Playing shy...

[Peter Gott]

Aloha reefers,

I'm Peter, but most people call me Dash. I haven't been in Austin all that long--just a little over nine months--but I feel like I should have made some more friends here by now. I never used to be shy, but a lot has happened in the past two years of my life that have kind of burnt me out on people. Still, I am an extrovert at heart...so as I get back into the hobby I love, I figured I'll give being social again a try within this community.

I love reef aquariums more than just about everything else besides clouds and colours and good stories. And as I write this, I realize that a good reef aqaurium is a good story, and ongoing, ever-changing one, with beautiful colours rarely matched anywhere else. I started this hobby accidentally with a 30 gallon long, when I was trying to create a massive (proportionally) aquarium filled with nothing but brine shrimp as research/prep-work for an art installation. It crashed, and I ended up talking to an LFS owner and coming home with live sand and a few pieces of live rock. Within a few days I had no brine shrimp again, but lots of Aiptasia. I was fascinated by them , and wanted more, so I visited my LFS again and came home this time with some peppermint shrimp, a healthy(?) prejudice against my new-found tentacled friends, and a small rock covered in protopalythoas. And so it began.

Since then I have had eleven tanks, if you count the propagation systems I had going during my two-year break from college when I decided to be a coral farmer and design and manage people's tanks for them. That was a pretty sweet business for a 22 year old. When I got back in college I switched to what I thought were nanoreefs, but have since been told were actually picos. I have always had a fascination for small things, and as an art and biology major, the challenge of creating a sustainable system with minimum equipment (entirely biological filtration) and an aquascape that took into account both aesthetics and the growth patterns and needs of the coral in such a small space delighted me. To this day, my favourite aquariums were my 1.5 gallon hex and my 2.5 gallon cube.

Of course, life happened in her occasional natural disaster kind of way, and I had to give up the hobby for a while. I have actualy been out of it for almost two years, and the withdrawal has been killing me...so now I am setting up a new system.

I don't make a lot of money, and Austin is kind of expensive, so it is progressing sowly, paycheck by paycheck, but the system I am designing is a 15 gallon display with a 10 gallon refugium. The refugium is actually going to be for display as well, so I have a place to show off some pulsing Xenia and clove polyps without worrying about them growing like weeds everywhere. As for the main display, I think it is going to focus primarily on Montipora and Leptastrea, my two favourite corals, with some zoas, palys and a few other smaller polyped LPS (with the exception of a Duncan). The coral stocking is still in the planning stages right now, though, with the possibility of some change depending on the next batch of live rock I get. I am in the process of curing the base rock at the moment...it is aquacultured LR from the Gulf, and actually already has a few sweet tube corals and a lot of beautiful tunicates on it. Depending on how much life comes with the next shipment of rock, I may tone down my initial stocking plans.

Anyhow, that's all...I'm pretty much obssessed with my aquarium, but it'd be cool to make some friends who appreciate/are into that as well.

Thanks for reading!

--Dash

8}

P.S. If you have sweet Leptastrea colour morphs you can frag in a month or so, PM me! I realize it plays more of an Emmy award-winning Best Supporting Actor kind of role in the aquarium, but for some reason it is hands-down my absolute favourite coral.

[bige]

Welcome. No need to be shy. Everyone here is friendly. Check out Castile coral ranch in the sponsors section. He gets and has awesome rock from the gulf.

[Chad and Belinda]

Welcome to ARC!!! You can meet a lot of your fellow reefers (and club members) hanging around some of the LFS. Belinda and I look forward to meeting you.

FYI, Castile Coral Ranch is no longer a sponsor but whatever you need, you can usually find it here.

[+KimP]

Welcome to the club! I have a few nano and picos myself. It's awesome to hear of another leptastrea fan It's also one of my favorites. Right now I only have a gorgeous blue one. Used to have orange and green also.

Glad to have you, tons of nice folks around on here. I hope you start a build thread!

[mFrame]

Welcome aboard, glad you took the time to say hi and really glad that you're back in the hobby. Austin (and the hobby) can both be expensive, so be sure to show up at our monthly meetings where we almost always have frags and reefing supplies to give away.

[jestep]

Welcome to the equally obsessed aquarium club.

[Peter Gott]

Thanks guys! I am pretty excited to get to know people here. When do you typically hold your meetings?

And KimP, I am so glad to hear you say that you're a Leptastrea fan! I thought I was the only one! I don't know what it is about that little sucker, but ever since I found my first piece at the LFS back when I was in college I have been in love with it. It actually became the star of the pico I had initially set up for a Cassiopea sp. jelly. It had brown/mauve tentacles with purple highlights, which wasnt spectacular compared to other colors of coral out there, but the center of each polyp was an amazing kind of silvery-lavender with faint green fluorescence that I could never capture on camera, and it fascinated me so much. It grew really fast, too. Ah, I miss that aquarium...