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Saltwater Reef Aquarium Journal

Tank progress for June 2008 Jason Buchanan

1-Jun-08 - I've got copepods out the wazoo! To quote Anthony Calfo, "I'm cuckoo for copepods!" Well, they're definitely there, much to my surprise. They are so very very tiny. Sometime over the past few days they've blossomed as I had not seen any of them 2 or 3 days ago while cleaning the front of the tank.

I have a Stomatella varia in the tank:


I posted a thread on Reef Central asking for identification what this thing is.

The hair algae has gone crazy on this piece of Fiji live rock and a rock with a LPS coral fragment on it but the two pieces of live rock from Skipton's Pet Center have no algae. I'm guessing there are little critters eating the algae on the rock from Skipton's - hopefully they'll saunter over to the other rocks and rid the algae from them.

Overall, the tank has really taken off. The full tank shot from last month looks pretty dull compared to how the tank looks now. I will take a photo of the tank later today or tomorrow. The most striking thing I notice is the piece of branch Fiji live rock has all sort of color, presumably red coralline, Corallinaceae, algae. The other rocks are starting to develop patches of green and purple coralline algae all over them. The patches are small, but they are growing. I really must take a photo to provide comparisons!

I put a Mexican Turbo snail in the tank, Turbo fluctuosa - Turbinidae, to tackle the green hair algae. It went right to work.


2-Jun-08 - Some sort of starfish in the tank!

Early word has it that it is an Asterina star. Apparently, the blue Asterina stars like mine are known to eat coral - read more about it at WetWebMedia.

In other news... The Turbo snail has plowed a clean path through a lot of hair algae. In 24 hours it's eradicated a few square inches. I'd get another snail but i'll see how this one does. I'm not enthusiastic about having two hungry/starving snails so i'll just let this one do its work at a "snail's" pace.


30-Jun-08 - Been a little slow at updating this page but not a lot to write about. The tank DID go through a transformation - the green algae has slowly disappeared while the chaetomorpha has exploded in the refugium. There's color everywhere - although it's not packed full of corralline algae it's got color of all different hues on every rock.

The Turbo snail stopped eating and looked like it was about to die so I pulled it out. It did a good job eating through most of the algae; I may get another one. Not a bad deal at $2.50 per snail.

Also, I've noticed lots of litle bits of new life on the rocks - i'm going to take more photos tomorrow... but in the meantime, the things i've found are little bits of what appears to be hydra. The pieces that are growing are barely 1/16" in width - very tiny, but they are growing.

I have some new fragments!




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