September's featured reef profile is our member Yardboy and his 10 gallon nano reef!



Click the picture above to check out his reef profile! You can find Yardboy's Jetties Nano tank journal here in our Members Aquariums forum. Feel free to post any comments or questions you may have for Yardboy, and he'll try his best to answer them.

Woohoo!! Congrats yardboy!!

Awesome thank... congrats!

Congratulations, Yardboy - one of my fav-o-rite tanks of all time!

Thanks so much guys! I am totally surprised that what began as an experiment turned into something that you all might like.
It's funny though. In the last few days with Gustav roaring into the Gulf I had to wonder if it would see another week. I'd already decided that it would be the easiest to throw in the back of the Honda and head for the hills with! What a releif that it seems to be going out with a fizzle instead of a bang.
Any questions that anyone has I'll be glad to try and answer. And thanks to the several people who have referred newbies to me with questions about gorgonians. I don't frequent the general discussions to assist as much as I should but am more than happy to help with questions about those wonderful octocorals when I can!

sweet gorgons!

i really like the valley look too! that's so difficult to pull off in a small tank but you did it perfectly! background, rockscape, positioning, etc.

i've been missing out on your tank! *thumbsup!*

Awesome tank congrats yardboy!

Your corals are still rocking in my tank!

Very awesome. Congrats yardboy!

Oh wow, It's been a while since I've checked out your tank thread. You've done a great job. Gold star for you!

very cool tank partner congats

congrats yardboy!

Way to be dude- awesome!

always been my inspiration and favorite on here, you know that!
way to go!

Congratulations! Your tank is one of the few biotopes that I consider on par with public aquariums in attention to detail.

Congrats Yardboy!

A well deserved honor for this wonderful tank and N-R member who has taught us so much.

Thanks YB!!

G'job man! With the way you did your aquascape it looks just like the mouth of many of the inlets down here. Excellent example of what you can do with a little ingenuity in a small aquarium.

Way to go Yardboy, Great tank.

Congratulations Yardboy! Watching your tank grow has been almost as fascinating as watching mine.

Great tank. Congradulations - all your hard work really shows.

Congrats Yardboy your tank looks awsome!!!

Thanks again, so much Guys. Boy, the jetties really took a beating from Gustav. Though it was over a hundred miles offshore, the waves were humongous (nautical term meaning very large), shooting clear over the rocks. The water was completely gray and opaque yesterday.
So accidentally I had a hurricane in my tank this evening! I did a pretty good water change due to a rock low in the tank having fallen and i've just about given up on trying to glue anything underwater. So I have a "spring tide" and drain the tank to below where the rock fell. Amounted to a 50% water change (took me two days to get the salinity right - add a bit of water, add some more salt, more water, more salt) so I didnt' have to worry about that. But when I put the hose to fill back in the tank, I found a pocket of detritus that blasted the whole tank. siphoned the highest concentration of it out and crossed my fingers. Everything seems to be doing well, and there was no smell when I did it, so I don't think I have to worry about sulfides.
I hope everyone West of us fared okay during the storm. Hopefully that will be it for this year. I noticed that the water temp. is lower than normal around here and the behavior of Gustav seemed to indicate that it was cooler in the Northern Gulf as a whole.

A+

Congrats!



You know it's gotta be good if Adin gives it a stamp of approval.

Very cool! I'm particularly interested in 10g builds at this moment so it is great to have such a good example to study.

Thanks for sharing all of this with us.

-hank

Thanks again to everyone.
I'm honored Adin!
Hank, I admit to having developed an obsessionwith 10's. I've got 3 going at once. Particularly for species tanks and small specimens, they can't be beat. Just be more careful with the glass than I am. I scratch the heck out of mine, somehow.
I've got some new pics posted on the thread, if interested.

A very nice tank and I found your desription very mature and inspiring. Congratulations for your humble approach and the willingness to learn from nature and observation.

