icenine's nano

[icenine]

A new Acan...

 

 

Nice blue stripes.

 

And some favia, this is a really big piece....

 

 

I'm diggin the LPS. There are a few more to come.

[annamarie421]

Nice additions! I really like the favia! For my birthday, I want to go to Chicago, and shop wherever you do for a little coral spending-spree!

Thanks for the photos!!

Anna

[nUgZ]

The 7 polyps on the right of that Acan....you can go ahead and send them to me if you want or you can wait...either way.

[Kilo Echo 7 Charlie Lima Sierra]

Looks amazin!

[Reeftank_addict]

One if the best I've seen....Great job!

[riotj]

And all the other posts are long too!!!

Nice btw!!

who makes the tank. Looks like a CPR but the size is larger than I'm aware of. Was it used or brand new. If new who was the seller? thanks and good luck.

[icenine]

The 15 gallon was a custom job. The guy who made it only did a few tanks and has since stopped making them. He had a few problem customers and decided it was not something he wanted to deal with any longer. I'll see if he might be up for giving it a go again, and if so I'll pass along some contact info. He did good work and at real good prices.

I've just decided that acrylic is not the best material for a small display.

[Schwazreef]

Killer Favia Ice. Man is that thing bright. Looking good.

[annamarie421]

Remember when I thought one of my Astraea snails had offsping? Well, it didn't and the parasite is still there. No harm seems to have been done to the Astraea, so I've left it there.

Here is a pic of the duo:

 

I have an astrea snail that has a growth on it too - probably a parasite. Did you ever have a problem with this spreading to other snails? Is it (the snail) still alive? Did it seem to be effected by the parasite at all?

 

Thanks!

Anna

[nanocurious]

That is an absolutely Beautiful tank! Have you had any issues with the Cherub Angel?

[icenine]

No issues with the angel... so far so good and it's a wonderfully active fish.

Anna, that snail is still chugging away after a year, parasite and all. When I showed this picture to CMAS I think the opinion was that the parasite is probably taking a bite out of the astraea every now and then, but apperently nothing lethal.

...it's not spread to any other snails, so I let it be.

 

...another vacation. This one was only a week long. Based on my last experience though I was just a little nervous. The tank was just fine. I had no one watching it and everything looked great when I came back. ...it's almost disappointing when your tank is able to get along without your attention for a week.

 

New frags, I've added a bunch of LPS to the 'pod:

 

Enchinos, a few 2" frags some interesting color mixes reds, greens, pinks and blues. I've planted a few of these on the upper rock work where a majority of the zoas used to be and various other outcroppings in the scape. Nice colors on these and I'm looking forward to how they develop.

 

Pics:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Favia, green and red jobbers with green eyes and a red with green eye favia variety.

 

 

 

A couple of varieties of acan. Since the whole acan craze is over I can actually afford them now. They are both towards the bottom of the tank but still color up very nicely.

 

 

There is now quite a bit of LPS in this tank. Who needs sps when you have long polyped stonies and gorgs.

 

All these frags came from sharkeysreef.com. Dennis and Anita there are really nice with a great selection of stock.

I must say, they did something I really appreciated as well. One of the corals I wanted to purchase had taken a turn for the worse just before I was about to take possession of it. Anita at Sharky's was forthright enough to tell me that She had her doubts about it's condition and suggested I take something else instead. There are a few retailers that might have just boxed that coral and sent it out the door asap just to rack up the sale. It's nice to find retailers that are looking out for their customers. Sharkeysreef.com has now made my short list of top online sources for livestock along with seacrop.com and sealifeflorida.com.

 

Ok... NOW I think the tank is full. .....but ya know, I could always squeeze a few more zoas in. This tank is a frag menagerie that would make Anthony Calfo cringe. lol. I can stare at it for hours though. At least I can look forward to lots of practice fraging things. I've got my exacto knife, bonecutters and dremmil tool at the ready. Always learning.

[icenine]

LPS rescue:

The green and red eye favia had been fragged just before I acquired it (at my request, I only bough half of the piece originally offered). One one of the recently severed corners of the coral had started to deteriorate with the flesh of one corallites turning into a brown jelly and melting away. I left it sit for a another day and the brown jelly had spread to another corallite. It's a really nice piece and I didn't want to lose it. ..to complicate matters I was going out of town for a week just a few days after I acquired it so if I wasn't able to do something quick it would rot away the week I was gone. I really did not want to return to a favia skeleton or worse seeing something spread to my other LPS.

 

 

 

I set up a small hospital tank for it out of my 2.5 gallon pico system. I popped out a bulb out so it was only using 18w of PC. I left it bare bottom with the an AC20 hob for circulation (set as low as it would go). Before I placed the favia in there scrapped off the infected flesh and I dipped it in some kent Marine Tech D. The dip was a qt of SW along with a few cap fulls of Tech D solution for 8 minutes. The amount of tech D I used was twice what is recommended on the bottle, but if this was a protazoan infection I needed it dead, fast. So I took the risk of potentially damaging the coral with an overdose. I then placed the favia into the hospital tank (with low light and low flow) crossed my fingers and headed out of town. Well, it worked. The tissue recession stopped with no loss or brown jelly appearing for over a week now. I thinkI'm out of the woods and I placed the coral back in the aquapod. I only lost three corallites from the colony, the the damage was minimal.

