Our tank has been overwhelmed by green hair algae. It is not the prettiest thing to have take over your saltwater tank. Brady brought over a temporary visitor that is named Sluggo. I keep referring to him as “the slug” although he is technically a nudibranch.
 Sluggo is going to live at our house for a little bit so that he can eat up all of the nasty hair algae. He has made a dent, but he still has a ways to go.
I have been buried in school and work and haven’t updated the blog or photos. I am at least slipping in an updated saltwater reef tank pic (which it is really fun to go through the gallery pic by pic and see how it grew from just a bunch of live rock and salt, to a ecosystem bursting with life).
I would say the saltwater tank is about one year old now.
Full view of the 55 gallon saltwater tank click here (large resolution).
Also, my friend started blog about his coral farm that he is building. Please feel free to visit his blog at:
http://www.livingcoralreef.com/blog
Once his coral is growing, it will be available for sale at:
I finally took an updated picture of our 55 gallon saltwater reef tank. It is interesting to look back and see that our saltwater tank has come from this:
To this:
To view a larger version of the 55 gallon saltwater tank click here. You can scroll through and look at everything close up.
Brady brought Mike two hard corals as a birthday gift. One is called hydnophora.
and some pink birds nest coral:
Tank is looking good. 
Ok, I FINALLY got the coralline under control with a little help from a razor that has a handle (yes, sadly I did not know such things existed. Lucky for me I have friends that are SMRT (Simpsons reference). Unfortunately they run about $40, but making it so that we could see that we actually have fish under all of the purple stuff was great.
Sadly I took the shrimp feeder out of the tank and the mandarin goby is looking fairly skinny. The feeder seemed to be raising nitrates too much. The saltwater tank tended to smell a bit like a dead ocean with it in. I was hoping that we had enough food in the sand by now, but I think I was wrong. I may need to order some copepods. The water quality has gone up with the feeder out (and my tendency to neglect cleaning it as often as I should have also created the issue).
I was discussing the possibility (oh horrors) of switching tanks a little further down the road so that we could add a refugium. The thought of moving everything gives me nightmares at night….
Yes, the smaller the tank, the harder it is to care for and keep alive. We bought our friend a 5.5 gallon saltwater tank this spring and it is alive and doing well.
The main inhabitant is an emerald crab that liked to knock over coral in our tank, Tanner took him home and put him in his nano tank. He likes to hang out during the daytime a lot more in the little tank (he typically hid a lot in our tank and came out at nighttime, we have a lot of saltwater fish though).
Tanner also has a xenya tree that was a resident in our tank (it was much smaller when it came out of our tank, it has grown a lot now!)
Ok, so coralline is considered a very good algae to have in your saltwater tank. We had added several coralline encrusted live rock to the tank, which means it is now growing everywhere! This does include the glass. I am having a bit of a tough time keeping up with it on the glass (which means some areas are probably just going to be purple forever). Scraping it off of the glass is also supposed to help the coraline growth throughout the rest of the tank.
One of the main benefits of coraline algae is that it helps keep bad algae’s from growing (too bad it doesn’t really grow on the sand, as that is where all of the bad algae likes to grow and takeover everything).
What is interesting is that everyone wants coralline algae because it is pretty and beneficial to your saltwater tank’s ecosystem, I just wish there was a better way to manage the growth on glass at the front of the tank.
If anyone has any tips or tricks on how to keep the front of the glass clean I would be happy to hear them. I try not to have my hands in the tank too often, so going at the glass with a razor blade does not appeal to me.
I have been tossing back and forth whether or not the next coral purchase I make will be tube coral or not. I really like how they look, but the nocturnal aspect, and the feeding needs for sun coral hold me back for now. I was at my friend’s house last week checking out their 125 gallon tank that they started (the have live rock now! now it is just sit and cycle time - new pic of the 125 gallon with live rock here). I also took some pictures of their nano tank.
They feed their tube coral (I actually prefer to call it sun coral… but it just seems to have two names) with a turkey baster. This is a picture I took of when the coral was being fed in the evening. Their cleaner shrimp decided that he needed his fair share of the shrimpy goodies.
I have heard some people say that theirs get enough to eat when they feed the tank. I am not sure that would be the case in our tank, which would mean a lot of hand feeding.
I do need to overcome the beautiful (not really…) algae issues we have before I really explore any new additions to the tank, but sun coral has always been top of mind.
If anyone is reading this, any suggestions - hints or tricks to keeping this beautiful coral alive? Should I get some? Hmmmm…
My friend was teasing me about how much coral I could buy with how much I am willing to spend on an iPhone. Here is my response.
10 reasons I need an iPhone more than new coral:
My friends added water and sand to their tank last night and took a picture just for me - in response to my previous post about their 125 gallon tank. Full size pic here. The 125’s progress photo gallery is here.
Apparently the home that the jawfish built under a huge rock was a bit of a bad idea… we found him laying outside of this home. The rock must have settled down on top of him after her had dug out the hole. His back fin is pretty torn up, but he is able to swim. We placed him in a net used for baby fish to keep him away from the other fish. He ate, but I am not sure if he will make it, we will keep him safe to see if he will heal well enough to be let back out.
Poor jawfishy…