Archive for December 2005
Tank Beginnings
Posted on Saturday, 31 December, 2005 at 1:29 PM by miskairal
I live near Murgon, a small town about 3 hour's drive from Brisbane airport and 2 hours from the sunshine coast. There are no shops within a 2 hour drive that sell any type of marine animal so obtaining stock for my tank has always been a challenge. Hence my 6 foot tank looked very bare for some time.
I bought my tank 2nd hand, a 6x2x2.5, in May 2005, from a guy in Brisbane and started reading all I could. Until I set it up though I didn't understand a lot of what I read. The tank came with a broken protein skimmer of some description, 2 x 150W Metal Halide lights, also home put together and a sump that was designed to hold bio balls and spray bars etc. It was drilled high up on one short side and had a metal and timber stand that was also home made and built to hold a TV as well. Luckily Tony, my husband, is pretty handy and cut down and rewelded the stand.
On the 13th October 2005 I started with a shallow coral sand bed and 21 kg of good live rock, no sump or refugium and a Tunze skimmer designed to go in the tank. I also had 1 Turbelle stream 6000 with a single controller. I barely saw a cycle with so small an amount of rock in such a large tank. I made the salt water up using my new R/O unit and corallife salt which gave me a Ca reading of 600 for the next year until I switched to seawater for changes. Oh and I also had a canister filter which only gets used on my Q tank these days.
My live rock provided me with
- 2 Favia type coral
- 2 Glaxeas
- 1 Cucumber (which came out and died mid 2006)
- 2 corallimorphs
- sponges
- halimeda
- several other smaller corals that have never been identified
My Fish
- 2 Ocellaris clowns (captive bred, bought on the 8th November 2005 still very young)
- 1 Coral Beauty bought 6th December 2005
- 2 Pyjama Cardinals bought 6th December 2005
I also bought a Leather coral and a Coral Banded Shrimp on the 6th December 2005 but the shrimp was dead when I returned from the MASQ AGM in Feb 2007. The Pyjama Cardinals perished on the 9th December 2006 as a result of my tank breaking which you will read about later. The leather coral looked great for a week then sulked for the next 6 weeks or so. It is thriving today despite two tank leaks/breaks and I have a sneaking suspicion it kills other leathers I put in the tank. I have no proof of that, just that they do great for 1 to 2 months then go downhill all of a sudden while it keeps going.
Posted in Corals (RSS), Fish (RSS), Other Critters (RSS), Tank in general (RSS)