430gal., L-shaped display

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Sorry, my camera's old-school. It only takes pictures. I would love to move up to the 5D Mark II, though (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/583953-REG/Canon_2764B003_EOS_5D_Mark_II.html). Have you seen some of the videos of the corals shot in macro? Fantastic! Go for the full screen version.

http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=1536662&highlight=xenia+video+canon

It almost makes me want some Xenia. Almost. Can you imagine, though: Videos of your hard corals feeding? Videos of copepods playing on the glass? Time-lapse clownfish egg development? Videos of bees pollinating flowers? If you have a coral spawn? Oh, the possibilities.... :)

The butterflies have been slacking on their large Aiptasia eating. There's not a small Aiptasia left in the tank (they had started spreading before I got the fish), but they've slowed on the large ones. I'm probably feeding them too much. I'm pretty good at that.
 
With the skills you already have with the macro photography you could do amazing teaching video's and photo's of all the life in reef aquariums, That video is amazing to watch, very cool.
 
Well, I took some fairly awful photos in the fishroom this evening but thought you all might forgive me for them. The water's pretty murky with algae and I was shooting with the horrible kit lens right before lights out. But here we go:

Here's my old papa Banggai. I bought a pair that had just come back to the fish store after a long stay in one of their maintenance tanks. They managed to give me one brood of babies before the female died in what was probably a low-O2 accident. He's not very happy with me for moving him or with being the only fish in this tank.

banggai04.jpg


In one 90 I have these two offspring cardinals. I'm beginning to suspect that they are two males, so I'll have to move one soon.

banggai02.jpg


banggai03.jpg


In another 90, I have the two purple tangs (too shy for photos) and these two cardinals. I hope these are either a pair or two females.

banggai01.jpg


I've set up the bottom 120 as a make shift frag QT tank. I do have a convict tang in here. He's pretty tiny and was all the way at the back of the tank.

convict01.jpg


Finally, a coral! A dendrophyllia that I've been giving care to for around the last six months. It'll be happy as it's been stuck in a 10 gal. tank and I haven't been able to really feed it like it needs. It has grown in my care, though. Just not enough food for new polyps yet. If you don't know about these, they have no symbiotic algae so they need lots of food and grow pretty slowly kind of like tubastrea.

dendro.jpg


Thanks!
 
Thanks! Well, like I've said, it's certainly in the ugly stage. But the microfauna's reproducing pretty well, so I think there's progress. I dropped a bunch more copepods into the deep sand bed tank and they are reproducing all over the place. I'm also excited to find that at least two of my DIBS cerith snails have survived the move and I'm hoping that their population will take hold. I used to have hundreds of them (from a starter population of about 7), so it bums me out that I lost so many.

Those two cardinals are now getting comfortable enough to start aggressive displays, so they are very likely same-sex. Time to shuffle 'em.
 
That's really cool, but I hardly ever shoot video. And I'm really jonesing for the full frame sensor, improved ISO range (low and high from what I have now), zooming digital preview, and increased megapixels in the camera body. And the video would be nice on the side. ;)
 
Well, messing around with the camera and macro lens again tonight. More copepods:

more_cops_02.jpg


As you can see, the hair algae is growing in pretty nicely.

more_cops_03.jpg


And a little closer crop of the last one:

more_cops_04.jpg


And this is a crazy one. In this one you can see sugar-fine sand, diatoms, and ciliates.

diatoms.jpg
 
:) Well, I'm hoping the jacuzzi action will help the cure. But, the water level is still several inches lower than it will be.
 
First of all, love the build and things are looking great.

Now on to my question, is that the way the rock is going to look or are you going to attach some live rock over it? I don't mean to sound insulting but to me it doesn't look very natural. I can see how eventually, when covered with corals it won't matter anyways.

