Recent content by thorn

Full tank pics here

There *can* be. Since pictures speak louder then words... here's some examples: North Atlantic Blue Lobster (from Maine) Painted Blue Lobster (from all topical oceans) (blue) Coral Painted Crayfish (from Australia) - it's actually a lobster, but you know... Aussies always have to be a...

yup copepods! Sign of a healthy tank. If you've been going for a good 3 months, your tank is mature enough for some madarin or green psychadelic goby's... their diet is exclusively copepods. And they look real cool.

First... pathogens from freshwater fish cannot survive in saltwater. Even if your guppies or goldfish are sick with something, they will not infect the lion or the puffer. Second... loins tend to be very difficult to gage when it comes to being sick. We've had 3 so far at the LFS I work at and...

We have one at our LFS store that was taken out of a customer's tank when it got too big. It started out the size of a shrimp (a good 1.5" or so) and is now well over a foot. Very beautiful but they do get big. He just molted the other day too... so he's still growing. Right now he's in a 90...

Star polyps are really hardy. Once they have the right conditions (clean water and iodine) they should survive any cutting. The big thing in all of this is to keep the flow good so no rot can set in. As for favites (aka close brain or moon coral) I'm sure you can propagate it, but knowing that...

The fish love it in my tank... and it's one of the only foods I can give my Hatian Purple-tip by hand and he'll accept readily. It's FANTASTIC for the crabs and shrimp. Nothing takes the place of live food though... I've kept blackworms in my fridge for a month (just need to change the water...

I agree... with fish only... you aren't going to be dosing like you would with corals... you can counter a lot of the biological waste issues with your cleanup crew, filters on the powerheads and activated carbon. You'll probably still have to dose with iodine for your crabs and any shrimp but...

Flow flow flow... Once you know you have the right wattage... your sebae needs a moderate amount of flow... some even like it heavier... it'll attach itself wherever it is happiest in the tank, but you can help it to make that choice (say you don't want it to be in the back behind that big rock...

Your nitrates are a little high, but not so much to cause a problem... are you adding any phytoplankton? The zooxanthellae in the mushrooms is being lost somehow... it's normally a stress reaction. In the ocean, it's seen when the ocean is receding and reefs that were at 25 ft below the surface...

Don't worry... she's got her own tank now. Sheesh you people are tough. :-P

I've had a bunch of damsels (domino, yellow tail, green chromis, lemon, blue devil) and only one (yellow tail) was super agressive, so much so that I had to keep him alone. In the end, I think it just comes down to the fish... sometimes a normally passive fish will just be mean - and vice versa.

So I have a story... I used to keep domino's. So cute... so lively... so good at cycling a tank. Started off with 3... went down to 2. At this point, one turns female and grows to DOUS (Domino Of Unusual Size). This "fiesty" female tore all the fins off the male and just kept on pounding till...