New 46 gallon...

I have two in the tank, neither are bleached, the smaller one is a very light green, but very healthy. I feed both the BTAs a few times per week. Hard to capture the exact color under my LEDs, but its a healthy little guy.

I dont know about the clowns being tomato....i have spent many hours looking around the interwebs trying to find a similar juvenile clownfish and havent really found anything. I will be interested to see how they develope as they grow.

Snausy -

Youre right, it is a cheap cleaner, it has scratched my tank, i hate it. Its there right now out of laziness, just need to get it out. Dont know that I can justify the big price of a tiger cleaner....i will just keeping wiping with my hand....benefits of a small tank :)

Wound up putting some gutter guard in the overflow, nothing should be able to get through now...my carpet is STILL damp!!!
 
Some updated shots…

tail spot in my return spout, he is a trip to watch, love that guy.
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One of my favorite Yumas, got a total of four of these for $20 cause they were an ugly color in the store. The rest are babies..
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This blue monti now has blue growth tips, when first placed in tank a couple weeks ago the monti was a brown/purple with whote growth tips, now it all blue, under my chinese LEDs
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One of my newest additions a HUGE colony of Pokerstar Monti, so easy to take pics of…
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A couple of heads of blastos
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A close up of that baby BTA, you can see the color better i think
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the body of my Medusa worm, these things are soooo creepy but super cool and active.
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New meat coral, this thing is enormous, love it!
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FTS
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Medusa's head
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More pokerstar
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Highlighter Monti
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tailspot blenny and my clown
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Merlettis
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Both clowns, the should pair up soon, they don't sleep in the anemone together, but I catch them like this every now and then"¦.
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Well, medusa worm met the powerhead. Not good….do not get a medusa worm. Just lost both of my clown fish. Tailspot blenny seems to be hanging in.

Also, can't find my flame hawk anywhere. Found my wrasse half eaten in my micron sock. Bad day for my fish….
 
Well, medusa worm met the powerhead. Not good"¦.do not get a medusa worm. Just lost both of my clown fish. Tailspot blenny seems to be hanging in.

Also, can't find my flame hawk anywhere. Found my wrasse half eaten in my micron sock. Bad day for my fish"¦.

If I'm reading this thread correctly your tank was still in the set up stage around Feb 20th. so you basicly have not completed a cycle on your tank yet.

The thing I hate about this hobby is the need for patience when things cycle and readjust to changes in the bio load. If my timing is right you might be realy pushing things to the extreme. when I first started setting up my system I had big losses untill I decided to just plain slow down. I now limit myself to 2 additional fish max per month. If they are larger fish like Tangs I'll even limit myself to one per month. Since slowing down like this my losses have been minimal.

As far as Clowns go they have been a pain for me. I so want a nice breeding pair but have little luck with them. Usualy within two months of buyng a pair one will get killed by the other. I have several anenomies but usualy only one will nest in one them and just keep any others away from all the anenomies.
 
All of my rock was taken from a well established system. So there was no cycle. In terms of fish, the losses due to the Medusa worm could have only been prevented by not buying the Medusa worm, wont make that mistake again.

The patience part sucks, thats what was pretty cool about using existing LR, didnt have to wait out the cycle, but still have to keep from being an idiot.

This pair that died seemed to be very unique, and I know they would have started breeding soon. I had just they day before seen them hanging out together in a corner of the tank picking diatoms off of the glass. I think they may have been preparing a spot to lay eggs. Next day.....dead. :( Some days I truely hate this hobby and remember why I left in the first place.....

My goal is to have a breeding pair and to actually raise the frye, just have to keep the damned fish alive long enough....

On the bright side all the corals seem to be fine.

Although immediately after the worm inceident my frogspawn puffed up like balloons. Really strange, have never seen that before. My anemone and merlettis did the same thing shortly after.
 
I split a trans-shipment with my brother-in-law through livestockusa.org. Not very impressed. We were looking to get some livestock to start some aquaculturing, but for the 900 it cost us with shipping, and the sizes of the pieces we essentially got screwed. Mitch at livestockusa.org asked me to take some pics and send to him to see the sizes and said we may be able to work something out. We will see. I will get some pics up of the stuff we got, but we averaged $40 per piece, and nothing was particularly good looking or big.

Also got a pair of saddleback clowns and a green spot puffer.

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Picked up a porcelain crab, which proceeded to annoy the crap out of my BTA, and was subsequently returned. But got some cool pics first.

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new brittle star
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will post pics of the clowns tomorrow.

Also bought a bubble magus protein skimmer, excited to get that, my water seems almost cloudy. Will be buying a phosphate reactor within a couple days too.
 
Man you did an awesome job on that and canopy! Only pick that's missing is a fts with the stand and canopy in the pic .... Looks great man
 
Careful with that puffer, GSPs and most puffers in general LOVE to eat corals/BTAs. It's hit or miss but the odds aren't good ime. I'm a puffer freak, they are what started me in this hobby. Had a few GSP's in my time and all of them ended up alone in a species tank.

I put an 8" diameter rosebubble in my tank last month and it was gone the next day. No trace... My dogface puffer was IMMEDIATELY interested like it was a "gummy worm" or something. The bta tried to suck himself down in a hole in the rocks but to no avail. The trigger is suspect as well. Just an experiment really, my friend has like fifty RBTA and he's trying to just give them to me. Free fishfood I guess?

Adding that medusa worm taught you a lesson you won't forget. Look at my sig...seems I'm not the only one who does it. :)

As for adding to the bioload slowly I couldn't agree more. In fact I only have six fish total in my 300g. lol Yeah they are big and messy but still...the guys at the LFS think I'm overcautious and want to sell me 20 fish everytime I go there.

I love how you started this thread by saying "I wasn't ever going to get back into this hobby" and then look at this thread LOL you are so reefwhipped! It's ok, we all are... :)
 
Unfortunately the puffer is dead, it went over the overflow and got sucked in to my skimmer, it did not fair well. However, it had no interest in any corals, and I watched it closely. It was an awesome addition to the tanks, and like all fish, that doesnt guarantee the next will be so coral friendly. I would get another but I think I have too much flow, unless I were to get a bigger one. That little guy was all of about 3/4 inch long.

Yeah the medussa worm was maybe the coolest invert I have ever bought, but I wont do it again.

The porcelain crab is already gone, i took it out the next day, it annoyed the anemone it tried to host on. That anemone wound up dying off after the medussa worm too. The tank looks much different now. I didnt think anyone was looking so I stopped updating this thread.

I have already been thinking about getting back out of the hobby again. It just takes too much of my time. My wife has told me to wait, so I am going to give it some time. But I might just bail again. We shall see.

Travis, thanks, maybe I will get a FTS with the canopy in the next couple days.
 
I split a trans-shipment with my brother-in-law through livestockusa.org. Not very impressed. We were looking to get some livestock to start some aquaculturing, but for the 900 it cost us with shipping, and the sizes of the pieces we essentially got screwed. Mitch at livestockusa.org asked me to take some pics and send to him to see the sizes and said we may be able to work something out. We will see. I will get some pics up of the stuff we got, but we averaged $40 per piece, and nothing was particularly good looking or big.

Gro,

Was wondering what you finally worked out. I'm kinda in the same boat. Pics sent, no response. TIA
 
Well, first Mitch will reply to your emails perhaps 10 % of the time. On the other hand, he usually answers the phone and is willing to talk. He seemed surprised that I wasn't happy, but how else should he act? Besides the fact that everything that was in the box was mediocre at best, they threw three extra pieces in, this is great if they are things that you put on your lists as substitutes, but not so great when its just crap you wouldn't have bought, but got stuck paying for. One of these things was a blue finger sponge about 1.5 inches long, and basically dead and hanging off the rock. I wound up being charged $35 for this, a sponge that often comes as a hitchhiker, that i would never buy. Granted he did refund my money on that piece. I never sent him pictures because I didn't want to waste anymore time with it. Nothing that was listed as "special color" was anything close to special, just your usual boring zoos and leather. And all of the zoos i got now have zoa pocks, so who knows how long they will last. Basically we threw away $900, i absolutely do NOT recommend this to anyone, this was such an incredible disappointment. I did take some pics, and will try to get them posted so people can see what you can expect to get. Keep in mind, the biggest problem with these trans ships is usually the first box is awesome to reel you in, then the quality drops. In this case the first box even sucked!
 
Well, first Mitch will reply to your emails perhaps 10 % of the time. On the other hand, he usually answers the phone and is willing to talk. He seemed surprised that I wasn't happy, but how else should he act? Besides the fact that everything that was in the box was mediocre at best, they threw three extra pieces in, this is great if they are things that you put on your lists as substitutes, but not so great when its just crap you wouldn't have bought, but got stuck paying for. I never sent him pictures because I didn't want to waste anymore time with it. Nothing that was listed as "special color" was anything close to special, just your usual boring zoos and leather. And all of the zoos i got now have zoa pocks, so who knows how long they will last. Basically we threw away $900, i absolutely do NOT recommend this to anyone, this was such an incredible disappointment. I did take some pics, and will try to get them posted so people can see what you can expect to get. Keep in mind, the biggest problem with these trans ships is usually the first box is awesome to reel you in, then the quality drops. In this case the first box even sucked!

Hi Gro,

Thanks for the input. I was wondering about your comment:
"Keep in mind, the biggest problem with these trans ships is usually the first box is awesome to reel you in, then the quality drops."
Why would the first box be any different? Just wondering. Couldn't agree more that this stuff was "an incredible disappointment".
In my case, I waited nearly three weeks (could've been four) for the rock. Wanted Pukani, but since he just wasn't getting any, I settled for the regular Fiji. According to Mitch, I "wouldn't be disappointed". Well, I was. The rock looked as though it had been out of the water for a LONG time. It was shipped to me in boxes lined with a plastic bag, and moisted newspaper covering the top of the rock. Actually, some of the paper had begun to dry out when I opened the boxes. The rock had a few, old dead, dying sponges on it, some very short (1/4") stalks of what looked like some seaweed or macroalgae. Overall, not much color to it.
I did take pics, and emailed them to Russ. He also was astounded that I wasn't happy with it. He had, over the 3 - 4 week period it took to get the rock, kept saying it would be "the freshest possible rock available" as it was air freighted instead of "boat rock". When he got the pics, he began to defend the quality of the rock by saying even though it looked devoid of life, there are small patches and even DNA of things that will begin to grow back over the following months. Maybe...maybe not....time will tell. Maybe I was expecting something based on my experiences 15 years ago, and things have changed. Either way, I remain disappointed. Also, sorry for typing a book on your thread.
 
The reason I say the first box is usually better is because they put good stuff in the first time, so you spend money on a second box, which then sucks. Mitch doesn't even live in California, and doesn't have much to do with the physical operation of the facility there, at least that's what I got from our conversations.

Another weird thing was that our shipment came in two different boxes. One of which was sealed and stamped by the Indonesian government, the other, in a completely different box, had the name of an import company in Cali, no seal. It looked to me that the seal from Indonesia had never been broken, although Mitch said that it had to be to re-oxygenate the livestock, I just didnt see where it had been taped together. Seems unlikely to me. I felt it was a bit fishy...although the stuff in the sealed box was just as blah as the stuff in the non-sealed box, so who knows. At any rate i will NEVER do it again. I am better off asking LFS to order a large specimen and prepay for it.

RE: newspaper shipping, Mitch told me that anemones are usually not shipped in water!! Just in wet newspaper! Seems strange to me....
 
I now have neomeris annulata popping out of this rock all over. It just keeps getting better and better...............:eek:(

NEVER AGAIN.....LivestockUSA.org
 
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