For example, in the last picture what is the distance between the rock face and the glass. Is that the back wall of the tank? It seems that generally there is a limited amount of real estate for coral growth in the long run and a lot of large vertical surface area. It seems that with the ability to create any rock form you wanted with the truly ingenious cementing technique, some arches and caves would have give the tank a more natural 3 dimensional look.

I don't mean to sound so negative, its just the only part of the build that I have doubts about. The rest look superb and I would love to have a tank room like that. The possibilities are inspiring.
 
Not at all and it's a fair point. I certainly wish that he knew what coral rock looked like ahead of time. I don't know if I've said it here, but I do think this would be a great aquascape for a FW tank. That's just how the rocks look to me. So, I'm not completely happy with them, no. Then again, the rocks are just substrate. I think once some coral grows in I'll forget about what's below. I'm thinking long-term on this one. There's still plenty of room for coral growth.
 
Your right about the FW look. I'm sure it will grow in wonderfully.

Good luck and I'm looking forward to seeing how the tank will progress.
 
So, I'm really impressed with the population growth on the copepods. Most of the tanks are now running with huge swarms of several species. There are so many now that it's getting fairly distracting trying to look into the tanks because of all of the movement on the glass. Here's a sample:

copepod_group_shot.jpg


Of course, the reason that their population growth is so high is that they are the apex herbivore in many of the tanks and the hair algae is growing great guns. Given the boom, I'm also a bit leery of the eventual crash. But I'm enjoying it in the meantime.

I picked up a small colony (6) of royal grammas the other day. They are currently living with the papa Banggai and are serving as good dither fish for him, keeping him out in the water column much more. I'm really digging watching the group interactions. Here's a photo:

grammas.jpg


I also picked up a couple small juvenile orchid dottybacks. They hid behind a rock when I brought the camera out. They are living with the purple tangs right now. The dominant tang is kind of being a jerk to the other now, ever since the move. No visible damage, though.

Still waiting on the concrete to cycle. Sigh.

There's a big frag swap today, but I think I have to miss it. My lovely bride was up all night throwing up and feels horrible today, so I'm trying to do what I can for her and my daughter. There'll be more frags. :(
 
Easy way to stop an aggressive tang is to find where he typically "hangs" and tape a mirror to the glass in that area...he'll see himself and bang up against the glass until he realizes "gee, that hurts!" :lol2: Won't be a problem after that... ;)

As for the rock...I know you say it will look nice when it grows in...and I haven't criticized anything else about the build...but I'm really on the fence about the look of what's there...I'm sure it will be ok in the end, but if it were my tank I'd show him pics of lots of other tanks on RC and say "mimic that and redo." Just my two cents worth...you are the one that has to live with the results. :)

More pics!! :)
 
What, the mirror trick with tangs? Yup...several club members here in our club have done it...believe you can read up on it on the web...just do a Google search for the keywords "aggressive tang mirror" and see how many results you come up with. ;)
 
Ah, good idea with the mirror trick and I'd never heard about it. Thanks! I'll get one tomorrow.

I'm really on the fence about the look of what's there.
Click to expand...

Well, that's kind of my problem, too. I'm willing to see what it looks like a year from now, though. At that point, I'll redo it myself if I have too, whether concrete or live rock. I should probably have done it myself in the first place, of course. Anyway, there are aspects that I like a lot. For example, the piece that's protecting the corner is really nice and would make a great place for plating montis. Maybe a couple different colors growing around each other....

I'm _really_ going to have to keep up with maintenance in this tank. I finally got sick of looking at the dye that had crusted the glass so I went out and bought an algae scrubber and went to town. Whew! I only got half done (the easy side) and I'm worn out. That's a lot of glass. I'm really happy I went with glass though. I would have put a dozen scratches into acrylic already.

Well, I had a lot of copepods.... I just brought home a pair of black and white aquacultured ocellaris that I bought last week. They are misbarred but, other than that they look great. They immediately decided that it was the coolest tank ever because they could pick copepods off the glass. The last I looked they were whizzing around the tank like crazy clowns, fat as clams (so to speak).
 
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