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Post by TenebrousNova on Jul 25, 2014 9:46:36 GMT
Hi Timenova, I'm sure you don't remember me but last time we spoke I believe you were just about to take the plunge into keeping a marine aquarium... Well look at you now! Your nano is beautiful and everything looks very healthy. That huge clump of pulsing looks great - I wish I still had mine but the anemone decided to take a walk and ended up sitting on it! I've only been on this forum a few hours and already I've found another salty keeper! Hello Fraggs, I do indeed remember your username from another ant forum! It's a pleasure to have you here. I'm afraid the nano is currently on top of the wardrobe since the upgrade and is only used when I go on holiday or if there's some big problem with the new tank. Lots of maintenance to do this summer because the heat is evaporating the water very quickly! Tomorrow I'm going to trim the xenia back a bit and trade the frags in the pet shop for other corals, it spreads like wildfire in my tank. Strange about the anemone killing it, my bubble tip anemone leans right into a large colony and it never bothered them. I'll be very interested to hear about your own animals.
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Post by TenebrousNova on Jul 29, 2014 11:01:22 GMT
Snipped off a few pieces of pulsing Xenia and gave them to the pet shop...it certainly doesn't take long for them to recover because they were happily pulsing away and extended even when we were in the car. They let me have £17 worth of coral in exchange so I went and bought this green Favia frag. Not that much to look at right now, but I'm hoping it will do well there. The skeleton underneath the flesh seems to be quite thick!
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Post by Deleted on Aug 3, 2014 19:08:04 GMT
I have 3 marine aquariums but one of them is currently empty. I have 2 different puffers a Picasso trigger and some other fish in the biggest tank(4 foot) in the 3 foot aquarium I have 3 clownfish 2 blue tangs (also know as dory in a movie) a shrimp and a goby.
P.S Sorry for clogging up your thread.
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Post by TenebrousNova on Aug 4, 2014 10:17:40 GMT
I have 3 marine aquariums but one of them is currently empty. I have 2 different puffers a Picasso trigger and some other fish in the biggest tank(4 foot) in the 3 foot aquarium I have 3 clownfish 2 blue tangs (also know as dory in a movie) a shrimp and a goby. P.S Sorry for clogging up your thread. It's fine, I'm always interested by other people's experiences! I did want a pufferfish originally until I read that they eat invertebrates, and apparently you have to trim their teeth back every so often. I'd love a tang (Probably a yellow tang) but I don't think my tank would be big enough for one. At 1am I was kept awake by bizarre gurgling noises coming from the tank. I looked in the sump this morning to find one of my turbo snails down there! He was clearly causing the noises as he traveled down the pipe...he's back where he belongs now. I'll have to cover the pipe with some mesh or something.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 4, 2014 13:21:30 GMT
I have 3 marine aquariums but one of them is currently empty. I have 2 different puffers a Picasso trigger and some other fish in the biggest tank(4 foot) in the 3 foot aquarium I have 3 clownfish 2 blue tangs (also know as dory in a movie) a shrimp and a goby. P.S Sorry for clogging up your thread. It's fine, I'm always interested by other people's experiences! I did want a pufferfish originally until I read that they eat invertebrates, and apparently you have to trim their teeth back every so often. I'd love a tang (Probably a yellow tang) but I don't think my tank would be big enough for one. At 1am I was kept awake by bizarre gurgling noises coming from the tank. I looked in the sump this morning to find one of my turbo snails down there! He was clearly causing the noises as he traveled down the pipe...he's back where he belongs now. I'll have to cover the pipe with some mesh or something. We've never had to trim their teeth back. You shouldn't have to anyway because the wouldn't be trimmed in the wild. We also had a yellow tang and a purple tang (my dad said he paid £30 for it when it should have cost £130 because the guy we got it from was unsure on its exact species) but we got a large crab and it attacked the purple tang and it soon died and the yellow tang soon followed about a few days after we got rid of the crab. Why did you get a sump we didn't get one we just used an overrated filter and a skimmer.
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Post by TenebrousNova on Aug 4, 2014 14:24:08 GMT
The sump was there when I bought the tank, it was all custom made by the previous owner. What kind of crab attacked your tang? I've been giving some thought to getting a porcelain crab, which are supposed to be docile enough. Or better yet, a pom-pom crab!
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Post by Deleted on Aug 4, 2014 15:38:32 GMT
it was a big hermit crab.
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Post by TenebrousNova on Aug 7, 2014 16:01:32 GMT
Here's a closeup of the green star polyps under the blue lights. They're still growing quickly. Both colonies have now merged with each other to create one big colony. The new Favite is still doing alright. It ate a pellet I dropped in one of the pit-like mouths, which sank down slightly and swallowed it up. You can see that the tissue is beginning to grow down the side of the skeleton where it was cut off from the mother coral. I'm being invaded by Xenia! Seriously, I gave several chunks of it to the pet shop last week. Some people actually can't get this stuff to grow at all in their tanks...its both a blessing and a curse because although it is nice to look at, you constantly have to cut it back. The truly awful thing about Xenia is the smell. When removed from the water it releases the most unholy stench ever that can take hours to leave the room! Let that be a word of warning to anyone else thinking of keeping this prolific, smelly coral.
