kgoldy Posted March 28, 2011 Author Share Posted March 28, 2011 I'm beginning to think that ordering premium LR online with all sorts of hitchhikers would have been more economical... Girlfriend has been in town for spring break... Updates had to be curbed for a bit. More to come when she leaves. Link to comment
animalmaster6 Posted March 28, 2011 Share Posted March 28, 2011 That'll get some microfauna started. Mated pair of??? Link to comment
Magiksurfman Posted March 28, 2011 Share Posted March 28, 2011 what ever jaw fish you decide to get, i think you already picked up a pair, just make sure they look "chill" at the lfs, if they look nervous or squirrelly like a prison inmate about to make an bust at the lfs, theres a chance they might not settle down. if they dont, they'll just hide in the rock work and at night they'll cruse the top of the tank lookin to carpet surf. id keep the lights dim and put something over the top of the tank to keep em from jumping out untill they build thier burrows after that your golden. my wifes favorite fish are jawfish and ive had one pearly jump out, another pearly stress out so bad(perfectly healthy at lfs) that he got sick with i think velvet, "i think" because of how fast the disease killed all of my fish within two weeks even after quarantined and medicated . and a blackcap/tiger jawfish a stupid damsel stressed out untill he caused him to run into one of my rbta's . that damsel was banished back to the lfs but i should've chopped him up and fed him to the nem that little punk. if you ever get any coral frags that you put on your sand bed or like fungias, keep them as far away from the jawfish as possible because they will snatch it up and use it to reinforce their burrows or they will bury it . just tryin' to help out, i wish i wouldn't have lost any of these little guys. They they have so much personality you'll definitely love em. Link to comment
bitts Posted March 28, 2011 Share Posted March 28, 2011 Have fun. We can wait for updates. Link to comment
kgoldy Posted March 29, 2011 Author Share Posted March 29, 2011 Mated pair of..... Male on right, female on left. They were eating frozen before I stuck them in the tank... But now they've been hiding in the rocks for days, so I don't know how well they're feeding now. My guess is they're going to town on the pods back there, since they don't seem to be exploring for food at all. And for size reference- Link to comment
bitts Posted March 29, 2011 Share Posted March 29, 2011 Mandarins Yeah!!! Fingers crossed. Link to comment
kgoldy Posted March 29, 2011 Author Share Posted March 29, 2011 Depending on how these mandarins look after a few weeks, I'd like to get a female ORA spotted mandarin too. I'd like to get it in there sooner than later, so they don't have time to get territorial. By the way, 15 bucks for the pair. Now that's pretty freakin sweet. The Inland Aquatics order comes in tomorrow, so hopefully they don't completely decimate the pod/gammarus shrimp population and starve. This tank is a whole different world from the nano I'm used to. The whole theme of going with nano-fish means I'm going to have a lot of stuff that lives in the rocks that I never see (or know if they died, are eating well, etc.) Those yellow watchman gobies I got haven't peeked out since the night I put them in there. In my biocube I got a yasha and a barberpoll goby that I purchased a few months apart from each other, each with a paired randall's pistol shrimp. It took a long time, but the pistols seem to have paired, and now have burrows that cover the entire 29BC. The fish now stick to holes that are about 2-3 inches from each other in one corner of the BC- no threatening displays, fighting, etc... But they definitely don't seem to want to get any closer than they are now. My hopes are that when I move them to the big tank, and continue to stock with small gobies and randalls pistol shrimp, that I'll have a peaceful community with a variety of watchman gobies. If suddenly they all want to fight to the death, it'll be near impossible to intervene with all the nooks and crannies they can hide from fishnets in... It's worth the gamble to me- hopefully it is to the fish too. ...ps Would you say these mandarins are red, or green? My LFS never seems to get the reds in- and were calling them green... But they look pretty red to me. May be because they're so young or something... Link to comment
kgoldy Posted March 29, 2011 Author Share Posted March 29, 2011 Photo dump time... Upgraded to photobucket pro, so pictures should be higher resolution, I think... Decided that the two lamps over my display fuge completely sucked... And since I don't have a skimmer in there yet, I can make this 6 bulb setup work with some CFLs. Total cost including bulbs and 3 prong cord is like 50 bucks. Total wattage (power used) = 78. Each bulb is a 50 watt equivalent, so it's like saying I have 300 watts blaring down over the 20 gallons of fuge. I got two each of "daylight" (looks very blue compared to other bulbs) "warm white" and "bright white". Played off making a jawfish home as "arts and crafts time" with the girlfriend. She's a teacher and nanny, so it almost worked... Haha. Actually she ended up pretty bored. Tried things like "do you want to learn how to use spraypaint?!" ... That didn't work at all... I skipped the photos of the cutting and trimming, but I used a chop saw to trim the 3/4" PVC fittings as short as I could so that the pipes don't take up so much room. The shorter the pieces get, the harder they are to put together, so I had to bevel the edges down on all the ends of the pipes- again using the chop saw. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who isn't very experienced with the power tools they're using. Overall, the PVC is nice and soft when you're running a coarse wood cutting blade, so it wasn't that hard to get the edges exactly the way I needed them. Sprayed it with some off-white-ish Krylon Fusion after I roughened the PVC up a little with some coarse files. There's some real nice looking textured Krylon Fusion that looks like it'd be the perfect texture to grow coraline on quickly, and blend in with sand... But I'm not sure if I want to experiment with it, because it says it has "Metallic flecks"... And finally, false percs loving my GHA. Link to comment
ajmckay Posted March 29, 2011 Share Posted March 29, 2011 Looks great! Best of luck with the Mandarins. One other potentially difficult part of having so many nano-fish in a larger tank is feeding them. As you'll have a variety of feeders, broadcast feeding probably won't help your algae issue at all. So maybe you should consider researching the feeding methods people have been successful with for each fish you have. I mean the clowns and the angel will be happy coming up to the surface and chowing on floating pellets & frozen. The gobies and mandarins, however, might require some thought since you may run into some territorial issues. Maybe invest in a sea-squirt (a really long baster made by Kent marine), so you can deposit food directly in specific locations near the bottom such that the fish know where to get it at (such as a small bowl or to keep it "natural" an oyster or clam shell). By having various "feeding stations" around the tank you may be able to more effectively feed the smaller fish. I've seen variations of this, and I also used this method successfully with some of my inverts. In time they knew exactly where and how to get the food. This is just a suggestion though. Maybe someone has a better idea. Link to comment
kgoldy Posted March 29, 2011 Author Share Posted March 29, 2011 Yeah, I saw someone who put a baby food jar in their tank for the mandarins and seahorses... I'll probably do something like that- maybe with a meduim sized conch shell or something. Broadcast feeding is going to happen regardless though. Eventually most of the rock will be covered with coral (key word = eventually)... But in the meantime, overfeeding = algae = well fed CUC and refugium critters. With the 500 snails John sent me, and the microfauna I'm trying to produce... I'm going to be doing some pretty heavy feeding on an otherwise near "empty" reef tank. Link to comment
kgoldy Posted March 29, 2011 Author Share Posted March 29, 2011 Ah!! Diver's Den Sneak Peek!! Black Tail McCosker's Wrasse (Group of 4) Why is today the first day in a while there's no BSJ or Tailspot Blenny that I've been wanting?! Link to comment
Jonthankite Posted March 29, 2011 Share Posted March 29, 2011 IM GONNA GETUM FIRST............ JK all i got is a mantis shrimp palace Link to comment
ajmckay Posted March 29, 2011 Share Posted March 29, 2011 BTW I saw the pic dump you just posted and I'm impressed with how much the tank has cleaned up! Are you sure you did no manual removal? If so, that CUC is doing a phenomenal job... You may just have to feed like you said! Link to comment
kgoldy Posted March 29, 2011 Author Share Posted March 29, 2011 The closest thing I did to manual removal was taking my sea hares, and plopping them down in the middle of what I wanted cleared up. edit- well, to be honest... Plopping them down isn't the whole truth. Last night I wanted one of the three big tufts of GHA gone, so I took the sea hare and wrapped him in the algae so he had to eat his way to get out of the mess. Hahaha. Link to comment
