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My humble 5.5g


c est ma

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Conversation from tiepilot68's tank thread ( http://www.nano-reef.com/forums/index.php?...124517&st=0 ):

 

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Me: I love gsp, too. Especially since I made myself hold off until an lfs had a frag of just the color morph I like best, the brightest green with purplish oral discs...

 

tiepilot68: OOOOO!... those sound perty Diane! Post a pic! Hey... speakin of which, do you have a thread for your tank? Would love to get a FTS of it! ...I bet your tank is amazing!

 

Me: Welllllllll...no. I don't have a tank thread. Mostly because my tank is not all that beautiful...I usually joke that the sum of the parts is more than the whole. Which results in the fact that I concentrate on the inhabitants more than the overall aesthetics, so I tend to post more often in the various livestock forums, esp. corals and inverts, though I got a bit active in the fish forum when my gobies started breeding.

 

I have been wanting to have a thread to post various things in, though, primarily progress shots of various inhabitants over time...so maybe I will take your prodding as an impetus to finally get around to it. (And so that I won't hijack your thread by posting my pics here.)

 

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So here...by less-than-popular demand...my tank thread. It won't be typical, as the tank's been running some 3.5 years...I hope to go thru my pic files and find "before" pics to post later...

 

Anyway: current fts's:

 

dscn4264largeod9.jpg

 

Probably the first thing you'll notice is the crushed coral. (Can you tell I'm self-conscious about it?) This tank was actually my son's dorm room tank 3 years ago, and he set it up with the advice of a very reputable lfs in East Lansing. At the time, they were recommending cc. So far I've been too lazy to undertake a change...hey, it took me 3 years to remove the biowheel! :)

 

Or maybe you'll notice the ghetto light stand. :) When I inherited the tank (son got into pdf's), it was just LR, a couple of snails & hc's, and a Coralife mini 18w fixture. After I started adding critters, I wanted more light, and went with the Satellite 20", 40W fixture. Which I love. But it was too hot & bright to rest on the top of the tank. As a "temporary" solution, I made a stand out of PVC. It's now on its 3rd set of legs, each one higher than the last...and it turns out that this height & stand is enormously convenient. I can open the front panel of the glass top w/o even moving the light, for feeding, etc., and I can move the whole stand back and forth, for best lighting for particular pictures, or so that I have the top light usable when I'm siphoning, etc. That's me--all about convenience. :) (The tank, BTW, is on a corner of my kitchen drainboard, under the upper cabinets...not a terribly propitious place for a fancy hood...)

 

Left side:

 

dscn4254largeia3.jpg

 

Each inhabitant has its own story...perhaps I'll develop this thread enough to touch on them.

 

A different angle:

 

dscn4266largeky4.jpg

 

I do have persistent diatoms, no doubt enhanced by the crud that collects in the cc (which I do clean, from time to time!), but I can live w/ diatoms. So much better than cyano, for instance! Usually it doesn't look quite this bad, but my snails had not been on the substrate much when these shots were taken. It also looks browner in spots than in real life because the exposure is a little low. The tank is actually brighter, but when I use an exposure that emulates that it washes out the pink rics, candy cane, pimply shroom and other things. So I prefer to make their colors look more normal at the expense of the overall brightness...

 

A couple of other views:

 

dscn4280largeid2.jpg

 

dscn4283largequ6.jpg

 

And a shot of how it was looking in February:

 

dscn0461largehy6.jpg

 

Then it was a REAL "dirty softy" tank! Note how lush the rics & shrooms are. The right hand corner was filled with several layers of shrooms, and the Xenia was spreading like crazy. My gobies were regularly breeding (see goby in middle bottom), and the tank couldn't have been happier. But it was nearly impossible to siphon, and I knew big piles of detritus were gathering under the overgrowth. Plus, it had dawned on me that the Satellite bulb was well over a year old, and had changed spectrum quite a bit (you can tell in this pic). Eventually I cleaned out the right corner, getting rid of lots of shrooms and leaving only the Xenia on the right side glass (but see all the sprouts on the LR where I thought I'd cleaned it off!), and bought a new bulb. Presto, I had an easier tank to maintain, much prettier light, and a little space to add new frags...but the softies have never been as happy as they were when they were "dim & dirty." They still thrive, though.

 

Well, that's (more than) enough for post 1!

 

--Diane

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Post the 2nd, and continuing to respond to tiepilot's requests. This time, the gsp.

 

This is about the hardest coral I've ever had to take pics of! My otherwise much-loved little cam just doesn't want to capture the green color of the gsp. (Or my merletti, for that matter. Amazingly, it does pretty well with my new, neon-green candy cane frag.) So, rather than quality, I'm going with quantity instead. :D

 

Here it is just opening up. Again I had to undershoot the exposure recommendations to approximate the actual color. The oral discs of this gsp match the color of its basal connecting tissue:

 

dscn3392largexv6.jpg

 

Here's an all-around blurry shot that also shows the color off well. (I was trying to get some shots of my male gbg, whose nest is under the gsp):

 

dscn3029largeht8.jpg

 

There's a brittle star arm poking out in this shot:

 

dscn3153largepa6.jpg

 

This shot and the next (I hope--I lose a lot of definition with the canned resizing program I'm using :angry: ) show something I just noticed when viewing the pics--the green tentacles each have a black spot near their tip, and in closeup it almost makes the tentacles look like so many snake heads!:

 

dscn3278largeyg0.jpg

 

dscn3303largejd6.jpg

 

Here's what the frag looked like when I first got it (April, 2006):

 

dscn5392largewy8.jpg

 

Edit: Just resized the above image with irfan: placing it here to compare the two programs:

 

dscn5392irf680nq2.jpg

 

--Diane

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DROOOOOL

SUPER NICE TANK!!!

