JC -- making things happen since 1985

The 55 gallon Reef Tank

I obtained this tank sometime in mid September. It came with crushed coral substrate, one clown fish, several lavender star-polyps, 2 HOB Penguin 160 filters, a HOB CPR bakpak protein skimmer, and a Rio 1700 to power it. It also came with a heater, and a Coralife 4x65 PC lighting. The front two lights are 10k and the back two are actinic. The next weekend (9/25/06) I bought 30 lbs of live rock and a bunch of new corals, along with a power head, and some supplements for the reef. A lot of the rocks had some bad hair algae on them as you can see. These pictures were taken after this buy, my apologies for the poor quality.
Next I bought a sally light foot crab and a few snails to work on the algae. When they couldn't keep up with it, I bought a tuxedo urchin (that insists on picking up everything that I don't want it to.) The sally light foot crab only had 6 legs when I got it, and for some reason I thought that was normal, but now he has all 8. It was crazy to see him grow a leg over night; one day it wasn't there, and the next day it was. Then 2 weeks later the same thing happened with the last leg. He's cool, I like him. About 3 weeks since my last large buy, I bought 40 more pounds of live rock, and some Frags (specifically 3 types of Zoanthids, a Ricordia, and a larger single stemmed Polyp Coral (not sure what it is)). I also got about 5 little hermits, to help clean up. I took some more pictures, but most of them are so blurry I decided not to post them. Here's a full tank shot and the urchin.
After this, I had spent a lot of money and felt I should wait a little bit before buying anything new. However, I still had a problem with hair algae, so I decided to get a Foxface. I couldn't believe how much that fish ate! It cut my hair algae down to size for the crabs real fast. Then one of my friend's Nano tank was starting to bend, so I bought a nice branch rock with a leather on it and lots of Coraline algae. I also got a Torch coral. I took some more pics, and I tried to take some of the foxface, but he moved too fast so they were blurry. Therefore I got a video instead, haha sucker! All these pics are as of November 11th.

Foxface

Xenia

Full tank video (28mb)


I haven't done anything with this tank since that point. Instead, I bought an additional 90 gallon reef tank. I am going to transfer everything in the 55 over as soon as the water settles. In the mean time, I took some more pics on Dec 10th. The ones with the flash aren't blurry, but the color doesn't look good, and the ones without the flash are supper blurry, but I like them anyways. I thought it was funny that my sally lightfoot was climbing the glass.
Equipment detail:
lights: http://www.marineandreef.com/products/aqualight_53106.jpg http://www.marineandreef.com/shoppro/power_aqualight.html

Thanks for looking
-James