In the first installment, I informed you of my setup and took you through the first month of my reefkeeping adventures. Well, to say the least, the adventures have not stopped as you could imagine. I have stocked this tank rather quickly and am now simply trying to find a happy medium of maintenance, feeding, and dosing so that it will become stable. I know I know….its supposed to be stable before I add everything.

Since last month, I have made many additions to the tank as far as livestock. I found a local distributor that will sell me most of his corals at mail-order prices so it has worked out pretty nicely. Below is the following of what I now have in the tank as far as corals:

• Sun polyps (Finding it a pain to feed but very pleasing in the evening)
• Star polyps (Spreading onto the adjacent rock, very nice)
• Button polyps (Open fully during the day but have not spread at all)
• Colt Coral (Cladiella) (Doing wonderful, attached to a rock finally)
• Octobubble (Plerogyra sp.) (Always open, have not noticed any growth or change)
• Finger Leather (Huge during the day and undergoes the infamous "shrinkage" at night)
• Toadstool (Sarcophyton sp.) (My favorite, also has small flower leather on its base)
• Green Mushroom rock (Has not spread yet, but inflate during the day)
• Open Brain (2 of them) (Eat once a week or so and are quite cool)
• Candy Cane Coral (Open mouths at night, not done much else)

All of these corals thus far have either done well, or are thriving. I tried to choose those that do not require intense lighting since I only have 160watts of N.O. flourescents. If you view the logs over the last month, you will see that I encountered my first death which was a sebae anemone. My wife and I could not resist the beautiful sebae clown and anemone, so we had to buy it. We got home, and all was well. The clown loved the anemone. Over the next few days, the anemone would shrink up occasionally. I didn’t think much of it since it would re-expand within a few hours. However, around the middle of the week it had shriveled up and would not expand. It began to decompose by the weekend and I had to remove it. I was left with a small carpet anemone that stays relatively still and has done beautifully from day one thus far(feed every few days tiny pieces of shrimp). As for the sun polyps, I am finding it very difficult to keep them fed adequately. It is rather a pain doing this every other day. If anyone is considering purchasing this coral, please realize the work that goes into keeping this specimen alive. I hope to trade this species in for something else soon.

On the 7^th of October, I began using RO water. This is one corner I decided not to cut. I purchased a 5 stage RO unit with faucet tap and all for $149.00 from Sam’s Club. I plumbed the system and now use it for drinking water to boot! The use of RO water over my former tap water, has seemed to benefit the corals the most. They appear much fuller and open. In addition to using RO water, I also purchased more rock this month. I decided to try Richard Londeree’s rock from Tampa Bay Saltwater (http://www.tbslatwater.com).. I ordered 40lbs. and split the order with a friend. I ordered 10lbs. of the decorated and 30lbs. of the corraline rock. To tell you the truth, both types of rock were full of life. It was not covered with as much coraline as I had hoped, but the lifeform was there. Richard also had the order out when he promised and right on time. It was in 5 gallon sealed buckets fully submerged.

I added the rock and have been watching the ammonia since. It rose to about .1ppm and has since dropped, although not 0 yet.

As for the maintenance, what most of you are reading this for, it has not been tooo bad.

The algae battle continues. I am not sure if this is common or not, but every afternoon, I have to remove a thin film of algae covering the front of the glass. I believe since I discontinued use of Kent Marine’s Strontium and Molybdenum, this has lessened a bit. The most tedious part of this whole setup has to be changing the floss in the canister filter every week. I am thinking of switching to sponges instead for less mechanical filtration. Someone suggested that I remove the bioballs in my eheim which I supposed I will get around to at some point.

Strange I noticed that when I clean my canister filter and hook everything back up, it takes forever to get all the air out of the filter. While I am trying to get all the air out of the filter, small bubbles flood the tank and get sucked in my the other canister which feeds the skimmer. When this happens, my skimmer produces large bubbles for the next 6 hours or so. The only thing I figured that was happening is that the bubbles are joining those produced and forming larger ones. <shrug> maybe that doesn’t make sense.

BTW, I have found it very useful to keep logs in this reefkeeping hobby. I kinda laughed at the thought of it when I started, but have found it to be very useful to identify trends and the like. It is simply a spreadsheet I edit daily in Excel.

I tried to take some pictures of the tank with a digital camera and they all came out pretty pathetic. I am attempting to take come pictures with a conventional 35mm camera at the moment which I hope to include with this next month’s article. I have included a few with this month’s article that were taken before I added the rest of the LR.

It looks much better when there is adequate in the tank that’s for sure.

Well, that about wraps it up for this installment. I hope to be battling algae much less over the next month and adding perhaps a Flame Angel. Thus far, I have come to the conclusion that nothing in this hobby is low-cost. Even though I am trying to keep this tank at minimal cost, it is still costing me large sums of money. For some reason though, it doesn't bother me since I receive a lot of enjoyment from maintaining the tank. I suppose you too feel the same if you are reading this. Till next time…..