75g w/ 33g frag tank system

Thanks for coming along for the ride and confirming that people do still look at this occasionally. ;D

 

I'm jonesing for a full tank shot. Any chance you could oblige me?

 

I've taken some pictures and video the last day or two but haven't had the time to sort through it all. I'll see what I can put together soon! Honestly the display doesn't look like much still since there's no coral in it. All the coral's in the frag tank. I'll see what I can do about that too. I still have some iffy pieces though. I can't get some coral to color back up from the old tank.

 

This is all the useable stuff I've come up with in the last day or two. I haven't had a lot of time to put into it and my camera doesn't allow for anything fancy video-wise and I certainly haven't edited anything, but I figured I'd throw this up unedited and all just for an idea of how the tank looks now.
It might be difficult to tell the fish apart if you're not familiar with them. The orangeish ones (there are 3) are the McCoskers flashers wrasses, there are 2 large ones and one small one. The largest and most active is the male. He actually does a little bit of flashing in this which is kind of cool because it depends on his mood whether he actually does anything besides hang out.
The purplish one with the yellow dorsal fin is the Lubbocki fairy wrasse.
The reddish one with the very white belly is the female fairy wrasse which is yet to be adequately identified but I think is a female Conde's fairy wrasse.
The sub-adult (possibly female) McCoskers has been hanging out in the upper righthand corner lately, I'm not sure if this is due to the introduction of the new fish or if it's just comfy up there or the male might be a little intimidating at times but I still see them hanging out together a lot seemingly comfortably so who knows.
I've also seen the "Conde's" wrasse trying to intimidate her a little bit so that may have something to do with it.
No serious fighting by any means. I'm actually pretty comfortable with how the introduction happened, especially between the McCoskers, I was a little worried that the new female/juvenile might get a tough time from the existing McCoskers but it came in with no problem. It might have something to do with the fact that it's like 1/3 of the size of the smaller of the two previous McCoskers.
The Yashia goby is unseen in here (you might be able to see a little bit of her dorsal filament on the left side behind a rock earlier on but I'm not sure), she didn't even come out for the second meal tonight but I think she got a big meal of Rod's fish eggs earlier tonight.

I'm getting some nasty reflections off of the back of the tank even though I haven't cleaned it in weeks, hence all the spirorbid-type worms and coralline spots. I'm going to have to get around to trying to fix it more permanently and maybe that might take away a little bit of that reflection.

Well, that's it for now. Maybe next will be some frag tank shots, but we'll see, I'm still not happy with how some of the coral is doing after the move from my old much more unstable tank.
Overall I'm happy with the progress other than that. My calcium reactor is humming along nicely keeping things very stable with no fuss. My nitrates and phosphates have been basically undetectable (like .02 nitrates on the high precision Salifert kit at most).

I'll be getting an Apogee PAR meter tomorrow, I believe, from Aquarium Specialty as well as one of the new Hanna Phosphate checkers so I'll probably have some more stuff to post after that. I'm really looking forward to doing the PAR checking especially, I may need to make some adjustments to my lights based on the tests. I may consider putting some coral into the display tank as well once I get that testing done. I have a favia that I just remounted so it can encrust onto a new frag plug that I'm planning on moving into the display.

I'm thinking right now for a lot of corals I will just frag a piece off of the piece that I have right now and keep a healthy frag in the frag tank and move the main bit into the display tank once I feel comfortable with it.

There will probably be some exceptions, like I may move my whole Duncan colony into the display since I'm planning on keeping that on a separate rock not affixed to the main rockwork that you see now. I have a lot of room behind the left half of the right island, I'm planning on putting something back there, possibly the Duncan and maybe a staghorn acro (a little higher up, possibly on a magnet rock which I may try to hide with the Duncan colony somwhat) which may put some depth into the tank, but it's going to have to look right. I don't want something sticking out obviously. Although who knows how that's going to change once I get it in the tank, these are just some ideas I'm tossing around in my head.

Anyways, here's the video.

(and in case that youtube link doesn't work)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwMKZ8qKaRo

 

Mmm, due to looking at/learning about too many different wrasses lately, I'd say your unidentified wrasse is a Cirrhilabrus roseafascia.

 

Thanks for checking, that's one I haven't heard yet, roseafascia. I'm not sure I agree but there aren't a lot of photos of females available that I could find quickly online, so it could be. I wasn't able to find one with the top half of the dorsal fin being black though which is the primary distinguishing feature to me from other similar female Cirrhilabrus species.

I'd like to get some more pictures taken this weekend maybe and get some closeups of the fish now that it's been settled into my tanks for almost 2 months. The dorsal half of the body has darkened up significantly and it flashes the black part of it's dorsal fin much more now and it's much darker.


