looking great! Nice corals and fish! Looks like an established system already.
Thanks Val! The corals, clams, and rock were moved in together from an established tank, so I can't take all the credit for the quick results. It has been a pretty desperate task to get it all moved over. I haven't lost a fish yet, and aside from the corals I didn't keep, (in particular one large leather) all of the corals appear as healthy as they were before the move.
David, I see you haven't placed the curtain above the tank, how's that project going?
I am going to wait two weeks on that, I have a quote in hand from a maker of tracks but I want to be sure I have time to install it when it arrives.
Also, I see your chromis are schooling, did you do something to achieve this? My chromis are just in one spot in the tank, (mostly on the sandbed) and not even close on swimming together, they are eating and look healthy but very passive.
thanks.
My whole strategy with this tank was to add a large number of fish all at the same time, to give the tank a "schooling" effect before any of the fish can become territorial.
Note: This is
not a strategy for everyone, you really have to know what you are doing, and be able to recognize signs of stress and monitor the water quality carefully.
Fish on the reef have two "modes", they can guard a tiny piece of the reef for themselves, or they can school in well-populated feeding areas. I tried hard to simulate the latter, and so far it has succeeded. In the tank I moved most of my fish from, many of these fish were so reclusive they were never seen. The same fish are socializing in the tank with the best of them.
Looking good DB :Thumbup:
Hows the eel doing?
He's doing well, though he probably wonders where all the other fish came from haha. He has a well established routine of nighttime prowling, so we try to feed him when he is on the move.
Part of my "social" fish strategy involves the eel, the other fish can't tell a zebra moray from a snowflake, and he is the king of the rockwork.
Couple of updates:
• Between my lawnmower blenny and orange spotted goby, much of the hair algae in the tank was quickly eaten. This influx of nutrients caused an algae bloom in my seagrass tank that threatened to overrun the Thalassia, and in fact still does.
It has been a maddening race to harvest the algae from the seagrass tank, at one point the overflow actually clogged to where the tank began to overflow. I filled a 1-gallon bucket with the goop the day after introducing the blenny.
I don't expect this kind of problem in the future, as there won't be a month's worth of hair algae for the blenny to consume in a day.
• I tweaked the back overflow risers until they run silent. Very silent. Bubbles almost undetectable in the main tank. I'm pumping the full 4000 GPH smoothly since this morning.
I'll post pics over the weekend, and a list of fish next week. List of inverts ... you are going to have to give me two weeks on that one. It has been
crazy the last week, hence my slow reply to the posts. (could use a bit more sleep also :blueoh