Friday, February 1, 2008

Our Little Ocean

I don't think many of you know this, but Mike and I have become "Reefers"!! ...NO! NOT LIKE THAT! We started our saltwater tank and when you keep corals in your tank it is know as "Reef Keeping" :)

I took us about 4 months to even get water in the tank because Mike is a little anal and had to be sure we had all the details and were doing everything correctly ;) All kidding aside he did an AMAZING job with the pluming and setup of the tank and he has been researching everything soo much! But we finally put water in and it's been moving fast ever since.

The tank is a 72gal Bow front tank (which means that the front of the glass in not flat but slightly convex). It sits in the little nook in our kitchen (where the pics of martini glasses are on the wall). We have about 100lbs of live rock in the tank encrusted with beautiful coraline algae. It is live because it contains bacteria which is beneficial to the tank.

This week we got our clean up crew which consisted of snails, hermit crabs, a sea cucumber, and a starfish. And we also had gotten a few fish from someone tearing down their tank. We got 3 chromis (which are little green schooling fish) and a pink spotted goby. The goby is my favorite.

Here is a link to a thread that we started and it follows along the progress of the tank...Click Here



This is the sea cucumber with some snails and hermits

The goby guarding his cave

The 3 chromis fish with a toadstool leather coral in the background

4 comments:

Donna said...

All of his research will pay off big time in the end. Salt water is so hard. We did have two 75 gallon fresh water and that was a ton of work in itself. We lost fish right and left in the beginning until we got the hang of it. We always wanted a salt water tank but knew how hard it would be to maintain. Good luck to you guys with your reefing. I can't wait to see it live.

Maureen said...

Good Pics Jenn. You forgot to tell everyone about the two fish you banished from the tank for being bad....

Donna said...

Oh Jennifer - You bannished them? Were they too territorial? Nothing worse than an agressive fish.

Linda said...

Wow, that's really great to have your own coral reef. Whe I was in Australia, I visited Sea World there and they had huge room fulls of noting but coral reef. It was so amazing. I could watch it all day.

Enjoy it,
Aunt Linda