Potential near-future Blasto addition

A local reefer is selling a 3-polyp frag of Blasto, pictured to the right, and I am thinking about purchasing it from him. It looks like a healthy little frag and I've been looking to add some diversity to my tank. I think this would be a cool addition of color/shape. Let me know what you think about this. The mother colony is pictured below.

(pictures posted on the local reef club forum by the owner of the coral, photo rights belong to "Landon" at www.madisonreef.com)

Thanksgiving Break Update

Good lord...I go home for 4 days for thanksgiving and return to a TON of evaporation. I turned off the Halide for the weekend to try to minimize it, but it was still ridiculous. I topped off probably half a gallon of water (water level was low by about an inch). This seem to be fine, otherwise. Both fish okay, all corals looking alright. The small zoa frag has even started spreading new little guys off, and I've suspected my mushroom had split for a while, but I finally came back and saw the second mouth, so I know for sure there are two of them!

I did notice an increase in the red bubble algae, the hair algae was a bit less prevalent after several days of darkness, but there appears to have been a small bit of Cyano starting up. I'm hoping that doing a water change tomorrow will solve that, but I'm considering adding some sort of filtration...perhaps a skimmer, perhaps a hang-on refugium. Any ideas?

Here's a blurry shot after I turned the lights back off tonight...just to tease you. I'll get some new, good pictures up sooner or later.

And We're Up To Date!

Okay folks, this is the last segment of the "catching up" series on my tank. Here you can see the tank after all of the earlier changes, and after I traded off a troublesome peppermint shrimp for the frag of Zoanthid's on the right hand side. You can see my Frogspawn coral on the left, and the Xenia is still pretty plentiful. This was before my move to the dorms.


Of course, you can see from the first post that I got a new coral today, so here that is, followed by a full tank shot from today. You can see that all of my Xenia has disappeared for some unknown reason. About three more pounds of rock were added to the tank, as you can see here, and the frogspawn has been growing nicely. The zoanthids I got in trade for the peppermint shrimp are over on the right side and the new Hairy Mushroom is on the small rock on the sandbed directly front center.








As far as maintenance goes, I do a 10-15% water change every week. This comes out to be about 1.5 gallons and I am using RO/DI and Instant Ocean salt mix. You can see in the updated FTS that my coralline growth is getting pretty good (Coralline is a beneficial algae that encrusts rocks, it's the purple that you see in there.) The frogspawn has grown a bit since I got it as well, and the clowns are looking happy and healthy.

And, to finish up with, some sweet eye candy of those Zoanthids on the right.

How It All Began

A used tank purchased from a friend for $40. Had I done research on Nano's beforehand, I probably wouldn't have made the buy...but I did, and I kinda like this goofy little tank...even if it is set up terribly for a reef environment as is. Join me on a crazy journey of purchases and DIYing.

Here's how it was the day I bought it...It's a mess. Algae all over, the filtration had been off for at least a week, so it was just bad. Still, I cleaned it up and filled it back up...kept the sand in there (which resulted in some gross algae clumps laying around for weeks.) March 22nd:
And after cleaning it up and refilling it:
As you can see, it made quite a turnaround on that day. It was a lot of work, and I wasn't even close to finished with it yet.

A couple weeks later, added live rock and a pair of A. Ocellaris ("Common Clownfish" for those not addicted to the hobby). It took about three days for the clowns to get sick and end up in Quarantine.








During QT there was a good month where I would wake up every day fearing the worst, that I would look into the QT tank and see a pair of dead clownfish. Fortunately they pulled through and are with me and thriving in my tank to this day.

First!

Evening, world.

The first of many posts here to the Trance Reef blog. Eventually I'll go through and write up the entire back story of my aquarium, including all of the DIY work I've done and whatnot. For now, I'll leave you with a picture of my most recent addition, a Hairy Mushroom species.