New Display Tank

Our display tank is really filling nicely ! Thought we would share with you guys

age: almost 1 year

size: 95 gallon display (deceiving though because ties into larger 300-400 gallon farm/ grow system downstairs)

alkalinity – aiming for 7.5

salinity 1.026

mag – 1500-1600

calcium 440

phosphate .03

nitrate 1-2 (would like it higher)

salt red sea pro coral salt

Dosing ESV calcium, magnesium and alkalinity (we mix in 50% redsea sometimes I can explain in email or in person why we do this )

Dosing acropower (15ml/ day) --> SHIT IS THE BOMB

Feed frozen brine, mysis, almost entire Vitalis line especially the marine pellet and LPS food (Crack for corals) and reef roids

Its a custom peninsula tank that is 50” long , 30” wide and 18” deep. We like shallow tanks because they are easy to work on and I like being able to easily touch the bottom of the tank for aquaplaning and coral placement. Deep tanks look amazing from a practical standpoint are awful. I used to have a 30” deep tank and I can not stand working a ladder. This stand is only 32” so its a very manageable height.

You can see here about a year ago when we first constructed

 

We will start with this photo because its probably my favorite section of the whole tank. Firstly because I am a huge acan nerd and secondly because I love doing gardens of certain corals.

The first acan we sort of placed here did really well in the lower light and lower flow area so we slowly built it out into a full fledged acan garden. The nice things about acans (notice all acan lord not enchinata) is that they are peaceful corals and wont sting other corals or themselves. You can see them touching on the right hand side some zoas and clove polyps. And to the left side they touch a large clam without harming anyone. They are super puffy which is always a good sign. Our trick to keeping them happy is high magnesium. We keep it close to 1600 in this tank and find the acans and lps in general really appreciate it. We feed them twice a week with Vtialis LPS pellets and Fauna marin Coral dust which you can find both on our site. Awesome foods.

This is my second favorite section and maybe customers favorite as well. Its our colorful hammer garden. It has mix of branching and wall type hammers from all different oceans. Anytime we see a new variety come into the shop we try to save one head for this garden. Same at the acans they wont sting each other and I find they are even ok touching torch / frogspawn although reading online you will hear that they will kill each other. They also get fed the same way the acans do, I think it helps growth and produce the striking color we are getting.

Here you can see some of the our FCC Zoas (fragbox cultured corals) You can find dead center in the photo our Sunny D, to the right King Tut, to the left Pandora, and behind them butt kissers. They used to grow faster for us in this system but once we added hard corals we began trying to lower the nitrate /phosphates which in turn slowed down our zoa growth. We are setting up a new 1000 gallon farm in our basement that we want to try to keep nitrates a little bit higher to promote softy growth. Will do some blog posts on that system when it starts.

Here is a shot of one side of the peninsula. The front I guess ? The tank is lit by a 48 inch 6 bulb ati sunpower T5 fixture which is favorite light of all time. On the side we run 2 x reef brite XHO led all blue to add blue accent light and moonlight effect.

Here is our little torch garden. Notice not too many corals close by as they are quite aggressive but fine with each other.

Another side of the tank. We use the polyp lab coral lense to take these photos with makes the background look orange but captures the color of the corals and fish  nicely 

That red monticap grew from a small toonie sized frag in under 7 months! we have also fragged it about 20 times. Its insane how fast montipora can grow. Its starting to cup / spiral really nicely as well which I think has to do with high light conditions. The par across the top of the tank measured with our apogee par meter reads 300-400 which keep the acro happy. At the sand bed is ready about 150 consistently and about 100 in the corners and shadow places. I would consider this a high light tank.

This has to be the single most asked about coral in this tank. Its a very nice chalice coral we have been trying to grow for about 1 year. Its growing quite slowly but I can see growth speed is picking up with size and it should be ready to frag for the first time in 2019.