When Stephen told me that he wanted a Saltwater Fish Tank for Christmas this past holiday, I thought "crap". Does he have any idea how hard it is to establish a saltwater tank? So I cashed in on my Citibank rewards and went out and bought him a 55 gallon long tank and stand, salt for saltwater and shell sand and filters. I brought it home in November and started it without fish. This thing took weeks of tweaking, more salt, less water, less salt, added rocks and on and on and on. It wasn't until January that we wee finally able to start to add fish. We added three damsels and managed to kill off the black and white one within two days, but the two blues are still going strong. One thing we did manage to grow was a lot of algae. I mean a lot of algae. We slowly added more fish, another to damsels, then two clowns, three turbo snails and six little crabs, trying to beat the algae. Finally a lawnmower blenny, which I endearingly call Jack Blenny. Get it? And finally a bright yellow tang and a chocolate chip starfish. I never realized how much personality saltwater fish have. The clowns swim into your hands and the starfish actually positions himself on the glass to be hand fed in which he will flip himself over only enough for us to lay the sea veg into his body, so that he may eat. It's absolutely fascinating. It was a lot of work, but well worth it. I can sit next to the tank and watch for hours. Very relaxing.
6 comments:
how cool! I like the clownfish...
and I thought our aquarium was complicated.....yours is a lot more but they are worth it arent they???
Bg, It took months to get the salt level just right, but now it's pretty self suficient and they are far more entertaining than my freshwater cichlid/oscar.
It's beautiful! Nice job! so, Who does all the work now? I sure miss our tank! It is a lot of work. I had only just begun to understand all the potions and monitors and automatic salt and fresh water adding contraptions! Before the move to the cabin we had a 220 gallon reef tank. Dan is planning a 500 gallon in the big house when we get that far. But the metal halide lights were so costly to run. We are working on a solar plan for the next one. Very interesting about the star fish! I had a niger trigger that would do tricks for food.
Geeze, that ambitious.........Mine's a spec in comparison. He feeds, I do the work...LOL.....OMG! We wanted a Trigger so bad, but we were told that he'd eat everybody else. Now that's a cool fish!
Maybe it was because the tank was so big and the smaller fish had plenty of places to hide that the trigger didn't bother them. We also got him when he was tiny winy. dan's worry was that he would eat the coral. But he didn't.
ELL, This is going to sound bad, but I have a 55 gallon long upstairs with an Oscar in it and was sick awhile back with hole in the head disease. I loaded the tank with meds and vitamins and got him back to eating and healthy, but it's just taken over again so I think he'll end biting the dust and when he does, I'm going to clean out the and filters completely and start a saltwater upstairs as well and in the meantime, there's a cute little 20 gallon bubble tank I saw designed for neons. I'm going to get that. The neons these days are so many neat colors, hot pink, lime green and bright blue. I think that would be cool!
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