lighting to grow most corals, so we upgraded from 40 watt kitchen-style flourescent light bulbs to 40 watt actinic and daylight bulbs. We were sure that people were exagerating about how important light intensity and other things were, so we just used the same old ballasts and bought the bulbs at petco that said they worked for reefs. So, once we had what we thought was a great lighting setup, we started out by buying a flower pot coral. It looked great in the store, and it looked great in our tank....for a while. We started adding other (mostly stony) corals, including elegance, plate, and bubble corals. Now our tank was about 2 weeks old, and all of a sudden the brown plague hit us. Everything turned brown...the beautiful decorative coral, the bright white crushed coral...all turned brown. We quickly asked around and decided to throw a Kent Phosphate Sponge into the tank in a high-flow area. This did nothing, the brown plague just had to take its course with our setup. Soon, our corals all shriveled and died, and our fish were afflicted with small white pokadots. One after another they kept dying. We bought fish after fish, and coral after coral. Some, here and there, would live, but most kept dying. This went on for several weeks, especially during the first month cycle. We kept getting very bad advice from pet stores that claimed to be experts. We figured that our stuff was all dying from coral and fish diseases, and one store had a great UV sterilizer that we bought to try to stop the various pestilences from killing everything in sight. This did nothing. ...see...the problem with this phase of learning reef...is that SOME stuff was working successfully...the Jawfish was alive, happy, and entertaining, the clown was happy, a couple corals were doing good, there were little buggy buggers all around the tank, the cleaner shrimp was happy. In other words, we FELT successful at some stuff, so we didn't realize how many things were wrong from the get go. So on we went, with live rock to handle the amonia cycle, but with a UV sterilizer to kill the good bacteria the live rock was harboring. We had an undergravel filter doing nothing but harm, and a lot of crushed coral leaking phosphates into the tank. We were oblivious to calcium and PH levels, and were sure everything was fine because our amonia was astonishingly low. Over time, we kept studying and found a lot of our startup errors. The UV sterilizer found a permanent home in our attic, and was replaced with a protein skimmer. The skimmer was a "Cyclone", that basically looked like a tornado in a tube. I later found that a lot of people hated the Cyclone, but it really worked great for us. The best thing we did was we bought 180 watts of power compact lighting and started monitoring calcium levels. This did wonders for the corals, and we even kept some Clams quite successfully. We kept the tank for a little over a year, then we had to move. The move pretty much devestated the tank, and we gave what was left over back to the local fish store. Here's some things we learned from the first fish tank (besides the things from last week's blog): 1. Buy some SERIOUS lighting. The 180 watts of power compact lighting might sound like a lot to someone startup up a tank, but it is still quite minimal for a tank my size. 2. Study on your own. There are too many VERY WRONG opinions that you can get by following advice of fish store workers. They might be well-intentioned, but you might not get the whole story. 3. Soft corals are easy...stony corals are hard. Clams are hard but worth it 4. Limit yourself. Just because it's pretty, doesn't mean it will live. Here's a rule of thumb - if it costs a lot, that's probably because it's really hard to keep alive long enough to sell it to you. Well, that's my 2-cents worth for today, next time I'll tell you about a much more successful tank or two.

Cool...thx. I hadn't found Kingfish yet. I'll stop by today.

I ordered a bunch of sand-sifting clam/mud from the following guy: http://cgi.ebay.com/Live-Sand-Algae-Reef-A...1QQcmdZViewItem Picture: I got it yesterday and used a small amount to seed my little refugium. It looks exactly like the picture. It is a very claylike substrate with sand grains throughout. Most of the clamshells you see are simply empty shells, but I think there's a bunch of live ones in there too...but no guarantees...I'm trying this stuff for the first time too. You can pickup at my work today near Burnet/183. If interested, please e-mail me at: [email protected] Thx.