I was lookin at the 5.5 Gallon AGAs and it seems like it would be so much fun! :P

What are you using for flow? Just the HOB filter?

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strangelove

Hey Diane,

 

Really like the photos of your tank, looking great. All those ricordias on the bottom look like a really comfy shag carpet, good job. Did you place all of those mushrooms and rics or did some of them split for you?

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(response to nanu-nanu)

 

Funny you should ask. :) That's what I started with (inherited), but as things grew, there were definite dead spots. So I did buy the tiniest PH I could find (from LiveAquaria) which has been sitting in its box for over a year....Before that, I'd dropped an airstone in on the back lefthand side. Me being me, I'm still just living with the airstone! (You can see the bubble tracks in the lefthand corner of some of the pics. Pros turn off their pumps, etc., to take fts's, but I didn't get around to it...)

 

At first I thought the bubbles from the airstone might be a problem, but that has not been the case. And it seems to agitate the water in that corner enough so that gunk from that side circulates to the HOB...

 

(Am I scientific or what?! <_< )

 

It could be better--I have to clean off the gorg from time to time, though it sways in the flow of the HOB...

 

--Diane

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Hey Diane,

 

Really like the photos of your tank, looking great. All those ricordias on the bottom look like a really comfy shag carpet, good job. Did you place all of those mushrooms and rics or did some of them split for you?

 

Early on I learned to love looking for the tiniest frags or colonies I could find at lfs's. I scouted the substrate of their tanks, looking for little pieces that had broken off the show frags. (It was +/- necessary with such a tiny tank and enough LR so that more rocks couldn't be added.) I hope to go back and add early pics, but till then--the orange ric was originally one polyp, the pink was two (it's now 7 - 9 --I can't tell if some of the polyps are split or not) and the greens and blues were very tiny, about dime-sized. They have really taken off.

 

My son was looking at them not long after looking at rics at the super-but-pricey lfs in Lansing, and remarked something along the lines of "My god, Mom, you've got a fortune in rics there!" :D

 

--Diane

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modularduck

mmmm 5.5. lol very nice ma, i really like your idea for using water pipe for a light. very cool!

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I don't know why you're downplaying this tank so much, I think it's absolutely beautiful, I really love it!!!! :flower:

 

I used to have a 5.5 AGA until a short while ago, and I used the same light fixture as you, and also had mine on my kitchen counter! I spend a lot of time in there and wanted to have it in a place where I could watch it a lot.

 

With that light fixture, I found that I actually needed to change the bulbs every 6 months. My coralline growth would slow down noticeably just before I needed to change it. I still have a couple of bulbs that have 6 months use on them if you're even remotely interested in them. I kept them on hand for "back-ups".

 

Keep the updates coming on this tank, I really like it!

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:blush::blush: Aw, you guys are too nice!! Thanks so much for the kind comments. This tank is my baby and I love it, even though I'd do some things differently if I started all over again. (And I'd make mistakes then, too, of course!)

 

And I have great trouble getting rid of anything that's taken hold, even if it's not the most attractive specimen ever...

 

But I did get lucky with the rics!

 

ReadyReefer--I was living with the CC just fine till I read too much on this site. :) It's probably easier to deal with if you don't overdo the bioload like I have (2 gobies).

 

Weetabix7--thanks for the info on the bulb. I'm going to take a page out of your book and try to change bulbs twice a year. Now that you mention it, I think I noticed a decline in coralline before I changed it and then an upsurge afterwards...I just hadn't put the two together. And oh, yes--kitchen counter tanks are just too easy to watch...!

 

Well--at least now I have a place to stick some of my zillions of pics. (How can I get so many from such a teensy tank?!)

 

Thanks again, everybody. It's nice to get encouraging words.

 

--Diane

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Oh Diane!!! :bowdown:

 

Your tank is AMAZING!!

 

How could you be self concious about it?? Every single square inch has your TLC written into it!! :):)

 

 

And WWOOOO!!! I'm not the only one who uses PVC piping for a light stand!!! :lol:

 

It IS very very handy! Can just slide it out or over any time I need to!

 

Your photography is great too... but if you want a better way to edit photo's... well I'll PM you about that. :)

 

Looking forward to MORE!!!

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HeyLookItsCaps

Your tank is no less than what i expected. and you need to learnt he word "custom" instead of ghetto.

 

haha looks great Diane. dont be self conscious

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I see a purple polyped Gorgonian (I think). How is that going for you? I had a yellow one that lasted about 4 months but I could not keep it alive. I bought it thinking (because the LFS told me so) that it was photosynthetic and found out later that it was not.

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Nice tank. :bowdown:

 

I like the look a lot, that is how I want my mantis tank to look like.

 

What kind of filter is that you are running.

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