matandtiff.com » Pets

One Fish, Two Fish

tiffany — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 16:47:23 +0000

So the tank is now done being setup for the time being. Maybe a few more plants in the future, but I am definitely looking for some new fish and color!

Here is a closeup of a few of the plants… not sure what the grass stuff is called, but the annubia on the right only had two leaves when I got it.

Reef!

admin — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 23:39:18 +0000

This weekend a pump went out on our fish tank so we made a (well, three, but we’ll get to that later) trip to the fish store. With the first trip, I was sold a pump that we didn’t think would work. The pump we needed was a vacuum pump that takes the air out of the siphon overflow for the filter. The pump we were sold was a submersible pump that most people use in their sump to move water. We couldn’t figure out how it would work because the attached hose contained a cap to sit outside the tank to pull in air.

So we trek back to the fish store to find out the cap is removable and it would pull air. We put it in the tank and it was slightly quieter because it was submersed. The problem was that it was a venturi style pump which has a needle wheel and creates micro bubbles with the air it pulls in from the hose.

For trip three we said we didn’t care that this one was quieter and moved more water, we simply wanted a replacement for what we had. We were going to get a store credit so we looked at fish and coral. We decided to get a piece of pink star polyp coral. We’ve heard that the move to a reef tank can be a hard task because it requires good water conditions, but we’ve had our water tested in the past and it’s been excellent. The acclimation for coral is typically done using drip, not float so this was our first attempt at that as well.

Here’s our siphon drip setup:

Here’s a couple pictures of our fish and new coral:

Fish!

admin — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 21:33:53 +0000

We have new pets! We received a free ~40 gallon salt water tank from Mat’s work, and have it setup with only a couple fish right now. The tank was in bad shape when we got it because it was not kept up at work. The algae was so bad that you could not see through the glass inside. There were two yellow-tailed blue damsels still alive, but lots of other fish that had been in it were dead and gone. We cleaned the tank, put in new water and let it run, with the damsels in a bucket. The damsels are doing fine and we have also purchased an orange spotted shrimpgobie and a couple crabs. The gobie and crabs have taken care of any remaining algae, although there is still a lot of debris in the water. We’re going to try sheets of filter medium on the siphon that goes to the sump. Hopefully this will keep the water a little more clean!