New fish 44 gal

lexiemc · April 18, 2010

Here are pics of our tank and our latest additions from Mr. Fishy.

Yellow clown gobbie

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Tailspot Blennie

Pink & Green Zoas

Clown...

tank scape

Derekreefer · April 18, 2010

Nice pics! I also have a little yellow coral goby. I like how they like to sit on corals.

lexiemc · July 3, 2010

We've had our fish now 2mths maybe?

And looks like the gobbies have set up house in the Candy Cane (from Chad & Belinda). This morning I notice what looks like a glob of eggs on the base of one of the acans. And our little gobbie is very diligent about his house keeping.

to quote mcallahan our Candy Cane Acan is now "the love shack".

BTW apparently Yellow Clown gobbies are bidirectional protogynous hermaphrodites. So yes, they can change like clown fish.

Edited July 3, 2010 by lexiemc

lexiemc · July 3, 2010

Now what shall we do with the lonely tail spot blenny?

lexiemc · August 28, 2010

1 year Updates & Comparison to share here.

For those wanting to know the difference b/n starting out with all live rock vrs dry rock. Slower is definitely good. Here are some clear comparison pictures.

So last July (2009) we started out cold turkey on this tank. Pentagonal 44-45g tank with a 75g aqua clear hob filter, and a Coralife 96wt power compacts (my husband had traded some one else for them). We also have and Aquaclear 70 sponge filter x power head and 1 Koralia1 pwr head. Aprox 40+ lbs dry rock, sand, water & tank. We built and epoxied the dry rock to resemble a shelf from a lagoon. Then let it set up for at least 24hrs before we added water. Then seeded it with 5-6lbs of live rock and let it run.

It was most of a month before we were ready to put in the first few select coral finds. B/c of out lights we started with low light corals, and saved up to upgrade later. The torch and a few mushrooms were added in Aug '09. It was many more months before we added any other zoas. By November & December we added a few more pieces and tried reworking our rocks / flow for better. In March we ordered new LED lights for the tank. We added another rock shelf to the existing structure to better accommodate future sps corals and shade the other lower light corals (mushrooms & zoas). We have seen a significant growth boom since we added the LED's. Not to mention the LED's are significantly cooler and the water temp is fairly constant 78 even in the hot summer.

The pics below show coral growth difference. c.

As for fish...That took us much longer. We knew we wanted to keep a passive reef safe group that would not over tax the bio load. But we encountered several common problems with acquiring fish so we opted to leave the tank fallow for several weeks at a time before reintroducing any new fish. We added the first group of fish: 2 ocellaris clowns & 2 yellow clown gobbies sometime around April. A few weeks later we added a Tail Spot Blennie. Pics of fish are in earlier posts here.

Because we have kept the bio-load small, we only added our skimmer about a month ago. We opted for the Tunze 9002 (2nd gen) b/c of the small internal foot print. It fits snugly in the back corner of the tank.

SW tanks & corals can be very enjoyable but as most anyone can attest it can also have some major draw back & learning curves at any given point. Take your time to research any new addition be it coral or fish. Enjoy.