My reef adventure

[Boxermom]

So as suggested on the meet and greet forum, I've decided to start a tank thread. This has been an interesting journey so far.

My husband was into salt water fish when we met back in 1985. At that time, he had a 55 gal. with a panther grouper and a niger trigger. Not long after we started dating, he got interested in reef tanks. We would go out for dinner, then spend the rest of the evening in one of the many LFS in the area. Over the course of the next few years he graduated to a 70 gallon (which we brought home in his Chevette-that was a fun ride), and a custom made 240 gallon. He ended up selling the 240 gallon after having it running for a few years, after which we got married and moved. Although he left the hobby for a while, the bug never really left.

Fast forward to 2013....the bug bit once again. The first tank back into his life was a 54 gallon corner tank. There was always something odd about that aquarium...it had odd spaces where the flow was not good, the lighting didn't really seem to reach the right places, and while corals did ok, they didn't really they didn't really thrive and grow. So, we moved on...to a 57 gallon rimless. That was a better fit, but I guess he thought I might be feeling a bit deprived, so he found a little Red Sea 130D on Craigslist and told me he was going to pick that up. For me.

The 130D was a mess.....the original owner really didn't fool with it much, and his wife wanted it GONE. We bought the tank and contents for $150.00...said contents being a pair of true percula clowns, 5 GBTAs, a few hermit crabs, a peppermint shrimp, and 90 pounds of live rock. Oh yeah, and hair algae. LOTS of it. About 5 pounds of it. We bucketed all the critters, tubbed the live rock, and stuffed everything into a VW Golf for the 90 minute drive home.

to be continued......

 

[Boxermom]

OK, I fail at the internet. Sorry, no pix yet.

 

[Boxermom]

Part 2

After getting the 130D home and set up, we upgraded the lights to LEDs, and the 5 BGTAs quickly became 11! I had 11 anemones, 2 clowns, a bunch of hermits, and a peppermint shrimp in there...minus about 5 lbs (yes, we weighed it) of hair algae, and several pounds of live rock. We found buried in the bottom of the tank one polyp of trumpet coral. We just chucked it back in their, thinking that since it survived this far, let's see what happens. What happened was, it grew like a weed, and over subsequent months, we fragged it a few times. we ended up selling off 9 of the anemones, and about 4 small frags of the trumpet. Our 130D paid for itself within the first 6 months we had it. And I caught the bug. I had to have a bigger tank.

So, back to Craigslist we went...and found a 60 gallon starfire cube. It had only one imperfection, but it was a pretty big one. The bottom had been broken out. So we bought it for $20.00. A local glass company cut us a piece for the bottom, which we drilled and siliconed in place. After letting it cure, we tested it, and it held, so we built a stand and moved it inside. We plumbed it up, and (I know, bad to admit this)quick cycling it with the water from the 130D, and a hefty water change from the 57 gallon, we scaped it and put my critters back in. At this time, I had the 2 perculas (Bonnie and Clyde), a black mouth damsel (Clark), 2 starry gobies (Upstairs and Downstairs), a tail spot blenny (Buddha), an emerald crab (King Kong), and the peppermint shrimp.

As the 60 gallon currently sits, I have a Purple tang (no tang police, please), a Royal Gramma, a bi-color blenny, the 2 starry gobies, a long nose hawkfish, a big old harbor goby and tiger pistol shrimp, hermits, and somewhere in there, the peppermint shrimp.


It's a mixed reef, with some toadstool leather corals from Fiji, some finger leather corals from Fiji, a few LPS pieces, and a couple of SPS pieces.

Once I learn to Internet a little better, I'll get some pictures up.

 

[redfishbluefish]

This is a great story. I like the reference to the cars used to transport, although I don't know what was used for the 60 gallon tank. I'm also willing to bet that you did NOT have GBTA, but had Cribrinopsis crassa , a bubble tip looking little green anemone that doesn't get bigger that a half-dollar, but reproduces like rabbits. I think I had over 50 of the little buggers when I decided they had to go.

Keep the story coming.....loving it!

 

[Boxermom]

Oh, we used the Golf for the 60 cube transport...it's a diesel, and gets great mileage, so when we take longer trips (especially ones that require AC) the golf gets the call. My car (an old Audi) is a 4 door, and has no AC, so it's pretty miserable in the summer time.

