ITS HERE
ITS HERE
Well it's finally here, and so worth the wait! You guys this rock is beautiful, I had a hard time arranging it and not squishing life. First I will apologize because these pictures suck and don't do the tank justice, iPhone plus LED lights do not mix.
Picked up two boxes from the airport at about 1:30 today. One box was a bit wet but still ok
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Then it's time for that scary moment of opening the boxes, hoping everything made the trip ok. As I had hoped I opened the box and it smelled like the ocean!
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image by
jessica_haering, on Flickr[/IMG]. Everything was very well bagged and sealed, all of the live rock was mostly submerged in water.
Once I got into the bags I was even more amazed, I've never seen rock with so much life on it, my husband was getting a huge kick of all of the girly sqeeing, over cool new things
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There were more bags but by then I was too busy arranging and unpacking to dry off to take more pics lol
As I unpacked the rocks I removed a few tiny (body only about 1cm) gorilla crabs. I found a myriad of tiny pistol shrimp (grain of rice size) in a variety of colors, yellows, reds and blues. Found blue porcline crab, and a little ruby mirthrix crab, all who got to stay. They're corals all over the place on all of the rocks, encrusting sponges, and tons of colonial tunicates, I've found 5 diffrent minds/colors. There are bivalves all over too, I got a great big jewl box clam, I beleive.
Since I ordered the reef to go package I also got a number of critters, two nice size sea squirts, one of which looks like a heart in my tank. I received a long spine urchin, an beautiful lavender pincushion urchin, a cucumber, a red and black brittle star and a handful of snails.
Everything has been set for only a few hours and the corals have polyp extension, the sea squirts are startling when they pump, urchins have been wandering, snails busy, clam showing it's beaustiful yellow mantle, and brittle star being sneaky checking out the tank. Every thing is happy but the cucumber but he had a rough trip with a leaky bag. At this point everything looks very happy
Now for what you really want pics!
Brittle star who is actually much more red
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Full tank shot
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Top down
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Thank you everyone for taking a peak and sharing this journey. Feeling like I've got a good start here and can't wait to watch it grow