The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Well it's been a while since my last post. All was going well until last week when I stopped seeing the Royal Gramma and the Firefish. I ended up finding a tiny bit of a dead fish but it was so far gone I couldn't identify. RIP Gramma and Firefish. I can't figure out a direct cause of death. My nitrates were pretty high, around 40ppm, but I couldn't figure out if that was what killed the fish or if the decomposing bodies caused the high nitrates.

Anyway, I've been doing everything I can to bring the nitrates down. Every other parameter of the tank is strong: a steady temp, steady pH at 8.0, steady salinity at 1.024ish, zero ammonia, zero nitrites. I started testing alkalinity, and that's fine, but nitrates remain stubbornly high. So Dennis at my favorite Local Fish Store (LFS) recommended Red Sea NO3/PO4 reducer, which I think is essentially vinegar mixed with methanol. Dosing that stuff encourages bacterial populations to bloom, which through reproduction suck up a lot of nitrates.

So far the dosing seems to really be helping. Nitrates fell over the week from 40 to 20 without a water change. I'm going to keep it up. Hopefully it'll do the trick.

Anyway, here's a picture of the tank. I did a big water change last night, cleaned the glass and the light fixture. It's looking good!

PICTURES!

Let the shameless exhibitionism begin!


 This is a coral cutting (frag) I got from my friend Billy. It's called Blue Cespitularia.

This is a frag of favia. It's kind of maroon with green centers. I'm going to glue it to the rock you see to the right, on which it should eventually spread and cover.

 This is another frag from Billy, pink (maybe orange?) birdsnest. I kind of killed the top when I drained too much water out of the tank, but the rest is doing great. Each polyp closes up at night to no bigger than the tip of a pen, and then it comes out (as shown here) in the daytime to look all nice and fuzzy.

 Our firefish (with the red tail) and the Royal Gramma (purple and yellow) behind.

Our lawnmower blenny come out to play.

Four of our six fish, with the clowns featured prominantly.

We've got a cleaner shrimp, and he's started cleaning!

So we've reached our quota on fish for the tank, the "no vacancy" sign is on out front of the aquarium. We have our two clownfish, blue tang, firefish, royal gramma, and lawnmower blenny. In saltwater aquariums, you have to limit the quantity of fish per gallon much moreso than in freshwater.

That limit doesn't prohibit adding invertebrates. So last weekend we bought a fighting conch snail, a frag (piece) of coral, and a cleaner shrimp.

Not two days after putting the cleaner shrimp in the tank, he set up a "cleaning station" like the literature says they do, and started cleaning the blue tang! They clean parasites and dead skin off of fish on the reef, and they'll do it in the aquarium too. I sorta got a picture of the action, see below!

Stocking the Tank!

It's been a while since I posted. I've been meaning to take more pictures to have something to show. I haven't done that yet, but I will get to it. But there has been so many changes to the aquarium it deserves an update!

Two pieces of bad news awaited me when I came back from a recruiting trip to Austin last week. The frag of birdsnest coral I got from Billy apparently was out in the air too long while I did my 15 gallon water change last week, and about half of it died off . On the upside, half of it still looks great. Hopefully it'll grow a bunch to compensate.

The other piece of slightly bad news was that my blue tang seems to have a case of Marine Ich. For the uninitiated, it's a protazoa parasite that causes itchy white spots under the skin of the fish. I'm treating with garlic (yes, garlic) drops and some stuff called "IchAttack", and so far it isn't too bad. My local fish guy said that every tank has it, but the fish only contract it when they are stressed out. Hopefully my tang will relax...

On the positive side, I've been adding quite a few species to my tank over the past week. Saturday James and I picked up a Lawnmower Blenny and a Royal Gramma Basslet. I have to get a picture for y'all of the Royal Gramma, it is awesome. The fish has blue eyes, and it's body is half purple and half yellow. Weird.

Yesterday I picked up a Fighting Conch snail, Skunk Cleaner Shrimp, and a frag of cool Favia coral- maroon with neon green centers. I will post pics!

So far so good.

More fish, and better pictures!

Since my last post, I've done another water change (15 gallons), and added our 4th fish and 1st coral!

Last weekend I changed 15 gallons of water (thanks again to Billy for the RO/DI water). He also gave me a few pieces of his Pink Birdsnest coral, which seems to be thriving in the tank.

While they can eventually get too big for our tank, I wasn't going to put together a saltwater tank without DORY, the regal blue tang. So, we got a small one (2") and so she'll have years before she's too big for us.

My best friend, Will Lim, came over with his beast of a camera and took pictures 10,000x better than what I can get with my point-n-shoot. Here's Dory:

And pictures of the other three:

Pictures of First Fish!

Not great pictures, but you get the idea. First is the Firefish, followed by two shots of the two Clown Fish. No names yet.

FIRST FISH!

On Sunday, after I had messed around with rocks and stirred everything around, I did another water chemistry analysis and found that everything was as it was- pH of 8.0, zero Ammonia, zero Nitrite, and about 40ppm of Nitrate.

Monday was a busy day for the aquarium. I completed the big water change required at the end of the nitrogen cycle. I decided to do 7 Home Depot Buckets of water change, about 35 gallons. My tank is "58" gallons, but with the 80 lbs of sand and 65 lbs of rocks, after I took out 35 gallons, there was only probably 3-4 inches of water left in the tank.

Monica helped me and we put on a blue background onto the tank. Unfortunately, as I was putting the hang-on-back refugium back on the tank, I ripped a hole smack in the middle of the blue background. I will try to patch, but I may have to plant a coral right in front of it so I stop staring at it!

Jude (2 years old) and I mixed up each Home Depot Bucket to 1.025 salinity with the Red Sea Coral Pro Salt. Jude did the scooping, and I did the counting. We pumped all the water back in and turned all the pumps and powerheads back on.

After letting everything mix and settle for a while, I performed another water chemistry check. Salinity was right on target at very slightly under 1.025, pH was up to 8.2 surprisingly, Ammonia and Nitrite still zero, and Nitrate down to maybe a little over 5ppm.

So it was time for first official tank inhabitants (the stowaway hermit crab and snail don't count, though they lived through the nitrogen cycle just fine!). James, John, and I went out shopping and brought home....

(drumroll please!)

2 Ocellaris Clownfish (http://www.liveaquaria.com/product/prod_display.cfm?c=15+27+755&pcatid=755)
and
1 Firefish (http://www.liveaquaria.com/product/prod_display.cfm?c=15+1636+168&pcatid=168)

I put links here to examples of our 3 little fishes. I tried to take pictures last night, but they came out blurry. I will try again tonight.

Hopefully everybody makes it through the shock of transition and that the tank handles the shock to the system, and then maybe we can add more livestock next weekend!

Coming this Thursday is our clean-up-crew from http://www.reefcleaners.org/. SNAILS!!!