It’s been a while now and things are going well in the new Ecoxotic tank.  Between our son getting sick, me watching him because of it, and somehow still pulling more than a full work week, and then getting sick myself, I’ve been distracted from the project so being “patient” was easy.
I gave the water a test on Saturday morning, February 12th, 2011.  pH = 8.1, Free and Total Ammonia 0 ppm, Nitrite and Nitrate 0 ppm, and total alkalinity was at 1.5 meq/L.  Hit it with a dose of C-Balance two-part which brought the alkalinity up to 2 meq/L.  Still low, but easily fixable.  Having a little free time, it was time to call in some payment on the last 4 juvenile Black Ocellaris I had traded to Morgan at Cosmic Aquatics.  The trade of course, was for my seed corals  – “one frag of each kind of Birdsnest you have”.
In some cases, “frag” meant 4″ colony in Morgan’s mind.  I returned from my trip to Superior WI with a full on colony of a Green with Purple Polyps and Pink Tips Seriatopora histrix, as well as a several inch branch of  Pink with Purple Polyp version of the species.  I also brought back 1 small and 1 larger fresh frag of “Sour Apple” Birdsnest, Seriatopora caliendrum.  My fourth birdsnest, ironically, was a piece of a Birdsnest I had given to Morgan when he opened up his shop; my Iowa Ponape Birdsnest, which is currently considered S. hystrix but at least one author has mused it might be something else (like Seriatopora dentritica).  I chuckle because I think I’ve given pieces of it to several people in the Duluth area and yet I no longer had it myself.
Still on my “wishlist” for Birdsnests are an actual hot pink with white growing needle-tips S. hystrix.  I know they’re out there, I owned one for a couple years, but lately, most hot pink birdsnests I’ve seen around are dirty brown-pink.  I’ll also set aside a spot for the classic ORA Green form of S. caliendrum – it’s a stunning coral when grown out.
The coral fun doesn’t stop there, because I also traded some spare stuff for a Tricolor Clavularia and “Hulk” Green Clavularia.  These large and colorful clove polyp varieties are some of my favorites, and they were placed in lower light areas where I hope they’ll do well.  I’ve had both in the past, but killed both off with my normal “high nitrates” due to many breeding fish all being stuffed with food.
All of the corals were dipped with Seachem’s Reef Dip before being placed into the tank.   I was surprised to see that some small feather dusters that were growing at the base of a Birdsnest made it through the dip unscathed.  I know the naysayers will say this has NOTHING to do with the breeding project and yup..they’re right.  It has everything to do with keeping my wife happy though – for the first time since I set it up, she said it was starting to look “better”.   That’s definitely a step in the right direction…best thing I could hope for when I wanted to bring the Lightning Maroon up from the basement to live with us on the first floor.
So first, here’s some shots of the tank as set up Saturday evening.  Note that I’m playing with camera settings and Photoshop corrections to get real-looking images.  I’ve found that photographing this tank when lit up is difficult, primarily due to all the different light coming from the room, outside (if during the day), with or without onboard flash (I have a remote flash somewhere stashed away…probably should break that out).   Any shots without Flash, but otherwise automatic settings on the D5000, wind up being very purple-hued, which I’ve tried to handle in Photoshop for the time being.




The other interesting thing I picked up from Morgan was a half dozen Stomatella sp. snails, probably Stomatella varia.  These small snails are actually closely related to the Trochus, Astrea and Turbo snails we’re all familiar with.  Stomatellas have this nice habit of readily reproducing in the aquarium environment without any special care or intervention, provided of course that there aren’t predators that would eat them.  They stay small and are nocturnal, which means they can get into small crevices and places larger cleanup crews can’t, all the while staying out of the way during the day when you dont’ want to be looking at 50 snails on your front glass.  These made the perfect third snail species addition to my sustainable, all captive-bred cleanup crew.


So that’s what I did on Saturday.  I’ve been watching the water quality and dosing with C-Balance.  It looks like I might have a very slight level of Nitrite, so I haven’t pulled the trigger on the clownfish swap just yet.  As last week was my birthday week, I also treated myself with just a wee-bit of my birthday cash to some additional frags that arrived today, Tuesday, 2-15-2011.  More on those in a little bit.