Actually, they were GBTAs; they were pretty big. My husband thought that the shock of a clean tank was what caused them to go crazy splitting. One morning I went to work and had 5, when I came home that evening, I had 7. Over the next few days, it went from 7 to 9 to 11. We sold a bunch of them off, then they started splitting again! I'd find them in filter socks, in the weir, in the sump...just about everywhere. We still have 2...they're in my husbands 90 gallon cub with a pair of tomato clowns.

 

[Boxermom]

 

[Boxermom]

Hey I figured out how to internet!! Above is a photo of the 60 cube right after we got it running. Only 2 anemones in it at the time, but you can see how large they were. Now imagine 11 of them, all about this same size, in a 130D. It was pretty crowded.

 

[Tahoe61]

Welcome.

 

[Boxermom]

Another angle. Not long after we made the switch from the 130 to the 60 cube, the blackmouth and the clowns decided to go jihad on everybody else, which is why they were re homed.

 

[Boxermom]

Here's a pic of the 130D after we cleaned it. Not too much hair algae in this shot.

 

[Boxermom]

My big toadstool leathers.

Maze brain and zoas.

My crazy cleaner wrasse. He eats romaine and kale with my purple tang.

 

[Boxermom]

My cactus pavona and a frag of green pipe organ.

 

[Daniel@R2R Verified Admin]

Cool stuff! Following!

 

[Boxermom]

Sad news. After not updating this for a couple months, some very weird stuff started happening. I sold the 2 large leathers, as they were over growing the tank (which thinking back, I was pretty happy that I did), and everything seemed good. Then my remaining leathers started looking a bit sad. Droopy, no polyp extension, color was off. Then the LPS started dying. Then the SPS. All told, I lost 2 leathers, the maze brain, the red meat coral, and the LA Lakers frag. We took all the other corals out and distributed them throughout the other aquariums, and so far they are recovering.

Most water parameters were stable and WNL, but the salinity was a bit low. We started by slowly increasing the salinity, and removed the small HOT fuge, and replaced it with a 45 gallon cube, to make a display fuge. We set that up with a 75 watt metal halide over it and took the macro algae out of the HOT fuge and stuck that in there with some nice Indo live rock (one piece is covered with halemida (sp?).
The plan is, once it's been up and running for a while, and everything is stabelized in the 60 cube, I'll move a goby or 2 in there, as well as my little dragon face pipe fish.

We aren't really sure what happened in the 60 cube. We have a few theories, but no way to really prove any of them.

One theory is that the LEDs we're using are getting a little long in the tooth, and so may have drifted some, but this doesn't explain the decreased salinity.

Another theory is that the pistol shrimp, in his endless excavations, piled up sand in the back of the tank and created a dead zone. Not sure about this, since I don't know if that would affect the salinity either. One thing we did notice, while rescaping the 60 cube last night, is that the base rock at the bottom and back of the reef had massive amounts of sand almost glued to it. It looked like the rock was cemented together, and I actually had to chisel it off the rock. My husband said he had never seen that happen before. Maybe there was some sort of weird chemical reaction going on there that did it, but who knows. The new scape is much more open and minimalistic. After giving the fish crew a chance to settle down some, everybody ate very well. As of right now, my reef has changed to FOWLR and a few zoas that we couldn't move.

So, now it's a fresh start. I'm a little disheartened, because I hate the those animals died while in my care. Through it all, the only losses were coral, and luckily not too many of those. I think the quick action of moving them out of the affected tank is what saved the survivors...although there are a couple at this time that are touch and go.

 

[Boxermom]

Still more sad news...I lost one of my dogs yesterday. He was almost 14 years old, and I had raised him from day one. I work as a vet tech and he was born via c-section at the clinic I work at. Since the breeder didn't want the litter (because they were mixed breed puppies) my co=workers and I decided to bottle raise them and find them homes. He found his permanent home with me and my husband. He was such a cute little bugger. For 14 years, he greeted me at the door after work everyday, but yesterday he didn't. When I found him, he was very pale and lethargic. I feared the worst...maybe a ruptured spleen. My husband and I rushed him back to work, and my boss and I took him into surgery for an emergency splenectomy. It turned out, it wasn't his spleen, but his liver. He had an inoperative mass on his liver that had ruptured, and he was bleeding out. We made the decision to put him to sleep.

It was very sudden, and I'm still feeling kind of shell shocked.

Rest in peace little Boo Man. I'm going to miss you.