WAR5150
Guest
Well I think it is about time I started a tank journal. I’ll admit I don’t really know what to say in this but what the heck? Disclaimer now: Sorry about poor picture qualities, I use my phone and am still learning how to get good pictures although they have improved.
I grew up hearing stories of my Dad’s old 55 gallon he used to have and the various life in it, including lion fish. This guy is a total green-thumb with pretty much anything he tries. I would do my research, try and plant a couple flowers or vegetables and they just die or never take off. Meanwhile, he comes over and throws some dirt in a pot and though may not even know exactly what he’s looking at, but the plants inevitably thrive. Same thing with his aquarium. He finally set up another tank in his office after I went away to college and I was pretty jealous because I barely ever got to see it. His BTAs split often, clownfish lay eggs, coral thrives and as much as he knows exactly what he’s doing, he doesn’t get into the weeds on anything. “Hey Dad, what is that coral?” “No idea, I just liked the way it looked.” So that’s the basic story of how I got interested. I learned from him the fish are cool, but he gravitated towards coral. That was before I heard the saying about fish get you interested in the hobby, but the coral keeps you.
I am active duty Air Force and moved to the Bay Area and immediately set out to get an aquarium setup because I know I need patience and my time was limited. Because I was starting out from scratch and had basically no background with any of this gear, I was very detailed in my research and taking pictures of every step along the way. I’m not kidding when I say everystep. I mean to the extent of building the skimmer I would take a picture when everything was laid out, picture when step one was complete, step 2, etc etc. I found that many of the YouTube videos I watched did not answer the questions I needed as someone brand new, so I decided that I would make a channel for true beginners so that way we could all learn together from a new perspective. Alas, my ambition was higher than my practicality like so many other aspects, but at least I still have all those pictures.
I went with a RedSea Reefer 350. I was used to hang-on style equipment from my Dad’s setup but came to really like the sump idea and everything with that. I used the Black Friday deals to buy practically all of my gear and saved lots of money by doing so. I remember struggling with putting the overflow pipes in correctly as silly as that sounds. I found the diagrams in the instruction to be a little unclear (this is one of those reasons why I wanted to start that YouTube channel) and ended up putting the pipes in the wrong slots. This eventually led to never really being able to make the tank as quiet as it should have been and needed to drain the overflow later down the road. During this time, I didn’t have a wet/dry shop vac yet, so I may or may not have totally ruined a regular vacuum trying to get all the water out of the sump when doing my initial freshwater leak test and when I had to drain the overflow to fix the pipes. It’s okay, I hated that vacuum and it was the perfect excuse to toss it.
December of 2019 is when I started to fill the tank with rock, sand, saltwater and got the cycle started. I used the Dr. Tim’s product to try and get through the cycle faster. When I felt comfortable, I added my first three corals; a toadstool leather, finger leather and a red/blue acan. The acan was touch for me to turn down since I’m a big Buffalo Bills fan and planned to have a dedicated red/blue portion of the aquarium. While it still has the colors, that piece has really faded from its original vibrance and it sounds like a lot of people have those same struggles. A couple weeks later I added a small zoa frag. I don’t know what type they are, but it had two different types on the frag.
In February, I went to some training where I was gone for roughly 4 weeks. During a portion where I had zero phone/internet access, my tank experienced a major malfunction. When I had access to these amenities again, I saw that my Apex had disconnected a couple days prior. Well, I don’t have anybody to watch my tank because I don’t trust anybody yet plus it’s only three pieces of coral so it shouldn’t need much babysitting. I called up someone from work and he came over another two days later and we discovered the power brick for my Apex had shorted out: everything belonging to the tank was plugged into that one source. We worked through facetime and managed to get it working because I happened to have a backup brick that wasn’t plugged in. I sent the brick in to Neptune and it was repaired. Since then, I have divided the load between these two and haven’t had further problems. I also keep the same guy from work on retainer because even though he didn’t know anything about aquariums, he saved my system and has been incredibly helpful when I’m on the road. I did lose the finger leather from that trip, but it was small and better than losing more all things considered.
About a week after I returned from that training, is when the COVID shelter in place began. I had picked up a Kenya tree to replace the finger leather and also some green hairy mushroom to add a little bit more color. My LFS had a TON of bubble tip anemones and it was super tempting to get one but I’ve heard everything about needing an established tank so I was able to exercise some self-control. For a couple weeks. I introduced a small BTA on April 2. It hung out where I placed it in the tank and I observed it the rest of the afternoon and evening. It didn’t move until I went to bed. Woke up in the morning and immediately check in and it was gone. I was devasted. I found a small piece of tentacle and came to the conclusion it offed itself in a powerhead. I had guards ordered, but they weren’t shipped yet. I felt so bad that I allowed this to happen to a living thing through my own negligence. It didn’t even make 24 hours. Heck, it didn’t even survive 18 hours. I thought it was weird because I didn’t see a large rise in levels or even the milkiness that I’ve heard happens in those situations but I did find a piece of tentacle so I chocked that up to it being a small ‘nem. Fast forward five days and I discovered the anemone had been hiding in the very back and basically under the rock. Since then, it has been doing well, although I think I should call it “Forrest” because it seems to run around its half of the tank every few days. It is entertaining to see though.