 

Saved favia:

 

 

I got a huge batch of home made reef food from another reefer in CMAS. Awesome stuff. It's a variation of Borneman's recipe, with additions. It's nori, squid, cyclopseese, cod rowe, few types of fish, shrimp... bunch of other stuff. For the most part it's a bit of everything you could think to feed your tank. I've got a frozen block of it that will likely last me a year or two (lol). Pretty much everything in the reef goes berserk over it. Fish and coral. Zoanthoids even grab hold of bits. Previously the only time I ever got anything that looked like a feeding response from zoas was dt's oyster eggs. I drop a 1/4" cube in and that pretty much creates a snow storm in the reef. I should try and get some video of the tank wide frenzy it creates.

I only feed this stuff the day before a water change, till I figure out a skimmer here. (Which I've spent no time on at all) With the silversides, krill and other stuff I have on hand I'm really overstocked on food for the foreseeable future. Making your own food is a really great idea. I had been kicking around the thought of doing it for a while. When I finally run out of this stuff I'll try my hand at it for sure. ...I think the thing to do would be to get together with a few other people to make a batch, with everyone brining a few ingredients to the mix.

 

The flower anemone. Just FYI, because I get a few questions about it. To clarify, it's not a "host" anemone for clowns. Not that my clown hosts in anything, unless you consider the front display glass a host. It is however neat. It's a very animated eater and grabs at anything that it thinks might be food. It's rather large, larger than I had expected it to get. I feed it quite a bit and it's grown to a little over six inches in diameter it was around three when I got it back in October. I have tried to get pics with a tape measure, but it either tries to grab the tape measure or retracts up when it's near, so that's been difficult. It does not bother fish, crabs or shrimp and never walks around or bothers any neighboring corals, some of which are rather close. It's not reproduced.

 

As for other anemone notes.... the mini carpet anemones split... both of them, just a few days apart. There are four now. The anemones got to about the size of a half dollar before splitting.

[icenine]

Some new pics...

 

Enchino coloring up... purpleish eyes popping out on this one:

 

 

 

The mini carpets have done some splitting, there are five now.

One of the new babies found a bit of an odd perch:

 

 

Here is another new one:

 

 

Toad stool, polyps retracted:

 

 

Open and awake:

 

 

Two of the crabs:

 

 

I've got a wierd macro pop up next to this colony of zoas... slow growing and kinda spikey:

 

 

 

...as I was looking at the pic there I thought it might be intersting to show that colony back in July... I've fragged bunch off since I've had them as well:

 

 

 

[pomby27]

do you have any other species of crab in your tank? i had a porcelain in my tank, i added an emerald, and 2 weeks later i couldn't find my porcelain anymore, i think the emerald ate it, coz there're only a pistol shrimp, and some snails in the tank right now.

[icenine]

There is one hitchhiker xanthid type crab in there... never bothers anyone though. I had a few hetmits but gave them away and never bothered to replace them.

[Disco Reefer]

a very healthy looking system. great job, man.

[icenine]

Why our reef is not an open top.....

 

[00 deven]

are you thinkin about sellin somethin? or even givin somethin to a beginer with a low buget?

[icenine]

[tinyreef]

that's an amazing looking crab! i love his coloration! what's he eating? are you feeding him?

 

btw, anymore more pics of your toadie? expanded or contracted.

[Schwazreef]

Looking great man. With no meetings over the summer I gotta check it out sometime. Sharky's is great. IMO they had the best vendor setup along with Rod's at IMAC. Find anything good for your dad's tank?

[icenine]

I had been feeding DT's reef diet Oyster Eggs. But for the past month I've been using a home made version of Borneman's recepie reef food that they go nuts over.

 

Schwaz, yep you gotta swing by... I have a gorg frag with your name on it still.

[spmedi]

So, icenine. What's your take on this tank for a newbie?

 

A little smaller than I wanted but looks like a nice all in one aquarium. Alternative to a nano, etc.

 

 

Thanks

[icenine]

I had talked to Steve (acrylicman) when I was planning my original tank. He does good work from what I hear. The only complaint I ever see is sometimes things are bit slow out of his shop, but if you have that in mind when ordering it should not be a big deal. I know he will add in some PC lighting to that set up and some fans. ..it's not a bad looking tank at all. The skimmer he has there is a "lift" of the cpr design like the one I had done for the first tank as well so I imagine it works pretty well. ..the only thing is that it's acrylic and WILL get scratched up.

[spmedi]

Yeah. I have a small freshwater acrylic.

 

I just want to start out with something fairly small. Then again this guy on ebay here (Indy) is moving and get rid of his 55gal. A little rough though. But at $300 what should I expect.