icenine's nano

[icenine]

[icenine]

Yellow tipped torch. This guy is my substitute for a bta in a low light tank. (as in maybe the clown will decide to host in it) ...and this one really kinda looks a little like a bta. It extends more than is shown in this picture but in general has kinda "chubby" looking tentacles. I'll see if putting him in a little more flow makes it extend more.

 

 

[icenine]

Hammer: Sorry for the blurry pic, and the colors don't look so hot either, the tips are much more green than they look here but I'm posting this one because it shows both mouths (though it's still just one head).

 

 

[icenine]

[icenine]

Finger GSP: Not that I'm glad I lost my previous GSP, but these look much better. Again this is not the greatest pic, they are really an intense green.

 

[icenine]

Watching the polyp extension on this guy is really neat, it goes from completely flat to this in a matter of seconds.

 

 

 

[JustFin]

nice looking corals! I will have to check out seacrop after your endorsement

 

...but you forgot one thing- a full tank shot showing what the tank looks like with all of the new additions

[icenine]

Thanks...

A FTS will be up soon... I still have a few things just sitting on the substrate and rubberbanded to rocks at the moment....

[crrichey]

I really am enjoying your system so far!

[x3cookiex3]

hehe ^^; nice tank mister although pepermint shrimps are good . they kill hermits / snails / anenomes and pick at corals xD so watch the lil guy

[icenine]

The pep bit the dust during the vacation breakdown.... ...and guess what has popped back up outa the rock in it's absence? Aiptasia, I really hate those things. I'll be adding another this weekend when we pick up nemo. When it comes to peps make sure you get the real deal lysmata wurdemanni. There is the camel shrimp, Rhynchocinetes durbanensis which looks fairly similar, is often confused with the peppermint and is far more likely not to eat Aiptasia but tear into some of your corals and fish.

[icenine]

We have fish.....

He (she) was sold as a true perc but I think may be ocellaris instead. Counting spines is a little harder than I hought it would be, so the jusry is still out, not that it matters much. The little bugger does not hold still. I've already fished her out of the overflow once, I'm going to have to figure out how to clown proof it without cutting in on the flow.

 

Here she is:

 

[icenine]

.....instead of a pair of true/false percs we added a yellow clown goby. The splash of bright yellow in the tank darting around is nice.

Here he is sitting on the recovering candy cane.

 

[yellowtangman]

I have a question about the Yellow Clown Goby. Does it swim around alot or does it just perch and crawl or swim once in a while? I'm setting up a 10 gallon and i'm considering one of them as a fish.

[icenine]

The yellow does a lot of perching, the only swimming he does seems to be in looking for a new perch or if he thinks I'm about to feed.

The other clown is a complete spaz and never seems to rest.

[emokid]

[sandlot13]

wow, what a story!!! i love it!!! seriously, just spent an hour reading the entire thread! amazing, specially cause i just set up a 10 gal and this gave me so many tips and tricks, its amazing, you have done a great job! keep the post up and running!

[firefishbrain]

I like the tank icenine, let's get a pic of the entire tank soon.

[icenine]

Thanks for the comments...fts is on the way soon.....

 

I bought a couple of shrimp today, a new pep to keep the aptaisia under control and a skunk cleaner.

The new additions are in the tank for only a couple of hours when from across the room I notice the skunk cleaner stick her rear end up from the top of one of the higher points of rock work and promptly let loose with about a hundred baby skunk cleaner shrimp. By the time I got over to the tank and realized what was going on, so had the two fish in the tank and they were feasting on them.

Before I could do anything to salvage the shrimp fry they had been consumed. I've got a smaller tank that I could have set up to house the fry in...but it all happened to quickly.

Perhaps some of them managed to hide out in the rock work before the clowns got to them... time will tell. ....all I could think of was crap, there goes about a hundred bucks worth of skunk cleaners as fish food..... but at least the fish are very well fed for now.

It was still an interesting thing to see happen in the reef.

[reef n ale]

Happy Birthday!

 

Rob

[Yuri]

Your tank is definitely one of my favorites. I've been in this thread so many times just so I could see your pictures again. Such great inspiration!

[icenine]

Thanks for the birthday greeting and comments. I'm glad you like the thread. When I was planning my tank (and still) I could not get enough of diary threads the likes of what (I hope) I've done here. It's also a great for simply keeping track of my own progress because I have a memory like a sieve sometimes (like, hmmm... when was the last time I saw a nudibranch?....I have to come back here and check).

 

I came across a small frag of green Kenya tree so that's been my last addition.

It's been seven months since I started to cure live rock in the tank and I don't plan on adding much from this point on. I hope to keep this tank going into 2007 and then tackle a much larger reef project towards the end of that year.

The yellow tipped torch just up and bit the dust, I have no idea why. It was in a similar area of the tank in terms of light and flow as the hammer and the hammer looks great. Losses suck, but even with the mishaps I have not had many.

Other than that everything is looking happy, zoas and palys are spreading, the new GSP is spreading VERY quickly... stay tuned for my "how do you trim back GSP" post. (but it's great looking stuff, lots of motion in the flow from the longer polyps) The toadstool is huge, unfortunately for that coral it's likely to be my first fragging experiment sometime in the near future. All of the "leather" corals are growing quickly but the toadstool is far outpacing the devils hand and sinulara. I've decided the sinulara is fugly looking and unless it starts to look more appealing to me very soon it's going to come out. As all these leather corals I've put in there grow, I'm concerned about them bumping into each other anyway. One of my candy canes is still bleached from the summer vacation incident, but it puffs up and extends sweepers regularly so I'm not giving up on it yet. The other two have split new heads. All of the mushrooms and rics are looking good. The pink and green rics have added new polyps. One of the green striped is still sitting on the floor of the tank, it looks good but just refuses to attach to any substrate.

Both of the shrimp have molted already.. this pep took a little longer to discover and begin to tear into the pest anemones but he has gone to work on them. The skunk cleaner and the fish finally "found" each other and are now seen together regularly. The clown shows no sign of hosting in anything, unless you consider finding her way into the overflow hosting behavior.

 

There have been some ups and downs along the way but things pretty much went as I had planned. (save for the scratches to the acrylic, trip to the ER, wild temperature swings during the first heat wave of the summer and the pumps going out when I was on vacation). That's not to say that I didn't learn a whole lot in the process. It's one thing to read, research and have an idea as to what to expect, another to actually do it or have things happen (the nudibranch and aiptasia invasions for example). While there were a few events that made taking as long as it has to get the tank to this point necessary (I knew we were moving in June when I began to plan the tank back in December of 04 and I knew I was going to go to Europe for three weeks over the summer then as well) I think that I (and the tank) benefited from the wait. Patience really is the most valuable thing anyone starting a reef tank can have.

 

 

more pics:

[icenine]

[icenine]

[icenine]