my favorite fish

finally have a fish to show. this is probably my favorite of all saltwater fish...the six line wrasse. They are small, active and have a ton of personality. This one is still a little shy...

and here's a few new corals while im at it...

-m

more than rocks...

i finally have some corals in the tank to show off. Had some frags waiting in the 90 and made a trip up to drs. foster & smith in Rhinelander and picked up a few things from there as well. Almost seems like i'm out of room already...

anyway, im not going to say much else, hopefully you enjoy the pictures.










you can see some more here.

-m

Slowly but surely

Well it's probably been 3 or 4 weeks now and the ammonia in the new tank is finally at 0. This is a good thing since ammonia is toxic to marine life. The bad news is that all that ammonia has been converted into nitrites, which is basically just as toxic. So the waiting game continues, but at least its progress.

Diatom algae has appeared. Very common in new tanks and usually a sign that a cycle has occurred. I believe this is fed by silica/silicates present in new tank and will cycle itself out once its nutrient source has been used up. Not that this really matters to anyone but me anyway...doesnt look nice though...

If i've done and continue to do things right though, this should hopefully be the last time i make any posts about nuisance algae in the tank.

Skimmer frustration and the Silver Lining.

More about the new skimmer...added some more sponge along the exhaust tube to stop the water from crashing back down into the tank. Now i can sit next to the tank and hear myself think again, always a good thing. Especially a good thing right now since i need to figure out a way to prevent all these bubbles from getting back up into the main tank.

The way this type of skimmer works is pretty simple. The pump injects water and air bubbles into a cylinder, the bubbles provide a surface for the waste to cling to and when the bubbles reach the top of the cylinder they break and waste falls into the collection cup. A great way to keep that waste from degrading the quality of the water.

The problem i now have is that it makes so many of these bubbles that some of them make their way out of the exhaust tube with the water and eventually back into the tank. So far i've made a small divider out of some egg crating and some filter floss and its helped some, but there's still some in there as you can see in this picture(if you click on it)...











The good thing that came from all this is that it forced me to figure out how to get a picture of it and made me realize just how awesome the 50mm lens we have is. I never really liked it before...turns out i just had to figure out how to use it. Now i don't know if i'll even bother using some of our other lenses. I know this picture isn't impressive in any way but i'm confident i'll have plenty of nice pictures in the near future to share now that i have at least half an idea of what i'm doing.

-m

ASM Mini G

New skimmer finally showed up today. This was the last item I've been waiting on so needless to say i was pretty pumped to see it. I decided to go with the mini g mainly because of its size. ASM also has a good reputation for producing quality skimmers.

My first impressions are that this is going to be a great skimmer. Its solid and compact which means I didn't break it as i was installing it because unfortunately, that is something i do all too often. This picture was taken about 15 minutes after i installed it and I'm quite impressed with the amount of bubbles and how fine they are. I cant wait until there's actually something producing waste for it to skim out.

One thing i wasn't really expecting...the noise. This sucker is loud. You've probably already noticed the pvc tube held on by a rubber band...this is basically a silencer i made out of some pvc tubing, some caps, and some filter floss. It helped tremendously...hopefully it doesn't impact how well the skimmer performs because there's no way i could keep it on this tank without it.

-m

My Latest Project

Been wanting to set up a small tank in the office again since we had to move our big tank to the basement a while ago. I decided on just a simple 20g.

Spent a good 2 months so far working on it..from planning it out, to ordering parts, to building the stand and finally putting it all together and getting water in it. The tank is still cycling so there isn't much to show yet, but I do have a few pics...

how it looked yesterday












a shot including the stand












the mess that is the sump - minus the skimmer(which still isn't here yet)










All in all I'm pretty happy with how its turned out so far. Now we just have to wait for it to be ready for some livestock...the hardest part.

-m

Ready...Set...Blag

err blog..

So, here i go, i guess. Time to start one of these here blog things.

Just so we get started on the right foot here, here's what you can expect:
a. Irregular and probably infrequent posting
2. No theme, just whatever i feel like posting about
3. basically, just keep those expectations low and nobody will be disappointed

Alright, glad we've got that out of the way.

So, who am i writing to? i don't know...i have no followers...i have no audience. But someday someone might see this...so whoever you are, welcome to my blog.

-m