My new Ecoxotic EcoPico 5 Gallon Pico Reef Tank

[sponger0]

Porcelain crabs are awesome. One of my favorite critters. The are 2 types. A blue porcelain and the other is referred to as an anemone crab. Anemone crabs will actually host an anemone. They are usually white with brown spots. They dont need an anemone to survive.

Ive had both but I prefer the blue ones. Ive had mine for a year now. And they are best in small tanks. But mines always been able to be found. Every that comes over and sees my tank are fascinated by this little guy.

Thats good the store gave you full credit.

And yes I pefer seeing photos through photobucket. Big pics are nice

They are filter feeders btw and will filter water all the time. Love em lol hahaha

 

[bigbunk03]

Here is one of my anemone crabs. I figured out the photobucket thing so here is my first "real" picture As you can see, I've also got quite a bit of coraline growth going which I didn't expect in my 7 week old tank.

 

[iwishtofish]

Great picture!

 

[bigbunk03]

Update 3

Update 3

Hey everybody, just thought I would update the status of my build. Everything is going pretty smoothly. The tank is about 2 months old now. Here is my stock now:

- 1 Percula Clown
- 3 cerith snails
- 5 small nassarius snails
- 1 Double Sea Star (Icon Star)
- 2 Blue Porcelain Anemone Crabs
- 3 Blue Leg Hermits
- 2 Sexy Shrimp

- 2 Zoa frags
- 1 Torch Coral
- 1 Orange Mushroom
- 1 Ricordea Mushroom

All of the coral is doing great. I had a hard time with getting the orange mushroom to stay glued down even though I followed all the tips on here and from my LFS. I finally had a piece of shell in the live sand and put it on there with no glue or anything and it stuck immediately and is doing good now.

I got 3 sexy shrimp last week and all are small but one was really small. I put them on the rocks after acclimating them. Within a millisecond of letting go, my clown grabbed the smallest one up even though I had fed the tank about 2 hours before. He tried to eat the middle sized one soon after that but spit it back out probably due to it being slightly too big. So now I'm down to 2 and will eventually replace the lost one.

I've been testing the water a lot and it seems as though I'm just fine with doing a single 1 gallon water change per week will be fine. My nitrates are still showing zero but even if the API water tests aren't totally accurate (which is probably true) they are still low after a week. I'm just having to add a pinch of buffer each day to keep the dKh at 10-10.5.

 

[Clarkii3]

cool dude, i just won this same tank on ebay, only paid $65 for it. It only comes with the single stip so i will have to upgrade but how is the tank evaporation wise?

 

[bigbunk03]

Congrats on the cheap price! The lights will set you back around $25 each plus the extra power supply and splitters. Some people go with three light strips but for the best coral growth, 5 seems to be the way to go (which is what I have). And some new advice I wish I would have done...now Ecoxotic has a light controller that will work with 2 power supplies. If you get the other strips in all white & all blue, you can get a controller and do moon lighting, fading of just whites/blues, etc. I have the mixed 2 white/1 blue strips so it would just help me with fading.

The evaporation isn't bad on mine. I keep my water at 78 and my house is about 70 where the tank is in the winter. I add a couple ounces of water every couple days or so. But you could easily probably go all week if you had to and the salinity wouldn't be much different. I get a little salt creep on the bottom of the light arm since I have my water level is high and it touches it so my salinity stays in check even with evaporation. Also, some of the evaporation sticks to the glass cover and so I just tilt it and that falls back into the tank so there is really not a ton of evaporated water leaving the tank.