Laura D & PitPat's 120 gal.

[Anonymous]

Laura's parents came to stay with us last weekend and the brought house-warming gifts in the form of a large gorgonian, a colony of green zoos, a rock covered in anthelia, some frogspawn frags, a closed brain, and some other polyps. It is great having reefkeeping in-laws!

I'll try to get some pics of the new additions soon, but here is a picture Laura's mom took of our tank while she was out here.

It shows our big beautiful tang who has developed a taste for various soft corals. He is on the way to the sump if I can ever catch him. I'm trying to get him to eat nori out of a net, which seems to be working. The problem is that the foxface has no problem eatting out of the net and will cause a serious problem if it gets caught in it. I'm worrried that we will need to remove the rockwork to catch this tang, but I hope it doesn't come to that.

 

[Anonymous]

The tang has been caught!

PitPat is a champion fish trainer. He succeeded in teaching the hippo tang to eat nori from above a big net, and he scooped him out.

The corals look better after only a few days.

 

[ratherbediving]

Sorry if I missed this earlier-- it sounds like you bought all new live rock, why didn't you just transfer the existing rock over?

Also-- how do you like the light fixture? Do you ever feel that you need more light for your acros than the 150 watt halides provides?

The tank looks very nice BTW. Someday maybe I can upgrade to a tank of that size, in which case I'll definitly be refering back to this thread for some advice!

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks RBD.

We didn't replace all of the rock, but we did replace most of it.
About 2 years ago we had a deep sand bed crash in our tank and we lost a bunch of livestock because of high PO4 levels. Our old rock had a rough life, and was probably 6-7 years old to begin with. I believe live rock only has a limited useful lifespan, or at least its properties change significantly over time. My suspicions were somewhat confirmed when we re-set this tank up and replaced most, but not all, of the rock. After about 3 months of running we started getting hair algae only on the old rock. The new rock was perfectly clean. So I suspect that the rocks were leaching PO4, and thats what was feeding the hair algae. So we removed almost all of the old rock and now we have very little hair algae.

I "cooked" the old live rock in a rubbermaid can with a skimmer on it for about 6 months, and when we took it out it was very clean and smelled good, but it wasn't very 'live'. We used that rock to fill up the fish only tank we set up for that tang we removed from the display.

The lights... I like them. The 150 watt bulbs do limit what livestock we can keep though, but its not important for me to be able to keep every type of animal possible. I can't keep most clams and many Acros, the acro we do have would have better color under brighter lights (we have one in our sump that has a 250watt MH over it and it is turning green). But... the convenience of not having to build/buy a canopy, or having to hang lights from the ceiling is worth it to me. And I like the way the fixture looks.

I haven't updated this thread in a while because my crappy camera finally failed completely. But I bought a new, decent one last night. I took these pictures with it when I first got it before the lights went out. I know how to use the camera much better today than I did yesterday, so I'm hoping when the lights come on today I can get some good shots. But here are the trials runs.

 

[Anonymous]

Looking good, guys!!

More pics!!

 

[Anonymous]

Ok, a couple of more.

 

[Anonymous]

one more

 

[ratherbediving]

PitPat--

Thanks for the explanation-- I have read a few threads where people say that live rock has a limited amount of time before it needs to be replaced, or cooked.... I am trying to determine if that will be something I need to take into consideration when I upgrade someday. Your pictures look really good; we know your camera can take some nice closeups, let's see how it does on a full tank shot

 

[Anonymous]

Well I haven't quite figured out how to take a nice full tank shot yet.
Here is an attempt from today. The stand is cropped out because the picture was really tilted, but its not so noticeable if you can't see the stand.