Bully Eviction Program: Part I

There once was a cute lil emerald named Alexa, who was named after a dear friend of the family. She worked hard to clean and grow but to my public dismay (but secret approvals) never molted in the tank. Well, one day, she walked through the valley of the shadow of death, met some bad company and things got ugly.

As you know, I'm not a fan of big crabs and today, one of them finally broke my trust. At first I thought the big crab wanted to pick the algae off of the smaller crab to clean her as a mother would. I soon learned that it was not the case when the crab pulled apart one of her legs and proceeded to pull out her underarmor. To my horror, this is what I saw when I was checking out my tank today.



Sorry for the bad video but I figured if the quality is as good as COPS it would be good enough to capture this incident. Needless to say, I fished out this guy as soon as I could and traded him in at the LFS. There is still another monster crab in the tank but until he does something wrong, I will keep him in for algae control.

Let's get this straight boys... in this house, there are only two members that can eat crabs; and they only do so with Old Bay. Good bye Bully Crab!

Note: Thanks Capp Bay for trading me smaller crabs for the bully crab!

Tank Shots! (and other goodies)

Tank on June 6, 2006
Okay, so I've been saying and saying for the last month that my tank is now a real tank. There's water in it; it's past the cycle stage; yada yada. Now I guess I should prove it with some pictures.

The first pic above is the day after the long long night I spent awake trying to fill a 90 gallon tank with about 45 gallons worth of rocks and water. Unfortunately I couldn't just pour RO/DI water than scoopfuls of salt and hope that the primordial soup mix will do right on its own. There were a significant amount of life being transferred from the 29 and after several hours... maybe even a full day, the tank finally cleared and so was my pic. Now, you would think with about 50lbs of LR that I'd be satisified with the tank, but boy were you wrong. This tank ain't for water, fishes or corals; it's for rocks! So off I went to pile on the rocks!

Tank on June 6, 2006 (afternoon)
Sadly, I simply could not stay away from my tank... even though I was working on like 4 hours of sleep and was working, I had to rearrange... I ended up building the first half of the wall during my lunch break, which you can see in the picture above.

Tank on June 8, 2006
Not satisified with the amount of rocks that were currently in the tank, I went and made a haste purchase with International Marine of Suck. Out of 55lbs, only one piece of rock made it pass the inspection (on the left). Yo, I'm as harsh as Gordon Ramsey when he's hungry. I expect fast but good work (rock) and as hungry as I am for rocks, I still won't accept it if it looks like sh*t.

Tank on June 17, 2006
So after getting rid of the 50lbs of bleh rock, I ended up getting another 50lbs from a local reefer who was tearing down his tank. The rocks here were so much purpler and prettier than the first batch that I was almost glad I waited the extra week to get them. At least this time, I wasn't producing raw sewage trying to cure some mail ordered rocks. YUCK! (Remember the word yuck?)

Tank on June 18, 2006
Just in case you thought my tank was a piece of art, this is the FULL MONTY shot of how ghetto it actually is. Auto topoff from a gravity fed 5 gallon jug... ain't technology grand? I guess I could have hid all the ugly equipment if I had gotten a sump, but at this point, I just don't roll like that.

Tank on July 3, 2006
Here's the tank over the fourth of July weekend. At this point, I've spent millions of dollars on frags from ReeferMadness and Marine Fish in Marietta. Thousands of gallons of water had been used and switched and hundreds of fish had been killed to feed the 2 or 3 that are currently in the tank.

Unlike the other more experienced reefers who preach critter kindness, my first fish that survived the ich cycle and the new tank cycle is technically my mandarin fish. I guess if you're a n00b, don't try this at home since dragonette fish are one of the hardest species to keep alive; I sometimes wonder why they are sold so cheaply... maybe it's because they are slow and are easy to catch. However, with my CPR HOB refuge and the 150,000lbs of live rock I have in the tank, I'm quite confident that there will be enough food for Mr. Mandarin for years (4) to come.

I'm now slowly trading frags and trying to grow out all the coral pieces that make up my frag tank, but hopefully sooner than later, this work of art will grow and mature.

Now, for the goodie... being a pro Google fan, I recently discovered that they do photo hosting online! If you're sick of snapfish or photobucket or other providers that sometimes will pull your picture due to bandwidth, I invite you to check out Picasa Web by Google. You get 250 mb of photo storage for free with an option to upgrade to 6 gigs of storage for $25 a year. Now, I'm not pro Google on everything they make because they do charge companies up the ass for some of their advertising solutions; but if there's one thing they do well, it's giving general consumers good tools for free/cheap.

Anyway, I know my tank pictures are probably not exciting to anyone except me, but if you've read this far, you may as well check out the web hosting tool for photos if you have a bunch of your own tank shots. Picasa is phototastic!

Help Me FEED You

Per anonymous Gwen's request... I've now added a few RSS feed options to this blog. Just so you know mysterious Gwen, I aim to please even though this is cutting into my 32 cents a year profit with AdSense.


Note: An extra 32 cents a year could have allowed me to feed my family... but instead, we all have to share one slice of pizza.

Cool Things at the LFS

This is a huge blue carpet anemone at the LFS. Everytime I see it, I want to eat the Nemo sushi off of it. (btw, I'm testing the blog by email feature on the phone.)

Edit: Blogging from phone apparently does not include pictures I attach in the email. BOOOO!

Ugh... the bi-color blenny is NOT reef safe!

With now about 40+ types of polyps and 25+ frags of SPS, I can now say my tank is fragtastic! (Hey! If Comcast can butcher a word then so can the rest of us.) So when my tank first thrived in the 29 gallon, I bought a bi-color blenny baby to add some color and personality to the tank. My first bi-color was great. As far as I know, no nips to the corals and it even found a number of areas where it liked to hide and perch which made the tank interesting to watch.

