Here’s some pictures I just took over the last few days of my salt water aquariums.

First up the 40 gallon full tank shot, iphones cant really handle the blue light spectrum so here’s it not been edited so it’s very blue. Most of the rest are lightly edited to reduce the blue tint.


Here’s the cleaner shrimp on top of my purple monti cap coral


These are called candy canes or trumpet coral. I grew these colonies from small frags of 2-3 heads over the past few years. I have a small green goby that lives in these corals, you never see him unless it’s feedjng time and he darts out to grab food and goes back and hides.


Here’s a blasto (red) and a branching euphyllia coral (white and green) - not sure what type exactly. The purple on the rock behind it is unknown, but it’s invasive in my tank right now. Some people think it’s a type of encrusting sponge, it literally grew over top of algae and some other coral I had killing it.


Front and center is my ocellaris clown, clowns are now bred into many different color patterns. This one is a domino since shes all black with a few white spots, I named her orca because here dorsal fin is flopped over to the side like a captive orca. Bottom left corner is just 2 heads of an acan lord coral, it wasn’t doing so well at one point and most the heads died.


Here’s a Ricordea Yuma, kind of like a mushroom coral but cooler. There is the big one about 1.5” diameter and as it moves along the rock it leaves babies behind, one baby is getting bigger now probably 3/8” diameter, the other baby is not really visible in the pic it’s about 1/16” diameter now.


My other clown in this tank, this ones called a black ice


Here’s the clowns in their corner of the tank, the don’t usually stray too far away. Green mushrooms, red mushrooms, and the white blob in the back by the green mushrooms is a big sponge


Here’s my other tank, is a smaller 29 gallon biocube, only mushrooms in this tank. It’s been setup for 6 years now non stop until a few weeks ago when the old tank started leaking and I just did a quick tank replacement with minimal changes. This is the last full tank shot I have in the old tank before tear down


First and only full tank shot I have in the new tank. this was right after I transfered everything into it so it’s all cloudy and corals are mad. This tank is a lot easier to photograph since the light isn’t as blue as the other.


Here’s my 2 normal colored ocellaris, no anenomes in the tank but they snuggle up in the mushrooms just the same. Ricordea Yuma on the left which is about 4-5” when fully spread out, it’s also the parent of all the Yuma’s in this and the other tank. Then 3-4 different mushrooms red, green, and a blue/purple.




Ricordeas

Wow - nice!

Sweet! Would love to have a tank like that... but it’s too much work!

Wow!

How do you get the water to stay in?

J/k

I always wanted a reef tank, but I just don't have the time.

Thanks everyone, but It’s really not too much time for maintenance, the 29 gallon is probably an hour a week. But you have to keep up on it. My routine is feed once everyday and top off a bit of fresh water to compensate for evaporation, Wednesday change the filter floss. Saturday or Sunday clean the glass vacuum out the junk in the sand and do a 5 gallon water change. Change the filter.

The 40 gallon takes a little more time since it also has a large sump with another 30 gallons of water, but it’s also more difficult since I need to use a step ladder for maintenance since the stand is so tall, and I have a lot more equipment on this one to maintain compared to the 29, but it’s basically the maintenance routine is the same as the smaller, just a 10 gallon water change a week. But I do dose stuff to keep up the alkalinity and calcium when needed since the Stoney corals do deplete it from the water.

Costs, the 29 I bought used on offer up for $150, I probably have about $1500 into everything to get that tank up running, that’s test kits, rocks, salt, reverse osmosis, buckets, that includes the fish and coral too.

The 40 is way more but I’ve bought tons of equipment and change this around a lot. The led light which is a budget fixture was about $3-400  a few years ago. I’ve spent hundreds on equipment I’ve used for a month or 2 and didn’t work out like I planned and then remove. Just recently I decided to buy an automatic water top off system so I no longer have to do it manually.