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Post by TenebrousNova on Aug 16, 2014 10:30:29 GMT
For those who are interested, here's the results of the latest water test. Ammonia: 0 (There shouldn't be any, it's toxic.) Nitrite: 0 (Again, there shouldn't be any.) Nitrate: 20 (Not bad, but ideally there shouldn't be any.) PH: 8.5 (Ideal for corals!) KH: 10 (The hardness of the water. Should be between 8 and 14.) Calcium: 440 (Calcium is essential for the growth of "stony" corals, calcareous algae and a number of other invertebrates.) Phosphate: 0 (Shouldn't be any.) Specific gravity: 1.024 (The "saltiness" of the water. Will try and raise it to 1.025.) Magnesium: 1320 As you can see, keeping marine animals is more about looking after the water than anything else. Chemistry was never my strong point so I'm still reading up on it. The test results are good though, whilst not perfect they're better than they used to be. I'm thinking about getting another trumpet coral since mine is doing well, one of the green ones (Caulatrea curvata). I also got the Ricordea yuma mushroom to eat a piece of squid. Usually it moves its food away from the mouth and over the edge. This time it slurped up its food. Hopefully it'll eventually spread, who knows?
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Post by Deleted on Aug 16, 2014 14:59:52 GMT
We never intervene with our aquariums we just feed the fish, clean the filters out and occasionally check the salt level but none of the stuff you have to do. Might be because we don't have any live plants just a lot of live rock and I mean a lot. Something like 100kilo in the large tank and a couple of kilos in the other tanks.
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Post by TenebrousNova on Aug 21, 2014 18:50:02 GMT
When feeding everyone earlier, I noticed an unusually large tentacle on the trumpet coral. It seemed to behave like the others before retracting minutes later. Never seen that before. At the weekend I may give the whelk to the pet shop. I like him, he's been in the tank for a long time. But he is also a danger to the other tank inhabitants. For example, instead of going around or over obstacles he will try and knock them out of the way. This has caused a few minor rockslides before! I also caught him taking a bite out of a mushroom coral last year and I suspected he ate my old hermit crabs. This suspicion was confirmed when I found him trying to slurp the smaller crab out of his shell! He is the larger of the two snails shown: Fun fact: some people eat this species!
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Post by TenebrousNova on Sept 1, 2014 14:40:14 GMT
The whelk has gone to the pet shop and immediately buried himself in the sand there. He should be alright, he's a tough snail. My Xenia jungle is now bigger than ever. Will probably start advertising it online at this rate. I'm going to trade in a rock with 14-15 stalks on it, should be able to get a new coral with it. In any case, I will probably have to remove most of it at some point because it doesn't leave a lot of room for the other corals. The six-line wrasse (Visible as a purple blur in front of the female clownfish) is doing very well and makes a very nice sight as he weaves in and out of view. He's actually getting bigger now.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 1, 2014 15:56:27 GMT
Very nice Timenova! I would love to even set up a cold water tank, but they can be expensive and I would need time to do it right. Fair play to you going with the marine set up. I love Clownfish too...
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Post by TenebrousNova on Sept 1, 2014 16:22:52 GMT
Thanks Mako! My family always said I'd never be allowed to keep marine animals because we envisioned sheds filled with obscure equipment and everything being incredibly complicated, not to mention expensive. I'd stare longingly at the marine tanks at pet shops every time, especially at the clownfish (I loved them even before Finding Nemo came out) and corals. The denizens of the deep are almost alien. Setting things up at the beginning can be expensive, I think the old nano tank was £200 and the live rock can also be pricey. Once everything is established things are much cheaper depending on what you get and where you buy from. Some people breed fancy clownfish with different colours and patterns that can be really expensive, and certain corals such as Scolymia usually cost £100-200 each. Just do tons of research and you'd do fine. Oh, and here's some of those fancy clownfish I mentioned: Snowflake: Naked: Onyx: Platinum: The list goes on!
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Post by TenebrousNova on Sept 2, 2014 9:47:18 GMT
Came back from the pet shop about an hour ago with a bright green trumpet coral, Caulastrea curvata. I have placed it next to the C.echinulata and it is already starting to inflate its polyps. There are three in total, but the one at the back has two mouths and will become two polyps given time. If it sends out its feeder tentacles tonight, I will be able to offer it direct feedings which should make it grow a bit quicker. And the larger hermit crab seems to be sampling an even bigger shell than the one he has at the moment.
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