Caulastrea

Taken with the flash on. The colors are way off but without the flash it is just a white smudge. The Caulastrea is about 1/3rd of the way up the tank. It should not need really high flow and the Halides may be to much light. I tried to get it glued in in a lower spot but it wouldn't stay. Good sign is that it seems to have really opened up compared to when it was on the bottom of the tank.

Glued the Montipora to a "Reef Plug" and managed to wedge it into the rock. Shouldn't fall down as easy now.

Getting used to the lights. Kept him in the sand for a few days.

Side Shot

Friday Vacation = get some stuff done i've been putting off

• The Lazy Electrician Wired 4 new basement lights so i can see down there
• He also Added a dedicated 20A circuit for fish junk in the basement
• Got rid of the old windows and put in some plexiglass to cover the sump.

Hopefully this will cut down on the condensation better then the previous set up I had. It steamed up and seemed to start working right away. We might have cut a little to wide around the skimmer but I'm not to worried. The plastic curves in a little so hopefully the condensation will drip off back into the tank. This may not work to good with my idea of having egg crate in the sump for a frag tank running a light above the glass but whatever.

Skunk

Taking turns getting cleaned

Ick

Lost the Powder Brown and Clown to ick.

Things I learned:

• Even though everyone seems to put fish in their tanks on day one quarantine them anyway because even if you lose your fist few fish ick can infest your tank for months. So No adding anything for a few months.
• Put a Skunk shrimp in before you add tangs
• Chromis seem to be pretty hardy and were my only fish to not get any ick
• Yellow tang did get hit pretty hard but the shrimp cleared off most of the white spots
• The powder brown got infested 3+ weeks after bringing him home. I think the cleaner shrimp would have taken care of things if it was in there first.
• Lowering the salinity by adding RO water didn't work for me, after 3 days the Powder Brown died in a 10 Gal quarantine

The skimmer was falling apart because I connected the pump wrong, due to the lack of instructions that I wouldn't have read anyway. That may have cause parts of the ick and the brown algae, but now that i reconnected it, what I am assuming is the correct way the algae is clearing up and I get more bubbles in the skimmer.