Ok saw the stuff in the store, totally not transparent. I'll figure something out though, foam sounds like a good idea though then I can easily cut out where holes where the pipes go in/out.
Onto the tank now.
Noticed something over the past few days that kind of bugs me. When I shine lights into the tank the tank water looks a bit cloudy. I don't think it's particulate matter in the water column though because the sump doesn't look particularly cloudy, although I tossed on some filter socks just for kicks and giggles to see if that clears things up. What I think that's happening is because of the insulation foam I put under. I had the silver side up because the other side basically said R-TECH and looked kind of tacky to be looking at through a barebottom tank, but the silver stuff is almost dimpled like old school MH reflectors, I'm thinking the light from the LEDs is going down, then reflecting right back up but because it's not a perfect mirror finish the light is getting scattered. Probably will be absolutely awesome for corals to get light from multiple angles... I'll have to see though as far as how annoying that gets... maybe a few monti caps to have some big shaded areas... frag swap is coming soon isn't it??
Ok, since there's some stuff in the tank, I guess it's only fair to throw up some eye candy. I don't have a fancy camera, it's an older point and shoot but I like it because it has a built in white balance that I can change on the fly to compensate if the lights are too blue. I also noticed my little top-down under the water picture tube is getting some bright haloing around some of the corals. I'm not sure if it's from the aforementioned reflection, or if the clear nature of my camera tube is allowing light to funnel into the lens at odd angles. Either way, a little photoshop magic and I can wipe away a lot of the haze.
First up, 1 of 3 fish. Only fish picture I've gotten so far. They're getting more comfortable with the tank, definitely can tell they like the space to swim around. Was a bit worried about the yellow tang picking on the purple due to the size difference, I saw a little bit of flashing/chasing but later that night they were both "sleeping" in the same cave area. Also notice the purple does come to hang out near the other 2 when I'm not around (I catch him just as I peek into the room). Oh well, as they get more comfortable I'll see about trying to get more fish pictures.
Since I only have 1 LED array up, all the corals got "bunched" into one corner. I kind of half-assed the wiring just so I could get some light over the system and so the corals didn't brown out. I almost got all the pieces I need to throw together my lighting (except enough lenses for the LEDs... but I'll run without lenses for a bit, since I won't have corals all over the place yet). Either way here's the corals through the acrylic (kind of horrible shot)
Now for the money shots, the top-down under water shots.
First the drab... but this sps actually survived! Not sure what the hell it is, maybe some encrusting monti? My wife likes this one for some reason because of the green dots, I see brown coral though :|
Next the other SPS that survived! The pink sand dollar monti. It lost quite a bit of it's purple base color, but hopefully it'll color back up, or at least the new growth gets purple. This is coral doesn't fluoresce at all, so blue light or white light doesn't matter.
Next up is a frogspawn that ain't too happy. For whatever reason, the fact it's tall branch with a thin base, it kept falling over, it zapped quite a few of my other LPS too when it fell right on them *frown*. But even though it isn't terribly impressive for some reason I absolutely love this picture, there's just something about the way it looked from this angle.
One of my zoa/paly colonies... yanno I really don't know how to tell the difference between zoas and palys... whatever they're all the same. One thing about taking macro shots from the top down is you can always find those little things that your eye tends to miss, whether it's aiptasia, or redbugs, or in this case red flatworms... so looking through all the pictures I found all the rocks that had them, removed them, treated them with flatworm exit, and hopefully none of them jumped off in the tank.
Here's an acan that seemed to have done ok considering all the issues of the old tank, there's one piece of skeleton where a polyp died, but overall it's done ok. Plus some of those green death? nuclear green? the hell if I know they're green palys.
Now some orange yumas, and a super cool green rodactis with a bad case of reef herpies! Actually it's a cool little coral, unfortunately it has never split/reproduce. Will keep an eye on the boundary though hopefully the yumas don't attack it. Got this from way back when Jim had the store in Berkeley.
Now I've always been a blastomussa man, unfortunately there's not a huge selection you normally see in the stores. I don't buy online, yet, and I don't travel to those reef shows. So usually what you see is red with greenish/teal center blastomusa welsii. I know there are other color morphs, but I just never see them, and the couple times I did they acted as if those were one of a kind. Well here's one of my first blastos, this a Merletti, originally was red with blue center (Superman Blasto!) but I just noticed the blue is two tone, and there's actually a little yellow mouth! Definitely going to charge $200 per polyp for this guy!
Here you can see that reflective crap on the foam, welp way too late to change anything about it
Now here's my Rachmaninov, this was one of the first DBTC I did way way back in the day, probably can't even find it anymore since every one who I gave it to killed it. Oh well I've been keeping it alive and happy. The reality is this coral doesn't look like this to me, this is a photograph thing, I can't see the level of detail that the macro shot gets. I see a red coral with a green mouth, a little bit of ruffle around the edge but that's it. But hey it does photograph pretty! All I need is some black sand to take it against and we're talking $300 a polyp!
Oh well that's all the eye candy for now. Bob, almost time to get my babies home!
