Category Archives: Pets

And I have always wanted a succulent garden like this (I’ll still get there one day!).

Despite really trying hard to not buy another tank; I bought another tank.

It has rounded corners, which some people absolutely love, personally I’m not a fan.

The tank is a nice little all in one design with a spacious compartment out the back for heaters and gear and a filter too which returns via a spray bar that sits under the frag rack. PS: Comes with a foam pad to go under the tank too, very nice!

Rear compartment. Bag of filter media in the middle, a bag of carbon at the very bottom on chamber on right which also has a huge sponge.

Edge on the left, and maybe the frag tank will sit on my kitchen bench on the far right, although I’m now reading that it’s bad Feng Shui to have an aquarium in your kitchen!

Some acquired gear.

And some fragging gear too.

I’ve bought another tank. LOL! I’m keen on starting a frag tank. What’s a frag tank? Frags are “fragments” of corals. IE: Fish geeks world wide cut off bits of their growing corals and glue them down onto frag plugs, they then distribute these amongst other fish geeks. Really sweet if you think about it as it’s culturing livestock without taking from the ocean (in most cases the frags are stronger and more suited to aquarium life than wild taken species too).

I’ve always wanted a succulent garden, and so I’m taking the concept of a succulent garden, but I’ll be using frags of corals instead of succulents in pots, and my frag tank is my sunny outdoor deck to display my succulents on.

JBJ 20 Frag Tank:
Pump (1000LPH/266GPH)
75 Litres (20 Gallons)
6 mm Bent Glass
Dimensions: 50cm x 60cm x 22cm (20″ x 24″ x 9″)
Center Filter Chamber Dimensions: 34cm x12cm x 22cm (13.5” x 5” x 9”)
Left and Right Filter Chamber Dimensions: 12cm x 12cm x 22cm (5” x 5” X 9”)

Accessories:
Jebao RW-4
Aquael 100W heater

What I still need:
– A light. I’ve been talking to Dave from Nano Box about a Duo (best logical choice). I’ve also been talking to the guys at Ultrabright who made the LED unit on my Fluval Edge. They have a new light coming out they want me to check out. My heart though is with the Kessil 160. I like the way it looks, it’s proportions. It’s not got enough spread to reach the very corners of the tank but I’m thinking that’s OK (and will look nice).

– A location! I’m still not 100% sure where to put it!

Filter sponge.

Pulsing Xenia.

Torch coral.

Nassarius snail.

Delivery from Oceanarium in Western Australia. Beefing up my clean up crew (CUC) with a crimson hermit, cerith snails, nerite snails, micro stars, a filter sponge, some pulsating xenia and a flouro green yellow tipped torch! All of it came in good condition and is settling into my tank nicely.

I’ve really been holding off on adding fish to my tank. It’s a tiny tank, so I was considering just the one fish, at the very most 3. Of-course I considered a pair of clownfish, but I really wanted to keep an eye out for something different. I’d seen a few fish at the local shops that took my fancy, but none of them tempted me enough to take them home, but then I found these designer clownfish on the Reef Secrets Facebook Page and I instantly contacted them to secure the purchase.

These guys are not your usual clown fish. They’re designer clownfish, specifically DaVinci Clownfish which were aqua-cultured in the US. Their body colour is similar to the standard clownfish, but the stripes are very different. I could have bought them direct from the US, but that would have cost a lot more and hoping that they arrive alive would have been super stressful.

These guys came from Queensland, even then I was freaking out about whether they would get to me alive, or not.

I usually get deliveries at around 11AM, but nope, nothing. I was in the middle of a shoot and contacted the seller to say the delivery still had not made it. A few minutes later the doorbell rang and it looks like I was the driver’s last stop (poor fish have been on a plane overnight and in Sydney traffic all day!).

I didn’t hesitate to pause my shoot. The fish come first! I unpacked the esky and found one very dead looking clownfish in one bag, and another barely moving in the other bag.

My heart sank.

The bags were freezing cold. I was immediately really pissed off with the seller for not doing more to keep the temperature up in the package (the one heat pack didn’t do anything for the water temps). I contacted them to let them know of the situation and got a one line reply: “Clownfish are tough, just temperature acclimate well.”.

I left both bags afloat for a good 40 minutes and amazingly one fish was swimming strong and the other much more dead looking fish was upright at the bottom of the bag. I put both of them into my little breeder box in the tank so that the shrimp (1 of which is almost 3 times the size of these crazy tiny little kids!) wouldn’t eat them alive, and once the almost dead looking clownfish saw his mate he began swimming!

I knew clownfish were tough, but fucking wow!!!

PS: I’ve also spotted this crazy looking nudibranch hitchhiker this morning. And in not so good news, it looks like another one of my nassarius snails is going to die overnight. It’s sitting on the sand bed and not burying back into the sand. I assume that like the last one which died the other day it’s completely starved of food as the shrimp just eat everything I throw in before it hits the bottom.

I put in a big order for frags from Fragalicious and luckily I could acclimatise them all at the same time in my massive salt water drum (which is heated to the same temp as the tank).

The last time I bought frags off these guys the zoas took weeks to open, this time around they started opening straight away, which suggests my water quality is awesome now!

Hammer island! I have 9 hammer coral pieces all up now! