I decided to downgrade...

After a lot of thought & some personal reasons, I've decided to sadly give up my reef tank and keep a smaller tank instead. I'm planning on keeping seahorses. I kept some of my live rock & sand with a few gorgs. I'm also trying to grow some macro algae, which is proofing a bit hard! I remember when I had my large reef that algae was a no-no as people don't really like the look of it. But with a seahorse tank, you have to have it - it's part of their natural habitat. And it's so expensive to buy! Anyway, here is what I've done so far...

8th June 2008:

Here is the tank. Water going in:



Adding live rock. For those of you that's wondering, all the live rock, water & sand is from my MATURE setup. If you so this from scratch, you have to cycle your tank first before adding livestock.



After all the live rock went in:





The liverock wasn't very stable, so I added some egg crate (the white stuff you can see sticking out) to make a little platform. This 'platform' is on a egg crate box that is behind the rocks. I've stuck a power head behind the egg crate to filter the water behind the rock. The egg crate doesn't look very nice, but it will hopefilly get overgrown with algae soon.



Here's is a pic of the algae I've added so far.





The CAULERPA PROLIFERA I got is very fragile and got sucked into the powerhead :( It somehow unwrapped itself from the rocks I placed it on. This is what the algae looks like...like green ribbons...
I'm going to get some more I try to plant then in the sand.



15 June 2008:
I got some fake sea grass & a orange ornament. This is for the seahorses to hold onto. I hate the look of the fake grass, but my banggaii loves hiding behind it so I don't have the heart to take it out. Hopefully I will have more 'vegetation' growing soon that will hide it.

Green Chromis Laying Eggs!

A couple of weeks ago I saw something on the back glass panel that looked like it could be eggs.
The white spots were tiny, so I thought maybe it copepods or something like that.

Everyday I would see a new area covered. Well today I was very pleased to see who was responsible. My green chromis!!! I've got six. From what I could make out 3 of them are females. Only the one male was fertilizing the eggs at the time I observing. The females would make turn laying the eggs while the male swims with them & also afterwards in circles.
It was really cool to see this behavior!

Here's a clip:



Here are some pics:

More Pics :)

All is well part 2 :-)

Here's some pics of my fish:

Algae Blennie:



Green Chromis



Green Chromis



My lovely Mandarin (doing very well, nice & fat)



Peek-a-boo!! :-D

Everything is still going well :-)

Since I've added the new sand & green chromis, everything is going really well. Every one is happy :-)

I did however notice that my Asterina population is getting out of control. Asterinas are really small little starfish, good guys. But if they get out of control, they can start to smother some corals.

Here's one on the glass:

Close up:

There's to many to remove by hand, so I got some Harlequin shrimps that eats star fish. These guys are still small, nothing bigger that a 5pence piece. But gorgeous!!! Click on the photos to enlarge:

And here they are with their 1st dinner in my tank!! :-D Click on the photos to enlarge - I've circled the asterina:

Feeding Time!!

Changing the look of My Tank

After some advice I decided to change my sandbed and clean my back glass. I've also added some lovely blue & purple gorgonians and 6 green chromis.

Taking out my old sand bed:

Here I've started to add the new sand:

Now I have to wait for the cloudiness to settle. After a couple of hours:

9pm last night:



This morning, after I cleaned as much of the back glass I could reach:

After adding some new fishies: