r-balljunkie
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newest addition. his name is Maui Jim...in honor of the pair of sunglasses i lost.
wild SPS corals, Marshall Islands
- Thread starter r-balljunkie
- Start date
r-balljunkie
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some tank shots. every thing is humming along just fine. some fine tuning on the dosing pumps, still waiting on the maxspects like everyone else. i hope they get here in one piece.
glennr1978
New member
+1. Keep it up, this is my favorite thread on RC!!
r-balljunkie
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a few more...gotta go to work, make da money...its 0730!!
nolanrob123
Member
Wow! Always such a visual treat. I love how established the clams are. How old do you think they are?
r-balljunkie
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markie mark
New member
What happened? This thread has died off!!! Hope the camera isn't broke...I remember something about vacation..Hope thats why theres no pics...
Raggamuffin
New member
I notice your zoos have about quadrupled since you put them in... must be doing something right!
r-balljunkie
Registered Reefer
ask, and you shall receive.
My sincerest apologies. I presumed interests had waned off. the never ever landia of follow the shiny ball on reefcentral, on to the next thread. Of course I've been keeping busy here, diving most every weekend. My newest fetish has been collecting fish. Fashioning my own nets on my off time, I'm in 'training' mode, following the zen master, jedi collector. He said he doesn't mind if I drop his name, but I won't. FWIW he is a true marine biologist, and an absolute diving freak. Us mere recreational divers can't hold his diving bag when it comes to living under the sea and his experiences. pretty down to earth guy, salt of the earth..err ocean.
He has been credited with some species discoveries to boot.
Kind of hard to correct someone on a fish id or aquarium keeping ideology when talking to someone who really is an expert and not some aquarium wannabe hack like myself. He's has been nice enough to drag me along fish collecting. The locale is usally on the fringe of recreational diving limits and of course at top secret locations. after chickening out about going so deep and wimpily flailing away at 20-30 feet on the reef the first couple of times, I decided to 'man up' follow him to the depths. whoa, wow. much easier to collect at these depths. granted, not the same success as he, but better than chasing crafty fish that just disappear into the coral reef in the shallower depths. this is the main reason for lack of pictures collecting at depths. you really don't have a big window of time to wrangle fish in the net, much less time to document via a bulky underwater camera. I had my eye on some blue throat triggers when I was down on a dive....they just non-chalantly mosey into a hole in the reef as you get closer. I asked, how do you get those....reply was stick your hand in there, unlock the fins and there you go. I guess I have to put my big boy pants on next time, and go noodling for blue throats.
I had relative success last trip, some johnsoni juvenille wrasses, and a juevenille scorpionfish. I had to clear out half my tank to get a rogue crab out (2nd one???) to prevent eating of my newly collected tiny fish. the tank is in a bit of disarray. I think I'm just going to do a couple of walk in dives this weekend, verses the awesome boat dives I've been doing the last few weeks. kind of a break as 3 tank boat dives are usually an all day ordeal. hopefully, get a couple of corals to round out the display, do some housekeeping on the tank....follow up with some tank shots
we are slated to leave for our vacation in October, booked and paid for.
itinerary is Bangkok, Saigon, Phuket. Ching Tai has been gracious enough to extend an invitation to see his showpiece display tank, so that's on the agenda in Bangkok. I'm going to bring my dive regulator with me, so diving in Phuket should be nice, too. I love subsidized vacations. I would normally not be able to afford such an extravagant trip, but I'm really blessed to get a generous annual travel allowance. enough about my fabulousness :clown: LOL
WOW man ! beautiful !
look at that black clam !! you tried to take it right ? right ?? lol
this is just too amazing !one day, one day
nah, if it's on the reef (clams) I will leave it be. I'm ok with collecting clams at low tide at places you cannot access diving. this way, I don't take away from the beauty of the reef for the next diver. trust me, it's very very tempting, but I have to maintain some type of standard being out here, you gotta respect the reef.
Wow, hard to say. you lose the scale of how grandeur in size some of these clams you're seeing. I would surmise some are 50+ years old. I hope I'm not speaking out of the side of my neck with nonsense, non-scientific guess on my part. the giant ones are every bit of 3-4 feet long.
the tank is well established, SPS are keeping their colors, nice PE extension. might be a bit exaggerated in 4x growth. when you look at other hobbyist tanks, frags are grown out into colonies, systems are designed from scratch. I feel like I'm cheating here....granted I'm keeping mindful of responsible husbandry and it's still an incurred cost for me to keep a tank here, purchasing salt from stateside, food, GFO, equipment purchases etc BUT there's many equal or better reef keepers out there.
here's some pics from collecting...some pretty rare stuff in there.
if thought I would throw up some old full tank shots from the years past....just so no one thinks I'm a total hack....perhaps just a hack.
r-balljunkie
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