April 28: Added two clownfish. Holy cow, I didn’t know they could be so small! As much as I prefer getting anything from an LFS, we’re in the middle of quarantine and mine didn’t have any the last time I was there so I got these from Liveaquaria, which is where I’ve made all my online livestock purchases. Quarantined those guys while I was doing my own quarantine and eventually added them to the display. They were so frustrating. They’d swim all over their 20 gallon quarantine, observe what I’m doing in the kitchen, understand when it’s feeding time etc, but when added to their large new home, the hang in a corner all day long that could fit inside my fist. At night, they’d swim to the other side of the tank and cuddle up just above the sand until the next day, when the same process would repeat. Seriously, all this new space and you don’t even bother exploring? As they gotten older, the one has turned almost completely black and just has fringes of orange, while the other is orange with fringes of black.
Time for another mission. I expect to be on the road five days and come back two weeks later. Gotta love the military. Came back to all kinds of algae, so I went to my LFS and grabbed three turbo snails. Now he’s known that I wanted a tuxedo urchin for a while, and a small foxface rabbitfish for a couple months, but they haven’t come in so I needed a stop gap. Grabbed those (along with a small candycane coral, single head. I can now see two "mouths" though so I'm sure it's about to become two heads) and a day later someone brings in a beautiful majestic foxface (along with some other things) because they were moving and had to decommission the tank. After some time letting the foxface de-stress and ensure it was doing well, I picked it up and added it to my aquarium. It’s been doing great and the combination of that plus the snails have totally changed the algae game. Another benefit, adding this new swimmer changed the behavior of my clowns. Nobody bullies each other and they’re perfectly happy hanging around together, but the clowns have started swimming around different areas of the tank.
I do love my little punk rocker.
By this point, I’ve gotten fed up waiting for my LFS to get back to me about the urchin so I decided to order one online. Along with that, grabbed a three pack of rock flower anemone and a war & peace favia. Once again, I never expected the urchin to be so tiny! I added those Sept 29 and think I’ve seen the urchin twice since then. I’d like to see that some more because I always wanted one and never cared about the snails but so long as nobody is being out competed, they’ll do for now.
What have I learned in these first 10 months of my first reef tank?
Current struggles
I grew up hearing stories of my Dad’s old 55 gallon he used to have and the various life in it, including lion fish. This guy is a total green-thumb with pretty much anything he tries. I would do my research, try and plant a couple flowers or vegetables and they just die or never take off. Meanwhile, he comes over and throws some dirt in a pot and though may not even know exactly what he’s looking at, but the plants inevitably thrive. Same thing with his aquarium. He finally set up another tank in his office after I went away to college and I was pretty jealous because I barely ever got to see it. His BTAs split often, clownfish lay eggs, coral thrives and as much as he knows exactly what he’s doing, he doesn’t get into the weeds on anything. “Hey Dad, what is that coral?” “No idea, I just liked the way it looked.” So that’s the basic story of how I got interested. I learned from him the fish are cool, but he gravitated towards coral. That was before I heard the saying about fish get you interested in the hobby, but the coral keeps you.
I am active duty Air Force and moved to the Bay Area and immediately set out to get an aquarium setup because I know I need patience and my time was limited. Because I was starting out from scratch and had basically no background with any of this gear, I was very detailed in my research and taking pictures of every step along the way. I’m not kidding when I say everystep. I mean to the extent of building the skimmer I would take a picture when everything was laid out, picture when step one was complete, step 2, etc etc. I found that many of the YouTube videos I watched did not answer the questions I needed as someone brand new, so I decided that I would make a channel for true beginners so that way we could all learn together from a new perspective. Alas, my ambition was higher than my practicality like so many other aspects, but at least I still have all those pictures.
I went with a RedSea Reefer 350. I was used to hang-on style equipment from my Dad’s setup but came to really like the sump idea and everything with that. I used the Black Friday deals to buy practically all of my gear and saved lots of money by doing so. I remember struggling with putting the overflow pipes in correctly as silly as that sounds. I found the diagrams in the instruction to be a little unclear (this is one of those reasons why I wanted to start that YouTube channel) and ended up putting the pipes in the wrong slots. This eventually led to never really being able to make the tank as quiet as it should have been and needed to drain the overflow later down the road. During this time, I didn’t have a wet/dry shop vac yet, so I may or may not have totally ruined a regular vacuum trying to get all the water out of the sump when doing my initial freshwater leak test and when I had to drain the overflow to fix the pipes. It’s okay, I hated that vacuum and it was the perfect excuse to toss it.