Awesome tank yardboy! It makes me want to start one of my own.

Do it!
The tank has been surprisngly easy to maintain. As you probably notice, it doesn't even have a skimmer, or sump. Weekly water changes, with a slight vacuuming of the sandbed seems to do the trick. One thing I haven't mentioned is the massive population of spaghetti worms that concentrates detritus around their burrows, making it easy to siphon up.

ever thoguht about adding in to the display things such as oar grass or manatee grass? to make for a more "natural" look? how are those masked gobies working out for ya anyways? anything prey on them from the florida areas that we might add into our tanks?

ie. would a blackcap/ chalk swallow them up? etc etc? and congrats btw.

Being such small fish, I'm sure there are plenty of things that prey upon them, but nothing in the jetties nano has bothered them. At first, the rusty gobies would pop them if they got too close, but I think that was just territorial disputes. They seem to get along fine now, though they tend not to wander up into the caves and ledges where the rusties hang out. There are still two rogue crabs in the tank, and they'd probably eat them if they got the chance. I've lost several decorative crabs to them, I'm sure. Those b-stards are so sharp, they can tell when you are looking at them and will sidle away, turn your head and they will ease back out. Too crazy. I need to get some sharp pointed spear to stab them with, since they are so fast.
Turtle grass beds occur about a mile away, in very large areas of the bay system that the jetties channel admits into, but none occur anywhere around the jetties that I've seen. I am experimenting with turtle and manatee grass in another tank (which has ended up being a kind of "leftover" tank of things I've tried in the jetties tank but that got too big for it. The Beau gregory that got too aggressive and big is in there (It's a 30 gallon tank) but I've found that the grasses grow very slowly for me at least. I've unfortunately just about run out of room in the jetties tank also, with there being only a small area in the middle with sand on it, which is where the grasses would need to go. I was recently in the Philippines and saw grass beds with brain and elegance corals in them. Now there's the kind of biotope I'd really like to try!

Congrats on your tank there. Great job.

I have some questions if you don't mind answering.
1. What make you decide to have this Mesican Gulf theme?
2. You said that you chagne additon 15% monthly? How would you do that when you already making 15% water change weekly?
3. How much and often do you feed your tank?

Sorry for the delay in answering, I've been out of town.
I started this tank because I live about 5 miles from the jetties that I was trying to emulate. I dive there at least once a week, and often more.
I do a 10-15% water change weekly using artificial (Instant Ocean) sea water. Once a month I use water from the ocean (natural sea water) for a 15% water change to give potential extra plankton for the tan inhabitants to feed on, and also with the chance that some other creature will settle and begin to grow in the tank. No luck yet on that front.

Where you get the sea water? In Jetties?

Yes, I wait for a good high tide and catch the water on the way in, that way it has the least chance of being contaminated with pollution from the bay.

nice

Congratz!

I was just up in PC over labor day .We didn't get to do any boating/snorkeling because of the dang hurricane though I was going to explore the jetties while I was there. Oh well. Maybe next time.

Your tank is looking awesome.

Too bad on the timing Dude. It was nice afterwards when the silt settled. I'm going this weekend to see if anything is left. The temp. is dropping and critters are starting to migrate away. I'll keep snorkeling this year until I just can't stand it so I can see what type population progressions there are over the winter.

I'm inspired by your aquascaping. The curved path creates a cool trench look. I plan on creating a similiar look now when I upgrade to a 40g.

Thanks! I was inspired by an arrangement of rocks at the jetties and later found that it's a method in landscaping to give the illusion of a larger space. Very useful in a nano. You might want to look here for another tank that uses a similar element. I've been wondering what you could do with an even smaller AIO tank with that design. Carefully chosen corals to maintain scale might turn out very cool.
Good luck with yours and keep me posted, I'd love to see it. A larger tank like the 40 you are planning will likely work much better than a smaller one to maintain the scale and give the feeling you could swim right through it.