No sump, you can see all sorts of accessories on the rim....like the white rubbermaid wastebasket refugium, the M8000 auto topoff switches (the maxi jet deflector by the remora on the rim is where the RO went into the tank), the aquaclear filter (no pads, filled with LR rubble). One of my favorite highlights was the "live powerhead" covered in green Erythropodium with the green mille frag on top.
There is more info in Mike Paletta's "Ultimate Marine Aquariums" book. I unfortunately lost many of the pictures over time due to one or two HD failures. The tank had 100+ sps in it counting all the frags, with some phenomenally rare-in-the-hobby species back then. The nicest colonies were grown from Solomon Islands mariculture frags purchased from Harbor Aquatics (one of the finest coral vendors of all time!).
The hobby was very different back then, and I felt borderline guilty selling frags of the nicest corals for $50 when I took the tank down.
Back on topic, the tank had a load of Dictyota that the 10" silver bristleworms would eat and I would remove manually. I fed NLS pellets and formula 1 frozen really heavily to keep the microfauna populations up. I had a pair of spawning spotted mandarins in there that were fat little pigs.
Photosynthetic corals get their food from symbiotic algae. In my opinion if your tank doesn't have the N and P to grow algae, your corals are probably starving too. Like Adam said, nuisance algaes are best controlled by grazers, just like they are on a natural reef. What would massive schools of tangs be eating if there was no algae on a wild reef??
There is more info in Mike Paletta's "Ultimate Marine Aquariums" book. I unfortunately lost many of the pictures over time due to one or two HD failures. The tank had 100+ sps in it counting all the frags, with some phenomenally rare-in-the-hobby species back then. The nicest colonies were grown from Solomon Islands mariculture frags purchased from Harbor Aquatics (one of the finest coral vendors of all time!).
The hobby was very different back then, and I felt borderline guilty selling frags of the nicest corals for $50 when I took the tank down.
Back on topic, the tank had a load of Dictyota that the 10" silver bristleworms would eat and I would remove manually. I fed NLS pellets and formula 1 frozen really heavily to keep the microfauna populations up. I had a pair of spawning spotted mandarins in there that were fat little pigs.
Photosynthetic corals get their food from symbiotic algae. In my opinion if your tank doesn't have the N and P to grow algae, your corals are probably starving too. Like Adam said, nuisance algaes are best controlled by grazers, just like they are on a natural reef. What would massive schools of tangs be eating if there was no algae on a wild reef??
Crazy!!