This hobby is/can be extremely expensive, and I still want to set up another tank but I don’t have the time, money or place to put it. It’s really a sickness like black rifle disease.

I can't keep coral alive to save my life so I just stick to FoWLR. Right now I'm at 12 tanks, 4 are FW the rest are SW.

The family and I will be taking a trip down to the keys and I plan on getting a fishing license because I plan on doing some collecting.

Yeah corals can be tough, my first 2 tanks were fowlr, I started the 29g with 4-5 different mushrooms, now i have to cut them off with scissors and throw them away they spread so much. Literally almost impossible to kill.

Enjoy your time in the Keys, first time I ever went snorkeling was in the Keys I was probably 10 or so. We took a boat out to a reef I’ll never forget how huge some of the corals were and all the colors, tons of different fish. It got me hooked.

X1000

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Amazing! I can't believe the water doesn't fall out with it sideways like that.

Curious to know what your using to view the website on? All my pics are right side up for me, but I get a bunch of people that always say they are sideways.

Laptop. Most pics are normal but 3 are sideways. Looks the same in firefox, chrome, IE. Checked on my phone and same as well.

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iPhone here.  None of the pics are sideways

3rd pic looks like buttholes with hemorrhoids.

I’ve never had a saltwater tank.  What do all those plants/anemones eat?   Do they just survive off nutrients in the water?

Thought I'd jump in and say they are sideways on my samsung tablet as well.  Beautiful tanks btw.  Have always wanted to get into saltwater reefs but dont have the time or dinero.

- Nw -

Anemones of which I have none actually (tried before in the past) can eat whole fish. The tentacles will sting other fish or things that swim by and bring it to their mouth. Clownfish that live in the anemones delevope a slime coat that resists the sting, so the anemones offer protection for the fish from predators, and the clowns will actually bring back food into the anemones to eat themselves and drop it and the anemone eats it.

Corals are part plant and part animal. The colors in the corals come from an algae called zooxanthellae that lives inside the coral, so they are photosynthetic and need strong light to recreate the sun on a shallow reef. Soft corals like mushrooms are mainly photosynthetic. Stoney corals are 2 types los and sps, they actually build up a calcium carbonate skeleton. Lps corals which stands for large polyp stone corals. The “buttholes” are a type of lps, they have large separate polyps with individual mouths. They can eat meaty foods, I feed frozen mysis shrimp and things and they eat it, they will eat pellet food that lands on them too. Sps corals are small polyp Stoney corals. They have very small polyps like the purple monti cap. They are primarily filter feeders feedjng on small foods like plankton and such. I feed stuff called reef chili which is a bunch of different plankton and things all freeze dried, but it’s basically powder. They need extremely stable water parameters to thrive. The water must elevated contain levels of alkalinity, calcium and magnesium for skeletal building.

That’s a pretty basic rundown.

That’s interesting if it’s only those 3 pics that are sideways, they are the only 3 that haven’t been edited or cropped. I don’t own a computer except for my iPhone so I don’t know what I could change besides just editing every photo I post.

I stopped counting at $15K for my 100 gallon reef tank.

I disagree about the maintenance part you said. I have a massive filter setup and im easily 1 hour per day, 2-4 on the weekends.

Great pics!

Your euphyllia looks like common frogspawn most likely. It'll grow FAST.

My dream is to get a 72” L x 36” W x 22” H tank built. And that would be the only one I would want, but yeah with that type of investment I would for sure be stepping up the amount of maintenance and reef related stuff for it.

Post up pics of your tank if you would like

It grows well when happy, but I always have to move it around when I do a water change since it’s on the sand and I always vacuum my sand. It started as 1 head smaller than a golf ball probably around 6-7 now and baseball sized when all inflated.

