my reef GARden frenzY: March 2014

There are a number of updates for March 2014.

The first few photos are taken of one of my office tanks. In terms of lighting, it is looking good in the photos, unlike the home aquariums photos which I took using the same iphone camera.

For Tank 1, sadly it seems like all the purple algae are all eaten by the Tang. This algae was both a boon and a bane for me in that I love how it looks and it grows very fast but it spreads like wild fire. On the other hand, now that it's gone, I hope there are still some left for me to grow.

For Tank 2, I just added some sps recently and I am having a silicates problem with it now because I have been using tap water to top up the evaporated water. What is interesting is I finally knew what the strange snail is - a Cowry! The shell may be shiny but the mantle completely wraps around the shell and engulf it. The Sympodium coral is also growing very well and has almost covered the entire frag of rock.

The exciting news is I have ordered a 3 feet x 1.5 feet x 1.5 feet tank with a sump from East Ocean Aquatic about a week ago and it should be coming in probably a week's time. I shall name it Tank 3 and I am feeling very excited about it because I haven't had a 3 feet tank since the time I lived at Newton more than 8 years ago. Over the last year, I have gained a lot more experience and there are a lot of technological advancements e.g. LED lights, that have made marine or reef aquariums more colourful, interesting and sustainable. In addition, I started dabbling in sps and am rather confident that this time I should be able to make it look much better than months before, especially with the regular programmed dosing.

This should be the last post on the Tank 2 aquarium (the 56 litres, 1.5 feet cube) since I intend to decommission it and shift everything over to the main 3 feet display tank. For tank 1, I may not dismantle it since it takes up only a small footprint and can be used for keeping some stuff that cannot be kept in Tank 3.

The following are the livestock and technical updates:

Tank 1 (1 ft cube - 27 litres)
The list of livestock is as follows:

Fishes

Clown Fish
Flameback Angel
Purple Tang
Yellow Goby

Invertebrates

2 Cleaner Skunk Shrimps
2 Pom Pom Crabs
big red Hermit Crab & 3 small red Hermit Crabs
2 Turbo Snails
Nassarius Snail
1 big brown, 1 big yellow-brown, 1 purple and 2 small yellow Feather Duster worms
2 big and 1 small clams
Fromia starfish and red Linckia starfish