Vacation Stress

I’m just returning from one week hiking around Utah with the family and we put some neighbors in charge of watching over the tank.   You can’t imagine my relief to return and find that the tank was just fine without me for a week and maybe slightly better off since no one was moving the corals around on a daily basis!

Aclamating the snails and sea cucumbers…

Adding the snails and sea cucumbers…, originally uploaded by tyrsdomain.

Here’s a fun shot of my son and myself adding the Reef Tank Tuneup to our tank.

Full Tank

Full Tank, originally uploaded by tyrsdomain.

Here is a full-view shot of our aquarium after we added the Reef Tank Tuneup. You’ll have to forgive the reflection of our patio!

Overall, everything seems pretty smooth two days after adding the coral, snails and two pink cucumbers…

Yoyo Coral

Yoyo Coral, originally uploaded by tyrsdomain.

While the Yoyo is one of the largest specimens in the aquarium, I haven’t done much research on him… The reality is that he is HUGE and seems to grow bigger by the day. He dominates the left side of the tank.

For better or worse, my research to date has been focused on the animals in distress, but that is not a good reason to neglect this very cool coral..

Emerald Crab

Emerald Crab, originally uploaded by tyrsdomain.

This is the best photo I’ve been able to take of our Emerald Crab so far…

Right-side of the tank

Wide Open Fiji Coral, originally uploaded by tyrsdomain.

Nothing new in this photo, but I really like it…

Both the Toadstool and the Leather Coral are wide open… Plus the photo has one of our snails and a clownfish!

Dueling Groups

It appears that there are two active fish groups in the LA area:

• MASLAC (Yahoo Group)
• LAFishFanatics (Yahoo Group)

The S. Cal Marine Aquarium Society (out of Orange Co.) also looks interesting and just had a “frag swap”… Very cool.

Reef Tank Tuneup to Clean Up the Hair Algae?

We went ahead and ordered the reef tank tuneup from Indo-Pacific Sea Farms…

So, as of Friday evening, we should have:

• 3 Hawaiian Trocus Grazers (Trochus intextus)
• 1 Hawaiian Turbo Grazer (Turbo sandwicensis)
• 12 Nerite Grazers (Nerita sp.)
• 12 MicroHermits (Calcinus sp.)
• 12 Strombus Grazers (Strombus maculatus)
• 2 Pinky Cuke (Holothuria sp.)
• 6 Hawaiian Littorinid Grazers (Littoraria sp.)

We’re definitely look forward to this arrival as we don’t have too many grazers at the moment and I think this group will enjoy our influx of hair algae… Time will tell.

Moving of the Rose Open Brain Coral

The Trachyphyllia geoffroyi was at his very smallest when I got home from work today and it definitely concerned me. Since I have learned he is a lagoon dweller normally found on sand or muddy bottoms and we have him on a rock (same as previous owner), I’ve been meaning to do some more research on him. One of the first sites I found seems well-informed and starts with the advice that T. geoffroyi should never be put on rocks:

We begin first with a bit of history and general information on Trachyphyllia for improved care in reef aquariology. T. geoffroyi is a free-living animal at maturity and can be found in lagoons and protected margins of the reef buried in sand or muddy substrates. They should always be maintained as such in display. The conical skeleton of this species has evolved to serve this very orientation specifically. Placement of these animals upon rocky substrates can sometimes lead to abraded tissue from daily polyp cycles (expansion and contraction) or displacement when an inflated animal becomes imbalanced.

Based on this information, I made some space in a sandy portion of the bottom of our tank and I moved him there… I’ll try to follow up with photos soon.

Clean Up Crew…

Looking around at some of the options I have for clean up crews on the tank, I’m really liking the captive bred options available from Indo-Pacific Sea Farms and their Reef Tank Tuneup in particular.  I may even go with an extra Pink Cuke because I really like the idea of at least a few cucumbers in the tank to stir up the sand…

When big is not big enough…

This guy needs a blog!

A guy going by the handle Goodwin has been posting his adventures in building out a 600 gallon reef tank on the Vivid Aquarium forum. Fascinating.

Venture Capitalists Want to Put Some Algae in Your Tank

Venture Capitalists Want to Put Some Algae in Your Tank – New York Times

But Lissa Morgenthaler-Jones and her husband, David Jones, are betting their careers and personal fortunes that they can grow masses of the slimy organism and use its natural photosynthesis process to produce a plentiful supply of biofuel.

Does the future hold a time when we can grow are gas in our living room?

Flickr Photo

There are so many different Flickr groups related to reef fishes and aquariums it is hard to know where to start on that site.  Nonetheless, I joined a group simply called aquarium and posted my first photo! 

Center View with Dottyback

Center View with Dottyback, originally uploaded by tyrsdomain.

This photo is one of the cleanest I have of the center of the tank. I decided to publish this because I wanted to have a place to start talking about the Sunrise Dottyback (Pseudochromis flavivertex) and he’s such a fast little guy, that this is the only good photo I have so far!

Octopus Frogspawn Coral (Genus: Euphyllia)

Octopus Frogspawn Coral (Genus: Euphyllia), originally uploaded by tyrsdomain.

This is one guy I haven’t exactly figured out yet…  While similar to the already identified, this one was called an “octopus” coral by the previous owner. However, it appears that a lot of different species under the genus Euphyllia divisia are called Octopus Coral, so that hasn’t helped my research much.

Once I can identify them all, I’ll be in a much better place to solidify their eating habits.  The good news is that this Euphyllia has been growing quite a bit and often extends his tentacles by over an inch, so I’m pretty sure he’s happy for the time being.

Also of note is that he is definitely poisonous to other coral as he seriously wounded our disk coral one day when he inched a little bit too close (they’ve since been moved far apart and the disk coral is doing much better!).

Neon Green Mushroom (Ricordea florida)

Neon Green Mushroom (?), originally uploaded by tyrsdomain.

This is a photo of the Ricordea florida identified in the previous post!

Neon Green Mushroom

The previous owner of the fishtank mentioned that we have a Neon Green Mushroom.

Our unidentified species looks quite close (although inconclusively similar) to the photo on this page: Ricordea Mushroom – Super Neon Green, so, I’m going to call our guy a Neon Green Mushroom (Ricordea florida) until I learn otherwise…

Center View with Dottyback

Center View with Dottyback, originally uploaded by tyrsdomain.

This view shows much of the life we have in the tank… I’ll work on getting a larger photo that shows all the life!