Happy New Year everyone, I hope you all enjoyed the festivities.
I am pleased to report that my tank has corals in it at last! I took absolutely ages at the LFS deciding what to buy. I'm still not sure if I have made the right choices but the deed is done now so I'll have live with the consequences. My criteria for selection were small pieces/frags only and easy(ish) corals to care for. So I am now the proud owner of a small rock with a scattering of zoanthids, a frag of Stylophora pistillata and a frag of Acanthastrea sp. At the insistence of my son I also came home with a couple of micro hermits. As far as my kids are concerned, crabs are absolutely awesome and corals are just blah! I did however, put my foot down at the suggestion of buying a clam at this point. As much as I would love one I think the tank is too young and unstable at the moment. With regards to the resident stock, the squat lobster is still MIA so it's looking like he's probably gone up to the great reef in the sky, I doubt that I'll be getting another if that is the case. He will be my first loss and will be sorely missed. The Scaleless Shrimpgobies are spending more and more of their time hidden in their cave and have become very protective of it too. Any hermits that venture too close are immediately attacked. Neither goby has fed today in fact I have only seen one of them (not sure which one) a couple of times this afternoon. I do hope they are OK. Edna the possum wrasse has become a bit more confident and I can feed her directly from a pipette, she still quite shy and prefers to swim close to the rockwork and hang out under overhangs though. Candy the Red Striped goby is going strong and seems unfazed by anything at all, food is definitely on top of her list of priorities.
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The tank is now two months old and yesterday I decided to take a trip to the LFS to see what fishies they had available. To my very great surprise they had quite a few from my wish list in stock. After much umming and ahhing I decided upon a sweet little possum wrasse. It was labelled up as a White Banded Possum Wrasse (Wetmorella albofasciata) but I'm fairly sure that it is actually a Tanaka's wrasse (Wetmorella tanakai). They are very similar looking, achieve the same size and behave in the same manner so it doesn't really matter to me which one it is. They are classed as a peaceful reef-safe fish that are generally quite reclusive, we've called her Edna. No picture to show as of yet.
Fortunately the other gobies don't seem bothered at all by the new arrival, in fact they have been out and about a little more than usual today. Possibly because they missed out on both tea and supper yesterday, lol. Day 58: Yesterday I was excited to see that the two shrimpgobies seemed to have finally rediscovered each other. Up until now they have resided separately, one (#1, named Hop) 'under' the right-hand rock pile and the other (#2, named Skip) 'under' the left-hand pile. Then I noticed that #1 was resting on the sand in between the two piles close to #2 Following that #1 actually moved over into #2's 'home' i.e. 'under' the left-hand rock pile. However my happiness was short lived as #1 appeared later on in the day with a torn sailfin after which he or she proceeded to move back 'under' the right-hand rock pile. Darn it! I have no idea what this means. Are are they the same sex or actually a male/female pair who haven't got it together yet? They were sold to me as a male/female pair but I guess nobody really knows if this is indeed the case. It's fascinating to observe either way (as long as they are both happy in their own territories).
Day 51: The fish seemed to have settled in and have all fed at some point. The food has to practically drift past their faces in order for them to eat though as they are not willing at this point to venture far from their respective caves.
Day 50: I was up bright and early today eager to discover if I still had three tiny fish in the tank. Thankfully I do, although it did take me a while to locate all three of them. After taking great pains to introduce the two shrimpgobies together into the ideal (as far as I'm concerned) cave they are now separated, one is still in the cave and the other is out roaming the tank. I hope that eventually they rediscover each other, pair up and make sweet goby love. As long as they don't fight I suppose I will be content.
Day 49: The tank is just shy of six weeks old and the time has come to introduce it's first fishy residents. Keeping to my philosophy of 'small fish for a small tank' I settled on, after much research, on a pair of Scaleless shrimp gobies (Tomiyamichthys nudus) and a Candy Cane goby (Trimma cana). Three fish in one go for a new tank sounds like a lot but these guys are tiny and I mean really tiny! The load on the biological filter will hopefully be small. To say that my family were a little disappointed when I arrived home with my precious cargo is a bit of an understatement, at first they didn't think that there were any fish in the bags at all, lol!
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AuthorHi, my name is Lisa and I live in Derby, UK. I am a self-confessed reefaholic! Archives
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