New Additions! Hippo Tang and Sea Urchin

As my Seios slowly die out due to algae sufficating their input vents, I am now looking towards other options to suck up all the alga in the tank so flow can resume. Now I know there are at least two options to increase flow: 1. buy another Seio powerhead 2. dip these in vingear to reverse the calcium deposits (or something like that) but since one involves $$$ and the other involves work and both do not involve new livestock, I've opted to turn to more livestock instead.

To add to my diversity of algae eaters, I got a black spiney sea urchin with white tips. I'm not sure why this particular one has white tips but it looks cool and it was cheap and it isn't one of the long black spiney ones but rather just black and spiney. I do have an coralline algae problem building up in my front glass so hopefully once he discovers those he will chomp down... but honestly, I have not seen him since the day I got him. Maybe he likes the dark or something.

I also got for the first time in my reef keeping, a lettuce nudibranch. Honestly I have no idea what it does but it looked cool. I got two but I think one perished as soon as he got into the tank. Luckily, the other one is still going strong, and fast too.

Finally, to add some colors to my fish collection, I got a hippo tang. Most of my fish leans towards the orange and purple side so I wanted some blue for contrast. There is one store in this area who is now charging $75 per hippo tang! Yikes! I remember the days when they were like $25-$30... the LFS guy claims that they are now harder to catch with global warming and stuff, but I seriously think the cause is probably Finding Nemo, who made the fish famous and now probably a must have in most salt water aquariums.

I think when the tank is ready again, I may get another yellow clown goby to finish the tank off. I had one before but since I only had like 3 SPS's, they ended up stressing out due to the goby favoring them as perch spots so the corals endd up retracted for the good part of the day. Now that I have several more colonies of SPS, maybe the goby won't favor just one. I guess we'll see.

Oh yeah, happy new years everyone!

Clean Up Crew Replenishment

So slowly over the last year, my snail and hermit crab population have somehow wiped each other out like the on going eternal battle between vampires and werewolves. As of earlier today, I only spotted two large hermits and 3-4 snails where as a few months ago I had at least 20 of each. I figured 8 months into this tank and now a year into the hobby, now is probably a good time to replenish the tank.

One sign I did notice within the last few days is that my tank has gotten dirtier (a.k.a. more mature). I haven't been feeding more or anything but I guess with the clean-up crew being picked off, I've just been having less help recently.

Right now, I'm scoping out Reef Package number 3 from ReefTopia.com. I think this time around I will be skipping the blue legged hermits since they seem to be the instigators of the battles and this package seem like the perfect fit for my 90 gallon tank.

In addition to this, I think I'll need some more Mexican turbos to clear my algae problem and if I can find one easily, I'll also need a sea urchin to clean the coralline algae off of my glass.

Happy Holidays!