HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Well, Here we are at new years eve, and the tank is operational and has gone through a few last minute changes since my last update. 

At this time if you have not visited Pages 1 and Page 2, I highly recommend it.
This is not your average fish tank.

The picture is a little distorted by the camera lense, but I am too shaky to take it at a distance and still get a nice clear shot (I quit drinking coffee a few weeks ago and haven't been the same since). If you click on the picture, you will get a nice 1024x768 view. If you compare this to the previous pages, you will see three new things - Fish, Live Rock, and Wave Maker diffusers.

I added about 30lbs of Cured Live Rock to help jump-start the biological system. I suppose I could have mail-ordered uncured rock to make it go faster, but I was a little impatient and the local dealer had this in stock for a great price. I bought a lot of small peices and dispersed it around the 200lbs of base rock, then I took some large chunks and piled it up in the rear and down in front. Finally, I added the Coral-Skeleton tree and fan (both fiberglass) which my daughters gave me for Christmas.

I'm sure that there are a few purist who are going to gauk at this point. First of all, the base rock is white and exposed in many areas. Second of all, there are a few artificial decorations that are quite out of place in a true reef system. My philosophy is this:

"So what? I like it - after all, this is my living space - not the Baltimore Aquarium"

However, just so I don't offend anyone from now on, I will heretoforth refer to this as a hybrid-reef. 

I like show-fish as well as invertibrates even though getting them to live together will surely be a challenge.
(Now he's getting cocky!)

I messed around with the wave system for a long time and found that I really wanted to do something about the incredible force of the 1-1/2" jets. Besides blowing all of my base media around, I was worried that it would be a little too much for the fish.

After a few really long evenings of experimentation, I got it working well in the form that it is shown here.
It was truly amazing that it took this long, because when I initially put it together it just worked without much tweaking. As soon as I put the diffusers on, the whole thing stopped working completely. I could get it to work off and on. I could make one side work by increasing the water flow into the bucket. But I could not get both to work reliably with the amount of water that I was pumping. I was definately not about to add another pump to the system - or buy a larger one.

Needless to say, I learned a lot more about how this thing ticks than I did when I started (even though I invented it to begin with). I will be documenting all of this as best as I can in a page dedicated to this system - in case someone else would like to try it. 

I will probably replace these with something that is a little less of an eye-sore if they don't get adaquately covered with algae or something.

"OREO"

Yup, they named them. I wanted to get a couple of fish to cycle the tank that I could take back to the pet shop, and my daughters gave them names the minute they saw them in the tank.

Oh, well - maybe I'm stuck with them, or maybe they'll fall prey to a future 4" Maroon-Clown (he-he).
For now their cute, and cheap, and will create enough waste to get the bio-system cycled-in.

For those of you who are not in the hobbie, these are damselfish. They are like the goldfish of the ocean - they are very hardy and cheap ($5.00 - $7.00 which is cheap for marine fish). They are also very nasty and will not tolerate like colored fish unless the tank is VERY large. 
They will actually pester fish three times their size! 

Shown above are:
SKY: Yellow-Tailed Chromis
DOMINO: Hawaiian Three-Spot
OREO: Black-Tailed Humbug.

I would give you the latin names, but I'm sure you don't care.

Marine aquarists usually buy these fish to start the biological system in their tank. During this startup, ammonia and nitrate levels in the tank get very high for a few weeks. This is lethal to most marine animals, but the damsels can survive it (seemingly without noticing). There are about a google-plex articles on aquarium bio-systems on the web, so I will not go into it deeper. In short, this is a step that must be done, and it always takes 6-8 weeks before you can add any show animals to the aquarium.
There is NO shortcut.

I keep thinking that someone should come up with some kind of damselfish rental service. You know, rent a few damsels for 10 weeks, then send them back for someone else to use.
I've never met anyone who actually wanted to keep them.

COMING SOON

Unless something really bizarre happens, I will not be adding anything else here until late February. 
However, I still intend to document the wave maker and electrical system, so stay tuned!

If you are interested in being notified when updates occur (or anything else), send me an email.

Thanks for visiting.

email me: ted@guarriello.net

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