Pleco - I was in bio lab, we were looking at growth rates of corn seeds when certain hormones and environmental conditions were introduced...
Brenda - The tank is good. The 55 is going to be a Hypo tank, all the rock but 1 piece and about 4/5ths of the sand has been removed, the rest is in there to keep the sand sifting goby alive and not move his home. The 20 long that the purple used to be in is the coral tank right now with all the corals, crabs, stars, shrimp, etc....My room right now has about 250lbs of LR in buckets and about 200lbs of Live Sand in styrofoam coolers, I will figure out something else to do with them but in the short term it was the only option. All the die off will be rinsed off before its put back in the tank, im not too worried about any of it really. When I originally set the 55 up the rock sat dry in the garage in the winter for a month, the way I look at it its rock and sand, whats really going to happen to it.
All the fish are happy and still eating, the only casualty to report was a hermit that ended up in the bottom of a bucket last night that I found today, he was pretty dry, poor little guy.
I think im going to drill the 90 tomorrow after i get back from morning class and can have dad help me take it outside and hold the hose while I drill, and then im going to support the stand and sand down the overflow tomorrow, get that installed hopefully thursday, and then get the eggcrate down on the tank bottom, figure out where its final place is going to be, and get working on the rocks. All this time lowering the salinity in the DT when I get the refractometer. I have been doing that slowly without the refractometer, when the water level plumeted as I was removing rock and sand half the replacement water, about 3 gallons, was just DI water, so nothing too insane but enough to get this ball rolling, its looking at about 1.024 from 1.025 3 days ago, which is fine i believe.
And...just bare with me, the test kit for the ammonia was checked!
-Salifert - .025
-API - 1
So, we know that its a crap test, and the salifert reading does not surprise me at all considering all the crap that was thrown into the water stream over the past few days from all the movement. There will be another update later and MAYBE a few pics, i have to find the camera first...