Marine Shots

Aquascaper

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This is my marine tank which has been up and running for only 4 weeks :D

Here's one of the red legged hermit crabs:
RedLegHermit.jpg


One of my Feather Dusters:
Feather.jpg


One of my soft corals (forgotten the name :*) ):
SoftCoral2.jpg


And a full shot of the right-hand end of the tank (with Yellowtail Blue damsel):
Reef.jpg


I tried to get a photo of the shrimp but he's sulking behind the rocks :sly:
 
Aquascaper said:
:p @ Sun

It's really not that hard as long as you have a bottomless wallet and people you can go to for advice :X
Bottomless wallet?
 
bottomless wallet meaning from tanks sizing from 29g-55g its about $2,000 to have it set up compleatly.
 
nice tanks
if I had that kind of money, I would just get a very large freshwater tank, like really big
n e way, nice tank, good pix
 
Nice tank :clap:

Just a question, I thought salt water tanks have to cycle for like 2-3 months before adding fish, then like 4 months before adding corals. Is there something you did to shorten the time?
 
I don't know what happened in this case, but you can cycle your salt tanks with live rock and most live rock comes with inverts and corals attached/living in :thumbs:
 
To clear up the mystery:

4kg of the live rock came from a previous marine tank that had been going for 6 months (along with the damsels and some inverts).
26kg of the live rock came from a previous marine tank that had been going for 2 years.
All the live rock had/has good healthy coraline growth (the purple stuff) and has lots of little fans, etc. all over it.
The tank was run with the internal filter from the 6 month old tank for 3 weeks to help the Eheim Mech in the filter chamber seed.
Nothing was added for the first 3 weeks to allow the tank to settle and die-off to finish and only when the water parameters were perfect did I add more inverts and some soft corals.
I took a water sample to my LFS who tested it and had a look at it under a microscope (he's nothing if not thorough) and even he was surprised at the maturity of the tank and the fact that I have a healthy colony of copepods (tiny white wriggly things that live in the sand and rock) and other organisms. The tank is nowhere near the level of maturity needed to add more fish but it is stable enough to add soft corals and a few inverts.
In many ways a marine tank is like a tropical in the way that it can be 'cycled' in a shorter time using existing filter medium/substrate (in this case the live rock and internal filter).
It's amazing to watch as everytime you look at the live rock there's something new growing on it and I would recommend anyone to have a go at setting a marine tank up if they have the resources, they are so cool to watch :D
 
awesome. one last question. how often do you change the water and do you use R/O water? If so, do you buy it or do you have a R/O filter at home? I wanna know because I want to start a marine too :D
 
konrad05 said:
awesome. one last question. how often do you change the water and do you use R/O water? If so, do you buy it or do you have a R/O filter at home? I wanna know because I want to start a marine too :D
I buy pre-mixed saltwater from my lfs for $1.00 a gallon. I just started mine on Tuesday so I haven't done any water changes yet :p
 
I'm yet to do a water change :D At the moment I have little or no Nitrates in the tank so I was advised by my LFS to leave the water as it will help everything settle. When I do I will be using R/O water bought from the LFS (until I get my own R/O unit). I'm really not looking forward to doing it as it took a while to get the salt level correct when I filled the tank in the first place so I imagine it will be just as hard mixing up the 'fresh' water :/

Anyway, I bought a new soft coral today :D:
Mushroom.jpg


And just for -Chewy-:
01-10-04.jpg


And my current computer wallpaper:
Blue.jpg

(Taken under UV + blue actinic lighting)

AND.................when I got the mushroom coral home and put it in my tank out popped a Cowrie!!!
It had to do a quick search on the internet to find out what effect he would have on my tank inhabitants and it seems he's an algae eater so won't harm anything :D (He's hiding under some rock so I can't get a picture just now but will post one when he comes out)

What a bonus :D
 

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