Sweetash0ney's 12G Current USA Aquapod

[sweetash0ney]

Here we go :O I'm off from work today, and am determined to do my very first build thread! I have tried to have at least one adventure every summer for the last two years, and hopefully on into the future! This summer, it was to jump head first into a hobby that I've always wanted to take part in. I've had many fresh water tanks in my life, but have always wanted to enjoy the symbiotic relationships, and wonder that a saltwater aquarium provides. I started out by finding a cheap tank on facebook marketplace for 20 dollars. It's a little 12 gallon Current USA Aquapod that came with a heater, thermometer, some very old api test kits, and a pump for the back. I know that bigger is always better for your first tank, but it's all I had the funds for, and had read extensively on Nano-reef that though difficult, it was possible.

The tank needed a bit of TLC but I quickly got to work scraping and cleaning it as well as I could. It ran for about three weeks without anything in it before the lfs assured me that it was time for my first fish. I chose instead to start off with my cuc and wait another week to add any fish. After some research I went with:

2x cerith snails

2x trochus snails

2x nassarius snails

1 evil emerald crab
I had some brown algae dusting the sand by this time, as well as some GHA on the piece of live rock I had added to the reefsaver dry rock that now populated my tank.
The snails and crab went though the bloom is a matter of a day or two, and the hitchhiker mushrooms from the live rock looked like they were doing great! Through my research I found out about pom pom crabs, and had to have one (those symbiotic relationships)

I was still weary about adding fish at this point, though everything seemed to be going well, so I added my very first corals! I picked out a green star polyp frag, and brought it home. That thing didn't open up for like a week and a half. Probably because I kept moving it around thinking that I was placing it wrong.

A day later my bf and I found the coolest little torch coral. We brought it home, and immediately it started opening up and looking awesome!

It was shortly after this that I started seeing my first Coraline algae popping up on the rocks. I've never been so happy to see little purple specks in my life. Fast forward a week, and I bought my very first fish! First came the Randalls pistol shrimp, Jacque, and then the Hi Fin Banded Goby (Rex). It took them a few hours to find each other, but they soon started their burrow under my largest rock structure. They are fascinating to watch and soon Rex was guarding the home while Jacque would push large amounts of sand out from beneath the rock with his little legs. Occasionally he would pop out and grab just the perfect sand grain to bring back in with him.

At that same time, I got two black and white ocellaris clown fish, and a green Bubble Tip Anemone. This was a horrible idea (but I'll get to that in a bit) I drip acclimated the nem, and turned off the pumps while it found a spot for its foot. It looked like it was settled, so I added the clowns and they weren't interested in the nem for the first few days (which is fine because during that time, the nem decided to move to face the back of the tank -_-) I finally woke up to see one of the clowns sleeping in the nem which was an amazing moment for me! It wouldn't let the other clown near, which I figured was probably normal as I know the most dominant one will eventually become the female.

This is roughly where the problems began....

 

[sweetash0ney]

Soon after, my lfs had their semi-annual sale. I picked up a Florida Ricordea

A Duncan that would open for a day, look happy, and then close up (no matter where I put it)

Some green Zoanthids

and a blueberry sea fan (gorgonian)

I knew the sea fan was a bad idea. I researched it, and in the heat of the moment, decided to do it anyway. I thought that maybe, just maybe I could do it. I feel awful about it, as it has slowly withered away in my tank.
It was at this point that we were going though the hottest part of the summer in southern CA, and my thermometer was always saying the same thing. This made me suspicious, so I went out and bought a new one just to find out the tank was 86 degrees!!! I was unknowingly roasting my coral and fish! I opened up the hood, and put some fans over the water to help with evaporation, and thankfully this brought the temp down and was able to manage it at an acceptable range. This lead me to change my lighting schedule to later in the evening with the lights coming on at around 5pm and not going off until about 2am. I'm a night owl, so this was actually kind of nice, visually speaking. Okay...remember the evil emerald crab? We named him Crabula (like Dracula). I know that there were many things playing into this, but the nem kept deflating, every single day. And every single day we would look in, and there Crabula would be, right next to the nem's sensitive foot. I now realize that temperature swings and most likely chemical swings from it being a newer tank were just as much if not a worse culprit. I never could get the nem to have a feeding response, though my research told me that you didn't HAVE to feed them, and that deflating could be normal as it settled into a tank. Heres the tank at this point!

 

[sweetash0ney]

I started this build thread, and got WAY too detailed lol! Time has passed, and I got a 56 gallon so some of the corals were moved to there, and the tank is vastly different now. So I'll be putting a pause on this tread until I have time to properly do this >.<