As for what it is, probably is frogspawn, but half the tentacles have hammer like tips so I usually call it a hammer with Down’s syndrome

New pics from yesterday. I decided to get the rocks out that were covered with a purple sponge that was taking over. I put them in a bucket and did a muriatic acid wash to kill it and anything else on them. Once I get them clean they will go into the sump. I used rocks I had cycling in my sump to re-aquascape. I like it better now than before, I have more room to clean the glass and more exposed sand bed so it should be easier to keep clean.

New full tank shot


I added a school of 8 Green Chromis. So fun to watch them all swim together, I have not been able to get a picture with all of them together yet.


I tried to leave the clownfish corner as close to what it was before as possible while using a new smaller rock. They seem to be ok with the changes and aren’t aggressive towards all the new fish which I was worried about since orca is about 4-5x bigger than the Chromis.


A few other additional fish a small watchman goby, serpent starfish, and a starry Blenny that I have not been able to get a picture of.

Very cool.

I'm going to start a 20 gallon Nano Reef tank here in the next couple weeks. Glad to see there are members here that are into the hobby.

Thanks, if your not on nano-reef.com you should join. I have the same screen name there too.

I'll have to check it out.

This hobby has finally started paying me back lol, I sold $120 worth of coral frags over the past 2 weeks. I ended up fragging my green and blue candy cane colonies to thin them out a bit and remove the dead parts that were shaded out.

Colonies after fragging, still plenty big but now they have more room to grow and no ugly dead parts.


And the frags, I also have some mushrooms and zoathinds I’m selling too.

Do you sell to a lfs or individuals?

I'm planning on getting into zoas and had thought about selling them as well.

Growing up we bred Cichlids, Guppies, and Mollys and they ended paying for themselves.

It’s the first time I’ve done it actually, I just put an add on offer up. It’s something I would like to do more of just to pay for stuff like salt, filter stuff, and more corals etc, I might try to trade some in to a store and get more coral, but I don’t really know any stores close to my house. I do want to set up a frag tank eventually because all my frags are crowding my display.

Do wear protective gear when messing with zoas and Palys though. Technically you should wear it for any type of corals. But Paly toxin is no joke.

I took your advice and made an account at nano-reef.com (same username as here).

In the process of starting up a tank. I've got a build thread going on their site.

@Ef4life more pics!   Need more eye candy

Haha ok - here’s a picture almost 6 years to the day after starting.


Here’s the tank on day 1 - started with clean dry rock.

Here’s a little tiny thing I found in the 40 gallon tank, it’s about 3-4mm diameter. I found it on the sand so I glued it to a frag plug so it won’t get lost. Looks like a baby ricordea but I don’t think it is. Hopefully it will grow out a bit so I can get a decent idea of what it is. Frag plug is roughly 1” diameter

Here’s a growth pic of the purple monti cap.

May 28th


June 21st

I figured I should do an update, had some downs and ups in this tank, a few months back I got lazy and started slacking on maintenance and dosing and I lost a large portion of some corals. Mostly the green and blue candy cane corals. They are slowly making a comeback now. As for the ups, good growth out of everything else in the tank really. All the fish are doing fine and my clownfish just spawned for the first time last night.

11/28/19 Clownfish spawning, the orange dots in the corner are the eggs, 6-8 days hatch time but I’m not set up to raise babies, I am going to try though, just probably not this time. They need a lot of care and some specific live foods and tank setup.


Some growth shots of the purple montipora cap, this has been growing like crazy and did not suffer any die off during the bad period. And you can see the major die off of the candy canes in that same period.
6/21/19

11/13/19


Here you can see the green candy canes in the sad state they are in, currently growing back but it’s going to take a while to get back to the former glory as the showpieces of my tank. Also this is the first pic I was ever able to get of the green clown goby perched on top, he’s probably grown 1/4” in length since I got him and has gotten bolder and started to swim outside of the candy cane colony now.


Another pic of the goby I was able to get yesterday.


And a new full tank shot, did some more rock rearranging since the last one I posted, added some new corals which have been doing good and growing quickly.

