Lighting... My setup is cheesy looking. I have a cheap T5HO fixture from ebay suspended from the ceiling, which was complicated by heating ducts right above the tank. So a series of draped chains was required, and a weight because the light angled oddly when hung. The weight is an old clarinet I made a collage out of. A fan hangs from one end. I also put up a large reassuring button with the phrase "DON'T PANIC", a fake shrunken head, a couple unfinished art projects from the early 90's and a Emily the Strange doll. The Don't Panic message is probably the most important.
It came with 4 65ooK bulbs. They are a nice warm white, and make things grow like mad. The reflector is terrific, I think I can successfully bleach most coral with only 4 bulbs instead of the 8 that come in higher end T5HO fixtures.
Recently I started adding SPS from Upscales here in Oregon, they have some fantastically colorful frags under perfect SPS conditions. These corals still in the shop's water in their bag were held up under my light, where they were a delightful shade of beige. If I was to ask anyone why they browned up I would bet 99% of them would say "you have secret phosphate that doesn't show up with any test kit! Cook or replace everything!!!". It's the light. So I switched half the 6500K bulbs out with URI actinics and things started getting prettier, with no slowdown of the rampant growth. Also will hang a single actinic moonlight here and there to see what will happen, a lot of corals will change color after about a week of that.
Growth is so extremely fast that I had to set up a frag tank and put an ad on craigslist to thin things out. For example, I dropped a frag from the digitata, it breaks easily during maintenance. One landed on this colony of zoanthids, (which grew from 3 polyps I glued to a large rock). This SPS grows 12 polyps a night, I count after breaking sometimes... It grows over the zoanthids, making its base a series of lumps. I don't really know what to do with it to tell you the truth, this SPS is INVASIVE! Lately a large bristleworm has developed a taste for it so maybe that will rein it in some.
That picture is old, the digitata grew to about baseball size and the base is probably 4" in all directions. All that in 2 months.
Here are two Acans I got from Perry/Ocean in a Box. They were probably 1.5" when bought last fall. They have more than doubled in size, and gained pigment intensity. I feed them mysis shrimp with a pipette about once a week, they get to keep what the wrasse misses.
Here is the wrasse too. It's a Hawaiian pencil wrasse, in the process of changing from female to male.
I love wrasses, and this guy is totally underrated. He eats small bristleworms but not feather dusters, coral or shrimp. All my fish bury themselves in the sand at night so the sand is pure white and protected from stagnating. He unfortunately is pestered by the whipfin wrasse, which I will probably get rid of.
Here is a volunteer pocillopora, don't know where it came from.
It has doubled in size since October, which is about when this was taken. The montipora on the left has tried to overpower it but I snapped that off. The soft coral above it sometimes tries to bend over and take it out as well, and the star polyps behind. I really need to figure out how to rescue it.
This yellow leather is interesting... the store I was working at ordered a bunch of these after getting a couple good ones from a wholesaler. The large batch was supposed to have 6 polyp fiji yellow leathers but we didn't find any, and several of the colonies collapsed soon after arrival. This one melted to a tiny blob, so I trimmed off the black bits and soaked it in lugols for a while, then put it back instead of throwing it away like a normal person. A month later it grew 3 heads, so I bought it. The biggest dropped off as soon as it got pingpong ball size. Then it tossed another lump of yellow tissue. Basically it self frags, which is great, and does not get too large which is even better! With the moonlight on it there is a slight hint of acid green to the polyps, so I think this is what the wholesaler meant by "green fiji toadstool". They must have been smoking the palythoa.
I like this sponge a lot, and this picture also shows some of the other stuff I have been talking about. Zoanthids taking over baserock, digitata everywhere, etc. The sponge is photosynthetic, it greens up in the light or turns white in shadow.
This is the softie above the pocillopora, it's from Finn's niece I think. Has a nice bluish green glow to it, leathery skin and small polyps that are eating SF Bay brine shrimp nauplii. Grows like mad, looks great. One of these days will have to frag it. I like the idea of fragging a lot more than the process. This is an old picture, the digitata is so small!
I wish my cameras could see the flourescence better, they don't see my hydnaphora as green at all. Course most of the time neither do I, it only looks green when the polyps retract due to stress. Figures. Ok, one more photo of that then I quit for now.
Next I will work on some growth sequence photos. A lot of these are old too.That hydnaphora picture is almost a year old, and it's 4 times bigger now.