December of 2019 is when I started to fill the tank with rock, sand, saltwater and got the cycle started. I used the Dr. Tim’s product to try and get through the cycle faster. When I felt comfortable, I added my first three corals; a toadstool leather, finger leather and a red/blue acan. The acan was touch for me to turn down since I’m a big Buffalo Bills fan and planned to have a dedicated red/blue portion of the aquarium. While it still has the colors, that piece has really faded from its original vibrance and it sounds like a lot of people have those same struggles. A couple weeks later I added a small zoa frag. I don’t know what type they are, but it had two different types on the frag.
In February, I went to some training where I was gone for roughly 4 weeks. During a portion where I had zero phone/internet access, my tank experienced a major malfunction. When I had access to these amenities again, I saw that my Apex had disconnected a couple days prior. Well, I don’t have anybody to watch my tank because I don’t trust anybody yet plus it’s only three pieces of coral so it shouldn’t need much babysitting. I called up someone from work and he came over another two days later and we discovered the power brick for my Apex had shorted out: everything belonging to the tank was plugged into that one source. We worked through facetime and managed to get it working because I happened to have a backup brick that wasn’t plugged in. I sent the brick in to Neptune and it was repaired. Since then, I have divided the load between these two and haven’t had further problems. I also keep the same guy from work on retainer because even though he didn’t know anything about aquariums, he saved my system and has been incredibly helpful when I’m on the road. I did lose the finger leather from that trip, but it was small and better than losing more all things considered.
About a week after I returned from that training, is when the COVID shelter in place began. I had picked up a Kenya tree to replace the finger leather and also some green hairy mushroom to add a little bit more color. My LFS had a TON of bubble tip anemones and it was super tempting to get one but I’ve heard everything about needing an established tank so I was able to exercise some self-control. For a couple weeks. I introduced a small BTA on April 2. It hung out where I placed it in the tank and I observed it the rest of the afternoon and evening. It didn’t move until I went to bed. Woke up in the morning and immediately check in and it was gone. I was devasted. I found a small piece of tentacle and came to the conclusion it offed itself in a powerhead. I had guards ordered, but they weren’t shipped yet. I felt so bad that I allowed this to happen to a living thing through my own negligence. It didn’t even make 24 hours. Heck, it didn’t even survive 18 hours. I thought it was weird because I didn’t see a large rise in levels or even the milkiness that I’ve heard happens in those situations but I did find a piece of tentacle so I chocked that up to it being a small ‘nem. Fast forward five days and I discovered the anemone had been hiding in the very back and basically under the rock. Since then, it has been doing well, although I think I should call it “Forrest” because it seems to run around its half of the tank every few days. It is entertaining to see though.
April 28: Added two clownfish. Holy cow, I didn’t know they could be so small! As much as I prefer getting anything from an LFS, we’re in the middle of quarantine and mine didn’t have any the last time I was there so I got these from Liveaquaria, which is where I’ve made all my online livestock purchases. Quarantined those guys while I was doing my own quarantine and eventually added them to the display. They were so frustrating. They’d swim all over their 20 gallon quarantine, observe what I’m doing in the kitchen, understand when it’s feeding time etc, but when added to their large new home, the hang in a corner all day long that could fit inside my fist. At night, they’d swim to the other side of the tank and cuddle up just above the sand until the next day, when the same process would repeat. Seriously, all this new space and you don’t even bother exploring? As they gotten older, the one has turned almost completely black and just has fringes of orange, while the other is orange with fringes of black.
Time for another mission. I expect to be on the road five days and come back two weeks later. Gotta love the military. Came back to all kinds of algae, so I went to my LFS and grabbed three turbo snails. Now he’s known that I wanted a tuxedo urchin for a while, and a small foxface rabbitfish for a couple months, but they haven’t come in so I needed a stop gap. Grabbed those (along with a small candycane coral, single head. I can now see two "mouths" though so I'm sure it's about to become two heads) and a day later someone brings in a beautiful majestic foxface (along with some other things) because they were moving and had to decommission the tank. After some time letting the foxface de-stress and ensure it was doing well, I picked it up and added it to my aquarium. It’s been doing great and the combination of that plus the snails have totally changed the algae game. Another benefit, adding this new swimmer changed the behavior of my clowns. Nobody bullies each other and they’re perfectly happy hanging around together, but the clowns have started swimming around different areas of the tank.
By this point, I’ve gotten fed up waiting for my LFS to get back to me about the urchin so I decided to order one online. Along with that, grabbed a three pack of rock flower anemone and a war & peace favia. Once again, I never expected the urchin to be so tiny! I added those Sept 29 and think I’ve seen the urchin twice since then. I’d like to see that some more because I always wanted one and never cared about the snails but so long as nobody is being out competed, they’ll do for now.
What have I learned in these first 10 months of my first reef tank?
- I hate the rockscape.
- Vermetid snails suck!
- I don’t know how I feel about acans
- I have a ton to learn! And will always be learning.
Current struggles
- Getting algae back under control
- Kenya tree extension
- I’d like the BTA to be a little more “bulbous”