Some New pics, I changed the light output to be more blue in the 40, brings out the colors a little better but it’s not overly blue.


A bunch of new corals I’ve added to the 40 recently- some colorful ricordea Florida’s and some zoanthids and palythoas.


Here’s one of my ricordea Yuma’s in my 29g bringing some food to it’s mouth.


And my dosing/frag station. This is where I glue coral frags on plugs, the jugs are the alkalinity, calcium, and magnesium and other solutions I dose daily to replace the stuff depleted by coral growth.

Man, I love aquariums so much. Yours is absolutely amazing. Incredible. I could sit and stare at that all night and not get bored.

I'm more invested in Kartoffel the Betta and his journey through life than I am in weekly television. So far, this guy has grown sweet taters and cat grass and strawberries all with the help of Kartoffel's poop as fertilizer. I'd love an aquaponics tank setup like this where the roots grow down into it but I have zero clue where to even start:



Little hurt fishie:

Thank you, those videos are cool, My first fish ever was a beta, planted freshwater tanks can be amazing. And having one grow food is cool as hell.

Cleaning and water changes is what made me stop a five year freshwater tank. Are there any systems now which can actually clean rock and auto replace 5 gallons every week? I know there are substrate filters for under the rocks.

No under gravel filters in saltwater anymore that’s super old school. Lots of people are setting up automatic water changes now, with the level of automation available in the hobby it’s pretty reasonable to do that too. But you still need to filter your freshwater and mix up saltwater to the proper salinity. Check out the Neptune systems apex controller, it’s a real time controller system that can monitor, alert, control, and even test water now and control from your phone or computer anywhere you have WIFI. It can monitor ph, temp, salinity out of the box, program and control pumps lights heaters etc. dose daily supplements or do auto water changes with additional dosing pumps , monitor pump flow rates through pipes with the flow monitors. Detect leaks with the additional sensors. Shut down things and alert via email somethings going wrong. Can automatically test the calcium, alkalinity, and magnesium with the new trident. It can be a very expensive system if you go all out.

Cleaning glass is always going to need to happen, but a quick once over every few days with a magnet cleaner takes just a few minutes and you don’t get your hands wet. But no matter how automated you build your system your still going to need to do some hands on maintenance.

To me the maintenance is relaxing and enjoyable, Kind of like how people enjoy building and restoring cars, woodworking etc. you have to get your hands dirty to build something beautiful.

Update on the 40b, my old light died so I had to upgrade to a better light. It’s a lot more powerful from the old lights 48 leds to 78 dual chip leds (so 156 total) and has better colors, including uv leds to really give the corals with fluorescent colors a lot of pop. It’s awesome and worth what I had to pay. I’m very very happy with it. Sadly I suck at taking pics and the iPhones can’t really handle blue light so you can never really see what I see in person.

Some pics


First pic of the fixture mounted over the tank


Here’s a view of the program I built in the Orphek app to control the light. Gradually increased intensity from 7am, peaks at 5pm, then Ramps down to zero at 10pm. Color spectrum changes through that period, starts/ends with just blue and uv channels to show off the colors it’s like looking through a bottle of windex, then it adds in the white and red channels at a lower intensity, and it’s really pleasing to look at and just enjoy with this spectrum.


Here’s a pic from this morning with just blue and Uv channels on, iPhone can’t handle it at all but you can see the fluorescent colors on a few corals

Same view but with a yellow/orange gel filter held up the the camera lens, it really lowers the quality but it’s closer to what I see in person but still not even close.

about half are sideways for me on chrome.

I take pics landscape mode on my iPhone, and post them and they all look fine too me. But I figured out the edited pics I take and post will show up correctly for everyone, non edited like most - not so much.

So many software auto or suggested rotate. Not sure why modern browsers don't follow suit.

