Sorry I have not had time to post for a while. Been busy working on the tank and making trips to LFS for the tank.
From the time I got it, I put in some Real reef rock, live sand, and allowed it to cycle.It was doing so at a slow and steady pace. Meanwhile, I purchased some live rock from KP Aquatics which were due to arrive in January. So, I told myself that I had plenty of time.
One day before christmas, I suddenly got a notification that KP Aquatics managed to get my order fulfilled before christmas and live rock is coming the next day! Great news but somewhat in a panic. Luckily we had plans to be home the next day.
Anyway live rock arrived in great shape and looked stunning in my opinion. There were plenty of hitch hikers including brittle star fish that were still alive. I put two in my tank. I even saw a half dying pistol shrimp and 2 crabs (probably injured from the shipping). I had ordered the dry packaging delivery from KP Aquatics.
Perhaps if you buy them in water, they would still be fine. I was buying the live rock mostly for aquascaping. So, it did not really matter to me. I soaked them in a big plastic box for a day to get rid of the dying stuff, and moved the rocks into the tank the following day. My wife and I were excited to see what came out of the live rock afterwards.
One day and a couple of water changes later, everything was doing well in the tank. My wife noticed a small apstasia thing coming off on one rock2 days. So, I got a peppermint shrimp the next day. Now i do not see it anymore.
We also noticed multiple 'fan' things like soft corals. They are open. So, i guess they are probably happy. The shrimp did not eat them which is great.
So, i decided to upgrade the lights to a hydra 32, and got a nero 3 wavemaker in case there were some nice corals that were coming out.The hardware is great but what a piece of s*!# app! It took me a long time of figuring things out to get the dang bluetooth to connect, and then now getting my wife's phone to connect to it.
Anyway, things looked good as of yesterday, and we decided to make a jump and buy 2 juv clown fish yesterday at the LFS. They are doing great. We noticed that the smaller one had somewhat of sticky whitish poop. I am not sure whether its due to parasite or frozen mysis diet. We medicated the tank with prazipro just in case.
As of now, we have noticed that a small crab is hiding somewhere in the rock, the starfish that seems to hide in the sand or under a rock...and we have a weird strange thing that looks like a spaghetti worm behind the rock somewhere! it looks freaky.
I am thinking of getting 2 royal gramma for the tank!
