I’m a Daddy!
Outside of the fact that the tank will be running on autopilot for a while, this has nothing to do with reefing! My wonderful wife gave birth to a beautiful little boy on Christmas day. I’m on cloud nine!
Goby Sighting!
For the first time since the day he was added to the tank, I saw the blue-stripe goby last night. Right after feeding, seconds before the actinic lights went out for the night, it popped out of a piece of rock below the frogspawn. And promptly disappeared! Hey, at least it’s still alive!
One of these gomezi’s is not like the other…
I mentioned that we picked up a new “gomezi” over the weekend. I don’t know what it really is, but I’m 99.9% sure it’s not a gomezi. Compare for yourself, the new addition is the first photo:
New Acropora "gomezi"...?
Vivid Acropora gomezi
Completely different structure! I am confident that the piece from Vivid is a gomezi. I have no idea what the new piece is. Maybe a tenuis? Anybody care to wager a guess?
<<<<<<<>>>>>>
Update 01/04/2010: As mentioned in this post, I stumbled on a photo of a similar looking piece that was labeled as Acropora vermiculata. I think we have a match!
Stopped by a New LFS Today
Unruly and I went to Midwest Coral Farms yesterday morning. Nice store that turns out to be not too far from home. They’re open to the public but not quite fully up to speed yet. They had a great selection of corals there. Some really large tanks full of softies and LPS. In the back they a really nice tank full of small SPS colonies and frags. Unruly picked out a neon green gomezi and a blue stripe goby. I chose a nice purple-tipped granulosa. More on the frags later. We also picked up some more Rod’s food and PE frozen mysis shrimp. We got freebies of Rod’s plankton and fish eggs.
Good store and we’ll be back for sure!
Later in the day I did a water change and cleaned the skimmer. I changed out the GFO and converted the carbon reactor to a second GFO reactor. This will be a temporary measure I hope, while I get the algae in the display tank under control. Feel like I’ve been saying that for years! I put a small portion of GFO in one of the reactors with the intention of changing it out in a week – this will get the reactors on staggered schedules. Today I made new top-off water, with ~2-1/2 TBS of kalk.
Few More Photos; Alkalinity Testing Revisited
It appears I am not the only reefer out there whose Salifert alkalinity kit measured 2.5dKH lower than multiple other test kits. I stumbled upon a current thread in the Chemistry forum at Reef Central, where there are a number of people in the same situation I was a week ago! People who are trying to maintain alkalinity in the tank at the low end of the acceptable spectrum (around 7.5dKH) only to find that their Salifert test kit is reading 2.5 dKH high. At least I’m not alone.
Let’s get on to some eye candy! Here are a few more photos I snapped recently. In a couple you can see some hair algae we’ve been battling. I am hoping that by the next round of photos the algae will all be gone. I have a strategy in mind to accomplish that goal, but more on that in a different post.
Let’s start with the new granulosa frag:
Acropora granulosa
And then the ORA Red Planet. This has more red in it than the photo shows. It was a large frag, and I decided to clip the two main branches and lay them by the base of the frag to encourage it to encrust and grow outwards. Will it work? Beats me! I’ll grab another photo in a few months and we’ll find out together.
ORA Red Planet
This is a millepora that started as a small frag and has encrusted its way around the side of the rock. I’m glad it did because one of the anemones has decided it likes the spot where I originally placed this coral. In the past month it has started to grow the branches you can see just forming.
Acropora millepora
An Ocean Blue Polyp Stylophora I bought as a frag. From the other side and the top this has an absolutely stunning pink/purple body. The polyps are a light blue, which makes a nice contrast.
Ocean Blue Polyp Stylophora
And finally, here’s a great member of the clean up crew. These micro-brittle stars are in every crevice in the tank. Not even visible until feeding or lights out, when suddenly thousands of little arms start waving in the water. For reference, this star is on a 1/2″ tube.
Micro Brittle Star
Couple photos of the new corals
I took a couple quick photos of the new corals. I also got a nice photo of the anemone shrimp, which I added to the sidebar at the right. I didn’t process these photos but the coloration is pretty close to what my eyes see. In the tank the hammer has a little less pink and a little more blue; the gomezi has more velvet-green in the branches; the prostrata is a bit brighter blue and less purple.
Let’s start with the shrimp:
Periclimenes brevicarpalis - Anemone Shrimp
The new hammer coral, not fully inflated:
Blue Hammer Coral
And the new gomezi and prostrata. I still need to get a photo of the granulosa; it’s in a tougher spot to photograph.
Acropora gomezi
Acropora prostrata
