Christy's Reef

Man its been awhile since I posted. Well the 90 gallon is still goin down the toilet in the way of SPS recession. I yarded out a frag the other day and FW dipped it, no acro eating flatworms. I'm still not convinced its water quality and have begun to speculate some sort of xanthid crab infestation but at this point I don't know how the heck to get the little buggers out of there. At this point, I'm thinking of perhaps turning it into a capricornus reef. After all I've got about 4-5 different colors in there and they do get rather large, I could just try that for awhile. Anyway, we'll see how it goes. I would imagine that if it keeps up as it is I'll be making that decision in the next few months or so.

Lets just say if I haven't fallen off the SPS bandwagon already, I'm in the process of jumping off into a pile of soft zoos and ricordeas :P

As for the nano, well its just getting better and better! :) Frank has been removed after snacking on one of my prized ricordea, which is coming back nicely. I kind of had reservations about putting him in there to begin with, he was really good about eating the algae but I guess he just couldn't reisist the soft goodness of a ricordea. Anyway, its pretty amazing how ricordeas can bounce back from being a half eaten bunch of curlicues. I suppose as long as the mouth is intact they can rebound.

As for new stuff well I did get a nice donation of eagle eye zoos from a local reefer which was awesome! I also salvaged my remaining ricordea in the big tank. I had thought it would be nice to leave it but with all the crap going on in there I felt it best to remove it for fear it becoming a snack for the crabs. I also scored a really nice ricordea yuma that is doing something funky. I think it might have gotten a bit bleached at the store. It seems to be okay though and I'm feeding it. Its doubled in size which seems like a good sign. I also got a new blastomussa frag which is quite pretty. Yes I have no idea how I'm managing to cram all this stuff in the tank. I've gotten a bit more rock but I'm not sure if its going to help. I really should have gone with a larger tank but its just sooo much fun having it right next to my computer monitor!!

I also made it to Ocean Aquatics and got some new zoos! (surprise surprise). I got some dragon eyes which I have been lusting after for some time, some neat yellowy zoos and some greeny brown ones.

Also one thing I've noticed about this nano, besides the fact that its alot easier to see the small stuff is how fast stuff reproduces. There are waving brittle star arms sticking out everywhere (they can't do that in the big tank as I would imagine they get eaten) and my stomatella snails are reproducing like crazy along with some sort of other small snail of which there have to be at least 25 or more cruising around the sides of the tank. I've tried taking photos but they're just too damned small. I have seen quite a few tiny stomatella snails chugging around as I only added about 3 larger ones originally but have now seen up to 5 at once. They're constantly "smoking" which I assume is some sort of gonadal release. Oh theres two of them doing it right now (gross :P). At some point there are going to be too many of the damned things in there but for now its kind of cool. As well as my critters reproducing, my zoos are definitely taking off, some frags that were barely hanging in there in the main tank, or never grew at all in the miain tank are now increasing by leaps and bounds. Its simply amazing.

Dammit I just found my first aiptasia as I type this. I also see some sort of "bonus" creature on my blasto frag. I can't quite tell if its some sort of anemone or a tiny frogspawn/hammer coral. Its strange looking thats for sure.