Okay, here's the good stuff (well, crummy photos, but update photos nonetheless).
First of all, here's a farther away shot of the whole (octo)bubble (tyvm Kevin
). It's not actually a green color- it's red. I don't know why the camera/flash changes the colors, but there you have it. It's a very vigorous eater; I feed it Cyclop-Eeze and brine shrimp in the evenings, and it folds its tentacles in and opens its mouths to chomp them down, which is pretty fun to watch. My only concern at present is that it almost looks as if it is straining out of its skeleton. Is this a lighting issue? It otherwise seems healthy and has grown since we purchased it, but I'm by no means any good at judging corals yet..
Here's the whole tank and stand from far away. It sits in the transition between the kitchen and the dining room. The black box on the right is the top of the protein skimmer.
Here is the *old* front view of the tank for comparison.
And here is the tank now. The torch coral is gone (=\), and the tank doesn't look aesthetically much better, but I think it does seem healthier. For some reason this picture came out dark so I bumped up the brightness a bit in PS so you can see it better.
And here is a view in the left side. You can really see the true red color of the bubble in this picture because I didn't need to use the flash.
And here's the left side. I love my mithrax crab, though I'm sure someday I too will discover the evilness of crabs. The rock the crab is crawling on has started growing some coralline of its own (like that purplish stuff toward the top)- it was just some random rock my parents bought when they were first setting up the tank and it's neat watching it become a liverock. =)
Here are a few more close-ups of the inhabitants. I've been irritating the elephant-ear a bit recently because I keep managing to bump into it when I'm doing water changes, but this week it decided to return to its fanned-out, floppy self again (though naturally I took the pic from the wrong side). It is kind of on a "branch" of rock and I have been debating moving it yet again so that the bottom parts that are currently fanned out over the substrate are on rock instead. As you can see, it presently does not have much support for its size (it has grown quite a bit since we got it).
And of course what tank is complete without giant worms that come creeping out when I'm trying to target feed variety wafers. =P
Lastly, here are my newly discovered things that need
ID'ing.
These have been on one rock for a while, but they haven't moved or....anything, really.
Is this one a feather duster or an aiptasia? Sorry about the blurriness. There is nothing else in the tank that looks like it. If you're wondering what the green thing is to the right it's the mithrax.
Lastly, I found this on the glass I think..two days ago. It's a very minuscule blob and I couldn't get a good picture of it, so I have this wonderful Microsoft Paint artist's rendering and a video of its "pulsing" activity. In the video it is blurred out, but I included in the drawing a little doodle of about where it is. The best example of the pulsing is toward the middle and last part of the video.
Vid:
http://members.aol.com/deepoceanred/squishie.avi
And that's it for now...
Please let me know if there's anything anyone notices that I wouldn't. For some quick stats on the tank: filtration is via a Penguin 170,
LR, and a new AquaC Remora. I do water changes of 3g and substrate stirrings at the same time once a week. I do water tests at the middle of the interval between water changes so that the newly added water doesn't affect the results. The clownfish is the only fish in the tank at present (a new one will be added within the next few weeks). The tank has been running now for about four months, I believe.
