Day's Three and Four - 12/06-07/07

Weird stretch of time. Work commitments had me awake for 24 hours straight. I then slept for three hours before getting up and running a bunch of errands. Needless to say, I'm a little loopy at the moment. I got some more neat pictures, see for yourself.

Joe brought me a couple pounds of GARF grunge out of his frag tank. A crab hitched a ride in as did a bunch of tiny stars, they have very small centers and relatively long spindly legs (tentacles?). Hopefully a good number of amphepods and copepods came over too. It's still settling so the tank is pretty murky at the moment.

King Prawn chowed down on a Bristle worm today. It seems that this is not a common occurrence.

Day Two - 12/05/07

Not much time to reef watch this morning, mostly just turned on the lights before heading off to work. Stopped at Pet-Mart on Busch blvd before coming home today. I bought three more red legged hermit crabs, a pair of blue legged hermits, and a Sally Lightfoot crab. The blue legged hermits are tiny, but at least one of them seems to have growth aspirations in mind. Within ten minutes of being added to his new home he inspected cleaned and took ownership of a larger shell. It was very cool to watch. Sally the Lightfoot is quite agile and started eating as soon as she touched down in the sand. So far she staying on the floor but I expect that she'll be helping King Prawn out with rock cleaning duties before too long. The other crabs are fun to watch too. The bigger hermit crabs like to forcibly inspect the smaller crabs at random intervals, no fourth amendment rights in this tank.

The two Margherita Snails were in some sort of struggle. One was attached to the other's shell and kept flipping him over. I separated them and put them on opposite sides of the tank. Hopefully they get back to eating up the brown hair algae and leave the cage fighting to the guys on Pay Per View.

Reef Tank Day One

The tank is a 12 gallon Nanocube. Purchased from a friend as an established tank, there are some modifications as compared to a "stock" Nanocube, all executed by the previous owner. The hood was replaced with a Sunpod HQI 1058 metal halide light setup. The pump was replaced with the highest flow capacity pump that would fit in the back of the tank. Half of the pump housing actually had to be removed in order to fit the pump. Several tactically placed holes have been drilled to increase water flow to targeted locations in the tank and as a safety valve for the filter inlet grate which has a tendency to get partially clogged by coralline algae over time.

There are quite a few inhabitants already. The most readily visible is "King Prawn" he's a Peppermint Shrimp, he molted on his first night in my house. There's at least three snails and four or five crabs. There's a nice Xenia frag, a leather, and some reasonably well established green star polyps in a couple different locations around the tank. There are three Hidden Cup corals that live in the shadier spots towards the front of the tank. They seem to be more active at night, opening up and extending long clear tentacles into the water to gather food. There's a lot of hair algae that I'm told should be subdued by the addition of more crabs. There's also some red bubble algae growth in multiple locations around the tank, no one cluster is particularly large. I suppose that I'll have to try my hand at removing these before too long.