a little bit of irony goes a long way. just this weekend (during an awesome trip back home) i realized that my tank was very empty and boring for being 4 months old. so i decided it was time to fill it up with some life by buying some more fish. and don’t you know it, i came home to find my sailfin tang stuck to the inlet of one of my maxijets. :[

so now i really need some more fish. (and a digital feeder to make sure i don't get a repeat of this mishap) after examining my original stocking plan, i pretty much have it all figured out.

• extremecorals.com has them in stock.
• Longfin Bannerfish - My girlfriend likes these guys, but i’ll have to work hard to find the reef-safe kind. (heniochus diphreutes)
• School of Bartlett’s Anthias - Looking to get either 4 or 5 of them.
• Purple Tang - My last fish; once he’s in there i’ll be “done”.

Depending on whether i get 4 or 5 anthias, i may have room for one more undecided fish. going to tour the fish stores this afternoon to see if anything catches my eye. also going to be on the lookout for a peppermint shrimp and emerald crab for some natural predators against aiptasia and valonia.

not much new news from the tank these days; i’ve just been letting everything settle and grow. my return pump did kick the bucket, so i got a eheim 1250. i like the pump and dont mind the low flow, but its causing my overflow to lose siphon, so i may step up to the 1260. still havent kicked the microbubble problem :[ i’ll look into it closer after i get my nanostreams next month!

enjoy the pics

millipora growth over 2 months:

last weekend i had the priviledge of attending MACNA 2006. the only reason i went was because it was being held about 5 minutes away from my apartment. i really enjoyed it, but i wouldn’t want to spend any money other than a ticket to go to one of these things. maybe after i’ve been doing this for 10 years i’ll make a weekend vacation out of it, but as of right now it was just a welcome diversion to the weekend.

for those that are unaware, MACNA is the yearly conference slash trade show for all things salty. its in a different city every year and this year it was at the galleria in houston. so on saturday i headed over there around noon and bought a cheapo pass for the trade show. (tickets for the workshops/presentations/banquets are much more expensive and i wasn’t that interested in them) they had lots of great stuff to check out and frags to buy, so i’ll just highlight the stuff that stood out for me.

tunze nanostreams

these bad boys have been on my radar for awhile now. i’ve always known my maxi jet 1200s just aren’t going to cut it for a SPS-heavy tank, but since my tank is only 75g, i was wary about using a tunze stream. they just seemed too big and powerful for my tiny tank. and i just knew a sandstorm would be unavoidable. but the nanostream is meant just for me. don’t let the name fool you, they aren’t THAT nano, but they would be a nice fit in alot of tanks. there are 3 flavors: a 660g/hr, a 1189g/hr, and a controllable one that goes from 264g/hr up to 1453g/hr. the non-controllable ones should be coming out in october while the nice one is scheduled for around christmas. i definitely know something that i’ll be asking santa for.

profilux controller

this was my favorite of the show. finally a controller that doesn’t make me have to comprimise on features. first off it’s the first controller that supports wireless connectivity out of the box. hopefully this becomes a defacto standard; i still remember being surprised 2 years ago when i found out that controllers were using serial connections to PCs. what were they thinking? having ethernet ports was a step up, but who wants to run a cat5 across the house to their fish tank?

another neat feature is the expansion card slots. just like a PC, you can buy up to 3 cards to customize your controller. the only cards i’ve seen so far are for redox, conductivity and USB support. and supposedly the controller will automatically detect and work with the new cards, no firmware changes needed. i like this much better than having seperate versions of the same controller when the major differences between them are what they can monitor. (AC jr, AC pro, AC3, AC3 pro anyone?)

also of note:

• all your basic controller functions
• temp monitor/control
• pH monitor/control
• outlet switching
• digital timing
• web interface for online viewing/control
• windows program for control/configuration
• T5 and LED lighting control
• dimming
• weather presets (lightning storm was my favorite)
• powerhead control
• controllable powerheads (i.e. tunze) can supposedly be controlled with this. not sure if it supports all the stuff something like a tunze multicontroller can do, but i know that things such as “soft start” are included.
• external display (added $$)
• seperate display screen which can be mounted or placed in sight while viewing the tank so that tank parameters can be viewed without opening your stand and accessing the primary unit

frags!

of course who could leave out all the livestock? i picked out 3 SPS peices i liked. kinda upset tho, since one of them doesn’t look as nice under my lighting. all just tan and boring under my 14Ks. i’ll give it two weeks and if it doesn’t color up i’ll sell it. i’m really happy with my new milli and tort. hopefully they’ll keep their color.

i put in an order for 3 frags from upscales.com yesterday, and since this hobby demands pay-out-your-ass overnight shipping on everything, they came in the mail this morning. so i took a nice long lunch to come home and unpack and acclimate them. and so far, so good. i got a birdnest, staghorn, and samoensis. and wow is the staghorn blue. (and i dont even have actinics) hopefully they all make it; these are my first acropora corals. in my old tank i just kept montipora and a boring brown anacropora frag lovingly referred to by my girlfriend as “the penis coral”.

i dont have any underwater putty to mount them yet, and since i hate messing with the super glue gel, i’ll just let them chill in my frag rack until then.

and i also found out that my sailfin is a complete camera hog. the damn thing acts more like a dog than a fish, which is cool and all, but not very useful when i’m trying to take pictures, as you can see:

i’m currently trying to figure out whats causing my microbubble issue; it is damn annoying. i’ve narrowed it down to my return pump, so i’m thinking about replacing the pump with an eheim 1250 and the tubing with the solid black kind. i’ll probably do that next month or something.

I finally made a trip back home, and while i was there i picked up my long lost frogspawn. it was the centerpiece of my last tank, and i just couldn’t part with it when it came time to sell all my livestock before the move. it made the trip just fine and within an hour was fluffing out pretty well.

i also had a royal gramma and false perc clownfish waiting for me, but literally two days before i headed home, the gramma decided to find out what the carpet felt like. he didn’t even leave a note! i figured a $15 clownfish wasn’t worth a 4 hour trip so i let my oh-so-nice fish sitter keep it. (he just lost a clownfish of his own)

to avoid a long story, lets just say i had a rental car for the day. and of course my destinations for driving around town were some local fish stores. i grabbed a sailfin tang and a lawnmower blenny while i was out. don’t worry, it wasn’t a compulsive buy just because my tank is finally ready. i’ve been eye-ing sailfins for awhile, and this guy just seemed to have the right personality. hopefully he’s a swimmer and not a hider. the LMB, well everybody needs one of those, right? :] i’m looking to have a large fish-load, so i feel a little preventative maintenance goes a long way