A separate behavior update. My male McCoskers has become extremely aggressive towards the air-fish in the last few days after I introduced these other fish. He goes through phases in the evenings where he gets very agitated and displays/flashes at his reflection and attacks the glass for long periods of time (close to an hour, if not longer). He shows zero aggression towards any of the new fish though so I don't know if they have anything to do with the change in his behavior or if it's just coincidence. Hopefully he calms down a bit over the next few days, if he keeps going at it for a lot longer I'm afraid he might hurt himself attacking the glass.

 

Great aquascape. I need to work on a creative scape for the cube.

Thanks for posting the video. I like that you didn't try to move around and show us stuff. Videos with lots of moving around make me seasick.

 

Thanks! I'm liking it so far too, there are maybe a couple little things I would do differently if I had to do it over again, the left island is a little too close to the back wall and some other little things as well.
I highly recommend getting a bunch of dry rock and fitting it together on a piece of cardboard with an outline of the tank dimensions on it. It really helps get an idea of how much room you'll have and how much rock you'll need in the tank. I think it worked really well for me. Of course there are little things I would do differently next time about that as well. Having more experience with drilling rock will help me out next time around.

I've tried getting some more pictures of some of the fish but nothing has turned out well yet.

I took my PAR meter through my display and frag tank today. I really need to find something to affix it too, maybe use some PVC or something and have it on the end, it's really difficult to get good readings, especially at the bottom of the display tank with one arm all the way in the tank almost, trying not to cast a shadow on the sensor and trying to keep the sensor pointed up.

I was pleasantly surprised by how much PAR I have in the display tank, on the sand in most areas I was getting between 90-130 PAR or so. Midway up the rocks I was mostly in the high 100's to maybe 250. The tops of the rocks were from 250 to 350. I was actually somewhat surprised to see 350 popping up.
On the other hand my frag tank was somewhat disappointing although I only had 2 of the 3 T5 bulbs on for the test since I need to have my arm in the tank right now my UVL actinic bulb could not be on the tank since it's attached to the lid that flips up, so that would have bumped things up a little bit but we'll see once I get some sort of holder put together for the sensor.
The bottom of the tank where some of my chalices are recovering from the old tank was somewhere around 40 and the highest it got up by my Acros was 240 or so. With another bulb on there it will be slightly better though.

I moved my hitchhiking fungia (came in on my live rock from my old tank) from my frag tank into the display as well today, it was getting crowded by my frogspawn and hammer coral and I thought I'd give it a shot and put some more interesting stuff in the display. I'll probably be putting some zoas in as well soon, probably a frag of my fire and ice colony. Having a PAR meter really puts my mind at ease and makes placing coral much easier, I know the light levels won't be exactly the same especially because the light spectrum will be quite different but it will be close. The first spot I put the fungia was on the bottom in the middle of the tank but after I checked it with the PAR meter it was over 150 or so which was much much higher than where it was in the frag tank, so I put it slightly under the bridge where the PAR was only 90-100 much closer to the frag tank lighting. I'll see how it does there and then try adjusting it to anoter location with more light. I'm interested to see if it colors up at all, it's always been pretty much brown.

 

Picture time for some coral.

This is my "Joker" paly budding out 2 new polyps, I started with 1 and it's been in the process of budding for about a week now but with 2 polyps coming up now I'm happy.


General picture of one of the frag racks that houses some of my higher light corals. Some of the frags are in a little bit of rough shape or browned out a big still from my last tank where I had issues but things are starting to come around now. The Lobophyllia you see on the left here really seems to love the higher light, I think it's around 200 PAR, maybe just a little less. You'll also see the a purple haze monti in the front, a random encrusting montipora, an orange monti setosa, a purple/green tort, a tricolor prostrata is sorta hiding in shadows behind the Lobo, something similar to a green body w/ blue tip tenuis, a tricolor valida-ish piece that hasn't regained all of it's purple yet, a green millepora in the back and a browned out plana I believe although you can see the bright green growth rim on it which should be the bulk of the color fading into teal at some point.


Kind of a poor picture of a high light watermelon chalice and a reddish/orange digitata and a purple cap in the front.


Some Zoas, an Acan frag and on the far right a sliver of my PPE favia which is really coloring up nicely, I should have gotten a full picture of that, maybe next time.

 

Also I'd just like to keep these links to some non-photosynthetic links in here because I think they're pretty incredible and I love the frozen food auto-feeder that Steve Weast is using, but I'm sure he's not the first person to pioneer this route.


Aquabacs' Cadlights Artisan 50 Azooxanthellae Tank build - Reef Central Online Community

The autofeeder Steve Weast uses. Discussed in the thread above on like page 29.



ADA 120-P + Elos Mini dual NPS tank journal - Reef Central Online Community