Yeah idk why, stupid computers I guess

Anyways. Update on the reefs - I’ve been dealing with some sort of bacterial bloom in the 40, it’s causing cloudy water and my filter floss to clog up really quickly, so I’ve been changing it every 24hrs. The 29g has the bacteria too, but it’s not bad just a slight haze in the water, hopefully I can get it handled. I’m not sure what’s causing it at all, really stressful few weeks now. So far the fish are all doing fine, I lost my cleaner shrimp not sure what happened if it was attacked by a clownfish for getting to close to the eggs or old age or the bacteria, and the coral for the most part are doing ok, they are losing color because this bacteria is taking my nitrate and phosphate levels down to 0, I’ve tried to increase feedings to increase the nitrate and phosphate but it’s just fueling the bacteria and clouding the water more. I did a major clean up yesterday in the 40, I took the upper sump tank out to clean the entire thing and sterilize with bleach. Cleaned all the pumps and filter stuff with bleach. I keep the upper tank pretty clean, but there was still a lot of crud built up from the 5 years it’s been running. 15 gallon water change and today the  water has been nice and clear so far. It Usually ends up cloudy again overnight after I feed in the evening, so we will see what tomorrow brings.

I’m not putting my upper sump tank back online until I get this issue bacteria/ cloudy water issue sorted out. I will be buying a big Uv sterilizer if I can’t get it sorted by the end of the week. That’s a big $500 item I don’t want to buy really, especially since I dropped $1300 for the new light on the 40 at he beginning of the month.

29 - can see the hazy water and the mushrooms don’t seem as happy - not as vibrant and opened up as in the older pictures


The 40, it’s a mess in there with all the extra equipment that is normally in the upper sump tank hidden from the display, and my acrylic mushroom box I keep loose mushrooms in to grow out and sell. The water is nice and clear currently, just overly blue in the picture,


And since I’ve never posted a pic showing the super janky upper sump tank, it’s another 40g tank on top of my gunsafe. Water pumps up from the display to be filtered, and gravity feeds back down to the display. I use it to hold equipment like heaters, extra rocks, macro algae for nitrate/phosphate control, frags of corals etc. also the extra water volume helps with stability. This is an old picture.

So I’m starting up another tank. Just a little guy - a 5.5 gallon tank. I’m doing this tank as part of a friendly competition on one of the reef tank forums I’m on. The Competition is going to run for a year. I’m going cheap cheap with this thing using mostly stuff I had already, and some diy skills. I’m using travertine tile as the bottom and back filtration chamber wall, to make it an “all in one” style tank - which an all in one is part of the competitions rules. It should be getting filled with water by the weekend.

Some pics of the setup so far, it’s not that blue in person, and the other pics are with a yellow filter to cancel out the blue.

Not sure I would want that much moisture that close to my guns

Ha yeah I thought about that, but it’s never been an issue. Yet. I live in the desert so humidity isn’t much of a concern. I keep a heater and desiccant pack in my safe and it’s always dry and warm inside.

The salt would concern me.

It stays in the tank unless I spill it. Although the exterior of the safe has a few rust stains on it where I can’t really reach to clean it, mostly because of the textured paint finish holding the dirt/salt etc, if it was smooth glossy finish it wouldn’t have been an issue

I filled up the new little tank a few days ago, added rock and am letting it cycle a little bit before I add any fish or corals.

I bought a fish and some corals already, they are just waiting in my 40g until I feel the little tank is ready. I plan on adding my fish next weekend, and corals in about 3 weeks or so.

Full tank shot


Some led backlighting I added for extra nighttime flair


A couple corals I picked up locally, and the little fish that’s going to be the main resident of the tank, A royal gramma about 1” long. I made an online order for another bunch of coral for this tank it won’t be shipped for a few days.

Picture of the newest tank from a few days ago. The little fish is pretty happy in there, corals are doing well


New fish in my 40g tank, he’s so small, sadly he will get too big for this tank eventually.


Having more down time due to China virus gives me even more time with the tanks for maintenance