kgoldy Posted March 29, 2011 Author Share Posted March 29, 2011 ...I'm gunna see if I can get TheCowKid to make a HOB fuge for my mangroves... Something like 46" long, 8" deep and 4" wide. It'd be a good source of pods too... And with the secondary fuge it'll let me feel like it's safer to put pipefish in the display fuge in the bottom, since there will be a true-predator-fee fuge. I'd like to have it feed from a small pump placed in the bottom of the RR overflow section. It's where I have my heater now, so it would force more water to pass by it, and eliminate any stagnation in the bottom there... Google sketch-ups will be done when I have free time... Link to comment
kgoldy Posted March 29, 2011 Author Share Posted March 29, 2011 Woohoo! (There's all my bugs from Inland Aquatics). Link to comment
kgoldy Posted March 30, 2011 Author Share Posted March 30, 2011 Alright, I'm officially cutting myself off from home reef related purchases until I get back from spring break in Dominican Republic. Reef related purchases pertaining to things like scuba/snorkel stuff are all that's allowed for the next few weeks. Anyone know what I should keep my eye out for while I'm down there? I know shipping stuff home is totally illegal... But at the very least, I'm bringing home a bottle of live sand from as deep as I can dive. Link to comment
ajmckay Posted March 30, 2011 Share Posted March 30, 2011 Dude where in the Dominican are you going? I spent a few years there and it's awesome... You can get real paintings there for super cheap. Also you should try to find a drink there called "cacheo" or "mabi" (pronounced ka-che-oh and mah-bee). It's usually found as sort of a home-brew type drink at the corner stores. What else... The banannas are the best I've ever had. So is the avacado and papaya. Link to comment
kgoldy Posted March 30, 2011 Author Share Posted March 30, 2011 I'm going to be staying at Majestic Colonial in Punta Cana. I've been there before- but I went with so many people that we never bothered leaving the resort. I remember there were these cute little curious puffer fish that would follow us around when we swam in the ocean... I think that's what I was looking at when my avatar picture was taken <----- (see underwater mohawk) That trip was well before I got into reefing- so I was afraid of most of the critters I saw in the water, fearing a nasty sting. There were enough urchins in the hotel area that just about everyone got stabbed at least once while goofing around out there. Looking back, I think it's pretty funny how I was scared to pick up a brittle star... I guess they look pretty dangerous to the untrained eye. "Mama Juana" was the big local drink down there when I went, if I'm not mixing up my vacations... Now that my taste buds have matured a bit, I'm definitely bringing home a few bottles of the local concoctions. Link to comment
disaster999 Posted March 30, 2011 Share Posted March 30, 2011 just skimmed through the whole setup. awesome work. liking the display fuge. you probably mentioned/answered this in the previous posts, but i probbaly didnt catch it...why are you setting up the fuge with so much microbubbles? that i gotta say must be a salt creep nightmare. esp with with all the wood you have and light bulbs Link to comment
kgoldy Posted March 30, 2011 Author Share Posted March 30, 2011 It is a bit of a salt creep nightmare, though I've learned to minimalize the issue by directing the bubbles to surface and pop in the middle of the water as opposed to the edges. The bubbles weren't really intentional, it's just something I guess I have to deal with since so much water is rushing through my drainpipe. Eventually I'll get around to widening the pipe that splits off into the skimmer chamber- so hopefully the reduced back pressure solves the problem. Edit- s@ltcreep is a bad word on NR when spelled as one word? WTF? Link to comment
paneubert Posted March 30, 2011 Share Posted March 30, 2011 Edit- s@ltcreep is a bad word on NR when spelled as one word? WTF? So is..... Gl#######s.... the company Edit: Wow, it really edited it. I wrote Glass-Holes. without the "-" Link to comment
animalmaster6 Posted March 30, 2011 Share Posted March 30, 2011 Love the mandarin pair!! Link to comment
kgoldy Posted March 30, 2011 Author Share Posted March 30, 2011 Love the mandarin pair!! Yeah, I really lucked out. The LFS guy didn't even know he had the two together. I got my Inland Aquatics order in today- Lots of little shrimp and good stuff in there. Hopefully everything breeds like crazy for those little mandarins to stay nice and fat on. I'm gunna go see if I can catch some of the fish in my BC and throw them in this tank.... Link to comment
gutterguy Posted March 30, 2011 Share Posted March 30, 2011 Damn Goldy, I havnt checking in in a while. I cant beleive how good of a job the sea hare is doing. Corals will be coming shortly I hope. Link to comment
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