Sea Urchin, Condy & Flower Anemones

This weekend we added a sea urchin:


This guy is pretty cool.  It's hard to see in the picture, but he has an orange ring on the bubble in the middle of his body (which we call his eye) and several white and blue spots on his body.  For something with so many spines sticking out everywhere, he gets around very well.  The other marine life don't seem to mind him much either, but the best thing about him - he eats algae!  :)

We also added a condy anemone (left) and a flower anemone (right):












Neither of these anemone's are a good host for clown fish (we just think they're 'pretty' LOL).  In fact, the condy is kinda... sticky!  You have to be careful with him and peel him off of you, as we learned while putting him in the tank.  He's also great at grabbing his mysis shrimp and gobbling them up.  He could do the same to a small fish if he got the notion and he'll sting, too - even corals.  That's why he got put in an "out of the way" place under an arch of live rock in the tank.  Both anemone's have stayed in place, unlike our first rose-tip, bubble anemone.  He once again floated on up in the overflow box and I had to dig him out with a hanger.  Ack!  Here is another picture of him after his "split."















The photo on the right (above) is another picture of the frogspawn (taken with the "good" camera this time).  Frogspawn is another type of invertebrate that clown fish sometimes like to host in.  We're hoping since we've had so much trouble with the other anemone that maybe the clown fish will be able to host in this, though they haven't taken to either yet.  We're considering getting another, much larger "tree" of frogspawn, but wanted to see how it would fair in the tank first.  Our research says that frogspawn is pretty easy to keep.

Here are pictures of the Xenia's & Mushroom Coral (left) and Kenya trees (right) that I didn't include in the last post:















The Xenia's are the light pink (all though in this picture they look more peach) coral.  They look like small hands whose fingers are constantly opening and closing to catch things in the water to eat.  They're pretty cool.

Clown Fish, Anemone, & Frogspawn

First, here's a current picture of the tank:

I really should have been better about keeping this updated, but the end of school and a wedding have kept us quite busy for the past few months!

Our most recent additions include two ocellaris clown fish (named Marlon & Coral, of course), an anemone (that has now become two smaller anemones), and frogspawn. The large anemone wasn't too happy with where we tried to place him in the tank. He kept moving around, sliding off the rock, and even lost his grip and got caught in the tank's current and was being swept all over the tank! We figure something similar to that must have happened when we were sleeping one night, because we awoke one morning to find him caught up in the mesh cover of the overflow box. He'd been sucked to it and split into three pieces. We were able to save two of the pieces, keep on eye on them in the sump for a few days, and then had them moved back to the main tank. They seem to be thriving so far, tho they prefer to hide and it disappoints us not to be able to see them on display. We're hoping they'll warm up to "sunning" on the rock more. Here is a picture of the anemone "before and after."

They are somewhat difficult to see in the second picture; as I said, they like to hide, but you can see some of their "tentacles" (?) sticking out from the rock. You may also notice the "blurred" clownfish in this picture. Here is a better picture of them as well as a picture of the frogspawn.

Let's see what I can remember about what's been happening in the aquarium since the last update...

We did purchase a couple of three stripes, but they both ended up dying. We never did get pictures of them before they died. And, all though I hate to lose any fish, this was probably for the best because they were QUITE aggressive fish! We have also lost one of the blue velvet damsels, one of the yellow-tail damsels, and both shrimp. In total, we have added about 6 more hermit crabs, 4 turbo snails (now down to 3), and 4 zebra snails.

We also purchased another 20-30 lbs. of live rock and 20 lbs. of live sand. The live rock we got this time came with some life on it! The pink, tree looking corals on the right of the tank are called Kenya trees. A rock on the bottom to the left of that (which you really can't see in the photo above) came with some mushroom coral and Xenias growing on it. The mushroom coral started out as a VERY bright green color. However, the summer heat (or so we think) raised the water temperature a few degrees. This seemed to have a rather adverse effect on the coral and for a while we weren't sure everything growing on those rocks was going to make it. However the Xenias and Kenya tress have perked up again and the mushroom coral, while it still has more of a translucent white color now, does seem to be hanging in there. We've learned how to feed the coral by crushing up mysis shrimp and feeding them directly through a syringe. We have also cut down on feeding the fish flake food and have begun feeding them mysis shrimp as well. We hope this will help with our cyano problem.

Yes, we still have quite a large problem with cyano; it seems to be quite resistant (or the chemical we used to treat wasn't worth a flip!) to everything we've tried. We know the water conditions are well within specifications and we've tried keeping the lights out for several days, increasing the current in the tank, more frequent water changes, and finally removed the affected rock (which was nearly all of it) and treated it with chemiclean in separate tubs. The chemiclean treatment seemed to work after a few days because the bright red fuzzy looking algae turned into brown spots on the rock. However, it has come back and is just as bad, if not worse, than before. We've basically run out of ideas on what in the world to do about it.

We've had our sump up and running for about a month now. We ended up having to toss the pipework Josh worked so hard to build for getting water to the sump and found an overflow box on sale. The overflow dumps water from the main tank into the right side of the sump, the water flows through baffles to the center of the sump where we keep a few snails, hermits, chaeto, live sand, and small pieces of live rock. From there the water spills into the left side of the sump that contains some store-bought filtration (biological, chemical, and mechanical) left over from our old AquaClear filters (pre-sump) where it is pumped back up into the main tank. The tank seemed to go through an adjustment period after we removed the HOB filters and used only the sump. This is when much of our fish death occurred, even though the water readings indicated that everything remained within acceptable levels. We did read that it is typical for tanks to go through this kind of adjustment phase when switching filtration systems.

Now that we've started making our own water with the RO/DI filter, we have run into some water quality issues. Apparently, the PH of this water requires some adjusting to keep it within acceptable levels, so we have had to use a PH additive to maintain the correct PH levels in the tank. We've also learned that the instant ocean salt we add to the water does not contain the correct level of magnesium. We are still researching this and other water additives that will be beneficial to corals, reef, and other marine life we plan to maintain in the tank.

Now, I'll just need to do better about keeping this updated so I don't have to remember quite so much and make such a long entry next time! ;-)