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DEKAND's 34g Solana Diary/Build-up


dekand

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So I've had my eye on 2 of these since I first saw them at the store, and since the Blenny has been doing great and seems very healthy and my water parameters have been perfect I decided to pick them up. They have been at the store for over a month and are very healthy, though a bit nicked up from the group picking on each other. I picked out a small one and slightly bigger one and brought them home. They seemed to have paired up great, just a little bit of asserting dominance and such, they are pretty inseparable at this point.

 

And as a plus, after adding them to the tank my Blenny has taken on a completely new attitude, he would never leave the rocks and was always in his little home hiding away only coming out in the late afternoon or when no one was in the room. After about an hour of watching the clowns swimming around and demolishing the pod population he decided to take a leap of faith and kick them out of the corner where they were feasting to get some... and now after a day he just stays out most of the day watching them, eating algae off the glass and actually swimming in open water... he's really fun to watch interact with the clowns...

 

anyways, this will be it for fish for a good while i believe, since i'll only be adding 2 more at the max i've got a lot to think about as far as what i want... so it's on to corals in the meantime, another thing i've got to research and figure out, but that's the fun part right :)

 

anyways pics:

 

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-Dustin

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wow those clowns are amazing, never seen that colouring yet. cool orange noses

 

Yeah i wish they would say like that but i know they will more than likely become all black and white but i don't mind, I love em...

 

Great start! Nice aquascaping!

 

Thanks! i'm glad everyone seems to like it, my clowns are still hanging out in the front of the tank, only rarely do they go explore the rockwork but i'm sure they will more as time goes on, maybe once they have some coral to look at? :) haha

 

however the blenny loves the rockwork, he on the other hand rarely swims out in the open unless he's competing with the clowns for the pods in the corners ;)

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Alright so here's an update, as much as I liked my aquascaping, I quickly became aware that it wasn't very practical for coral placement and since i want a lot of corals i decided to SCREW IT ALL UP!

 

Well not quite, I ended up picking up some rock that had just came in from the store and decided to scrap one piece that just wasn't working anymore so i ended up with about 5lbs more of rock, and a much more coral friendly arrangement. I'm sure it'll go through more changes but this is what i threw together last night after getting the new rock.

 

And enjoy the nice green algae bloom i've got goin on :)

 

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Nice looking tank you've got going there. And a Ron Paul man too. Great!

 

Also, these look like margarita snails a little bit from a far.

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Do you have any close ups of them?

 

It must be great to have a fish store in the family. It's been one of my dreams one day to have a really good one with healthy tanks and happy fish.............

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Nice looking tank you've got going there. And a Ron Paul man too. Great!

 

Also, these look like margarita snails a little bit from a far.

IMG_3984.jpg

 

Do you have any close ups of them?

 

Yeah i believe they are margarita snails, at least thats what my brother sold them to me as ;)

 

When they first arrived... i started with 12 and one crawled out of the tank, i have 2 other mexican turbo snails as well, the margarita's and my blenny wouldn't touch the hair algae but they mowed it down...

 

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It must be great to have a fish store in the family. It's been one of my dreams one day to have a really good one with healthy tanks and happy fish.............

 

Yeah it is pretty nice, and the store is literally 3 minutes from my apartment so it's pretty convenient. However everytime i drop in to get some RO or something i get sucked into working :) but i don't mind...

 

And keep the dream alive, it was my brothers as well, he started when he was about 14 i guess and he's 25 now running his own store, i wish i would of figured out how cool this stuff is earlier ;)

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So after staring at my previous aquascape for days i realized i wasn't using the rock i had in the best way and noticed i could have more "shelves" if i re-arranged some stuff so here goes it again, let me know what you guys think...

 

also added a Koralia 2 to the right side in addition to my Koralia Nano on the left.

 

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they all wanted to be in the shot :)

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Looks great bro!!!

Man, I really love your tank. It should really look amazing as the additions come in!!!

 

thanks man! yeah im fighting that urge to just keep adding stuff, trying to go as slow as possible but we all know how tough that is, aside from some other small corals my next addition will probably be a yasha hasha goby and pistol shrimp i think... i really need something to hang out on the substrate as none of my current fish or snails ever hang out there, it seems so desolate. The only time my lawnmower blenny gets off the rocks is to eat off the glass and drop his big green "packages" off in the front corners of my tank... haha

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ea82cb02.jpg

 

The surviving of the 2 frags of Zoa's from the "Zoa's for the needy" competition ... lol thanks Reefur and Ebin!

 

And this is my other frag of Zoa's, a bit over exposed under my blue moonlighting, it's the first time i've tried taking pics under that lighting so i've got some figuring out to do but they do look pretty cool with their fluorescent colors at night...

 

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ea82cb02.jpg

 

The surviving of the 2 frags of Zoa's from the "Zoa's for the needy" competition ... lol thanks Reefur and Ebin!

 

And this is my other frag of Zoa's, a bit over exposed under my blue moonlighting, it's the first time i've tried taking pics under that lighting so i've got some figuring out to do but they do look pretty cool with their fluorescent colors at night...

 

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How much evap do you have and how do you deal with it? Do you have an ATO system? Do you know what the newer solana tank upgrades are going to be when they come out in a few months? I can't decide between this tank and a zero edge. I heard the zero edge tanks have about 2 gal a day! Are there things on this tank that you would want changed?

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Well i have the Sunpod 150 and i usually have to re-fill the 2 auto top off bottles about twice / day to keep up with it (not sure what that volume is but certainly not even near 2g/day), my apartment stays below 75 but the temp in the tank i usually 79-82.

 

I don't know what the upgrades are going to be, id love to have a real ATO, what the Solana has is a half ATO lol... other things are small like holes in the back glass to route the wires through so they are hanging off the top, stuff like that, overall i love the tank and would recommend it to anyone...

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I was bored, here's a few more pics, as you can see the lighter zoas (name anyone?) have opened up quite a bit and have already sprouted a new polyp so they are looking nice and fat...

 

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thats it for now, my next addition will be a Yasha Hashe goby and Pistol shrimp...

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Got a new mushroom rock yesterday, I love the purple/blue combo, this picture was right after the lights came on im charging my camera right now i'll get another after they fully expand... I also am picking up my first Ricordea today so i'll have pictures of that tonight hopefully!

 

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Updated FTS

 

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The new zoa's haven't opened up enough to get a good shot yet so those later, but heres my first Ricordea...

 

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FTS is looking great! I can see that your rocks are starting to mature. Just keep up your patient stocking, you wont regret it ;)

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FTS is looking great! I can see that your rocks are starting to mature. Just keep up your patient stocking, you wont regret it ;)

 

yeah we had some traded in rock full of coraline at the store so i swapped out/added about 10 lbs of encrusted rock which i think has helped the seeding process for the other cured rocks.

 

I also added some Chaeto and a submersible light to my middle chamber as a "mini-fuge" it seems to have helped the algae growth, but that could just all part of the process, either way it certainly won't hurt anything!

 

Unfortunately as you can see my tank is in a corner, so getting pics of the rear chamber/fuge is only something i'll do when im extremely bored because rotating that thing is not fun haha... and yeah i'm trying to go pretty slow with it all, everything seems to be pretty happy so far, i'll do my best to keep it that way :) learning as i go...

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