I've been doing reef for about 8 years now. I hardly consider myself an expert reefkeeper, but I have learned how to have fun with this hobby while keeping costs...and tank problems...down. I figure I'll write down some history entries in this blog to help others who might be going down similar paths so they can learn from the good and bad times I've had with reefkeeping. In the beginning... When I was a kid, my parents...oops...I mean Santa Claus...bought me a nice 29 gallon freshwater tank. This doesn't have much to do with saltwater reefkeeping...but it DOES help explain my mindset going into salt water reefkeeping. My old freshwater tank had painted-green fake gravel on the bottom, and beautiful plastic bubble producing toys scattered around the bottom. It ran on an undergravel filter and I learned that using that filter, I could siphon out all the real crap each month to keep the tank cleaner. It worked well. That was a long time ago. By 1999, I was married with one daughter and another on the way. It was Christmas time, and my wife and I wanted to get something the family could all enjoy. We looked in the local paper (this was in Las Vegas), and found a beautiful 60-gallon glass aquarium with a great looking oak stand and canopy. It cost us $250 I think, and it came with undergravel filters, nice big flourescent bulbs like our kitchen had, and a couple of powerheads. We were quite proud of ourselves for getting what we thought was a nice, complete setup for such a low price. So...we wandered into a small local fish store, and the 16-year-old kid there was quite helpful, or so it seemed. We looked at the fresh water fish, then we looked at the salt water fish and quickly decided that we could spend just a little more and change over to a saltwater setup. The fish kid sold us a bunch of great-looking crushed coral for substrate, and this beautful piece of bleached out coral for decoration. He agreed that with the combination of a hang-on-back filter and the undergravel filter, we could have a great little fish tank. We learned that the tank was going to have to go through this thing called a "cycle"...but if we bought some other stuff called "live rock", it wouldn't really cycle at all. That was music to our ears, because we could just buy this live rock and life would be perfect...we could buy all the saltwater fish we wanted right off the bat. Since my old freshwater tank did so good on flake food, I wanted to make sure to go with what worked so I bought flake food for our new saltwater tank too. So we went home, proud that we had finally gotten everything we could possibly want for the tank except the fish. We set up the tank...it was BEAUTIFUL. Everything was white, the powerheads were pulling through the undergravel filter just right, we had a cool piece of arching live-rock with this very pretty green hair algae all over it. Life couldn't be better. We went to Petco and a few other stores the next day and loaded up on a bunch of fish. My favorite was the pearly jawfish, who quickly dug a hole dead front and center of our tank and looked like a paranoid freak poking his head in and out and ducking and hiding every time anything moved. We bought a nice orange clownfish, a medium batfish, some little damsels that the store suggested for our new venture, a yellow tang, and several other brightly colored fish. That was a happy day. So were the next few days. Each day we found ourselves rather obsessed with making the tank prettier...it was a nice Christmas. Now, right about now I need to take a break from my narative and explain a few things. Any reader can tell I've been a little cynical as I look back at my old setup. Any experienced reefkeeper is probably already either having a heart attack, or laughing hysterically at me...or both. But fear not...it might not have been a well though-out startup to a fish (and later reef) tank, but it didn't all turn out bad, in fact, even through the learning curve that I'm going to describe here in my blog, I always had fun with the tank. Here's what we did right so far: 1. We bought a beautiful tank and stand that was quite sturdy and presentable, and it had a very good canopy. 2. We bought a pearly jawfish...who remarkably survived every mistake we made with that first tank. 3. We bought a Jawfish, Damsels, and a Batfish who also turned out to be very hardy...even through the cycle...mostly. Here's what we did wrong so far: 1. We believed everything we were told. This is not to say we were lied to...but the hardest lesson to learn is to learn how much other people haven't learned about reefkeeping...and how many diverse opinions there are out there. When you start asking around, everyone will give you a different story about everything...not joking. 2. The undergravel filter, this is nothing but bad in any form of salt water tank. 3. The crushed coral. This added a LOT of phosphates and other unwanted chemicals into the tank. This seems counterintuitive, since coral is natural in the ocean...but coral does not get crushed in the ocean, it deteriorates naturally into aragonite...a much better choice for substrate. 4. Assumed that we would not cycle...because we bought live rock. EVERY TANK CYCLES. There is NO WAY AROUND IT. It's a natural balance that every tank has to find on it's own. Sure, live rock, live sand, and pure luck help...but ALWAYS COUNT ON CYCLING...no matter what anyone says...no matter what you read...you WILL cycle. But the good new is...you will cycle...meaning you will get through it. 5. The pretty bleached decorative coral...also a source of unwanted chemicals in the tank. 6. The hair algae on the live rock. 7. The pretty fish that had no business in a cycling tank. 8. The assumption that our spending was anywhere near over. Anyways...more tomorrow...gnight