Unfortunately, my bi-color died during the upgrade to the 90 gallon when the ammonia levels were too high. (Damn you new rocks!) In fact, it died the same day as my Potter's Angel which turned out to be a really sad and expensive day for me.

Well, since the first blenny died, I've now tried two bi-colors and both seemed to have taken a liking to my SPS corals. My first replacement was mostly purple instead of a cool purple and gold, which was already a strike for me. It also hid a lot instead of coming out which meant it was probably evil... but with that in mind, it was kind of a waste of money to buy a fish that only hid, so that was strike two. The final straw was when he proceeded to mow down most of my SPS frags nipping at the small polyps in a matter of four days; that's when I decided dead or alive, that blenny came out of the tank. I should have let my dogs take care of him when he hopped out, but trading him away live got me a free bi-color from the LFS.

My second replacement so far has great colors. I wouldn't say he's an angel but he's not as bad as the all purple bi-polar blenny. Anyway, if you have monti's and millies and acro's, unless they are already huge colonies that won't be bothered with a small nip here and there, I probably wouldn't recommend bi-color blennies. Of course, I'm hoping someone can tell me if more frequent feedings will curb this behavior, so if you guys have any tips on how to get the fish to behave, I'd love to hear some ideas.

Live Rocks Revisited... My International Marine Fish Order

I'm going to rewind a 'lil bit here... My tank is now stocked with live rocks and some corals and it's definitely beyond the initial cycling phase; (or so I'm claiming). However, during this upgrade that was filled with headaches, I failed to blog it as it happened so I'm going to go back and revisit some topics that I skipped over during this somewhat rushed upgrade.

After I filled up my 90 with rocks and corals from my 29g and my 10g, my tank was half full, literally. While my fishes enjoyed the open ocean for a slight period, I was busy looking for alternatives to fill that second half with rocks, instead of water. During your stupid journey to drop hundreds of dollars on rocks and saltwater, the thought of buying it online will most certainly cross your mind. Well, before you jump on all the websites claiming to sell PREMIUM rocks, let me learn the lesson for you and you can judge for yourself if it's worth it or not.


Before I dive too deep into this topic and hit my head on the rocks again... for those of you who want the moral of the story early without pictures of bland rocks, let me just say that during my research on this topic after receiving some lame rocks, two stores came highly recommended for great live rocks. These are ReefScience.com and Premium Aquatics. While Reef Science's rocks are not cheap by any means, the people who ordered them all seem very happy with them. I did not have the chance to do business with either of the companies above, but trust me... random guy on the web here would not steer you wrong. Anyway, on with the show...



So like any Googling fool, I went online, typed in "live rocks" and see which merchants are paying out their wazoo to get my business via the search result ads. One ad that stood out was International Marine Fish who had cheap, cured and uncured rocks for about $3.25/lb. I had debated eBay but the choices and selection were inconsistent... many online stores do sell live rocks but as much as I read, no one sung their praises... so based on pictures alone, I decided to buy from the Int Marine place.


Int Marine sells premium caribbean rocks... I guess I honestly should have done more research because this meant that the rocks were not as porous as kaelini or other types... but the pictures on the site looked good and it looked like Figi rocks so I said "what the heck!" Well, maybe I should have did some more research...


As you can see in these pictures, the rocks weren't necessarily bad. The reason I was disappointed was because I asked for rocks with lots of shapes; which the store did deliver, however most of the pieces I got were chalice skeletons and coral skeletons and the styles of the rocks did not match any of the existing rocks I had in the first picture.


There were however, a couple of nice pieces like the one above which looked pretty good as a brick with life, but unfortunately was not what I was looking for. I guess if I wanted street thug Nemo hanging out in marine alley's soliciting prostitutes then I could build a brick wall with pieces like these. I know... I may be a bit too harsh... however...


I bought the live rocks from this site based on pictures like these... tons of purple, tons of macro algae... tons of life.


So the lesson here is... don't let the pictures fool you. If you are interested in buying LR online, then you should check out the forums (linked on the right) and ask for opinions before you drop any money. Hey, you found this blog which means you are at least 60% net intelligent... so use the forums and don't waste money.

I'm not necessarily bashing Int Marine since the guy I talked to was nice and he shipped the same day I called AND gave me the discounted price even though the advertised period for the discount was over... however, when you have stock photos of nice live rocks and the shipment is no where close to the pictures, that's when the disappointments begin. At least I did learn (while curing the rocks) that my Remora skimmer kicks ass. There's always a bright side right? Oh... lesson number 2; if you can find a local reefer breaking down his tank and are selling LR for cheap, jump on it. That's what I ended up doing after this fiasco and I will post some pictures next time of the result. In the meantime, if you have had a bad experience or a great experience with the online stores selling live rocks, feel free to post a comment!

- Thanks.

HOLY CRAB IT'S HUGE!

Okay, so a lot has happened and I haven't had the time to do all the updates yet. However, my emerald crab has grown to such a mutant size that I MUST blog about it since I am now afraid for my life, and the life of my critters. Within a couple of days, both of my larger emeralds (I have three) have decided to molt to go into a "who has the bigger claw" competition. I must say, I am impressed and shocked at the same time.


See the shell size of the average astrea shell? Well, the snail jumped out of my tank so the crab is picking its remains... but still, it's HUUUGE!


Hopefully, one of my LFS will take em in and trade me for some smaller and cuter emeralds. Do any of you want em? On another note, what's the biggest emerald you've seen? I'm curious as to how big they can get.


Check out the above... my regular emerald on the right, my monster emerald on the left.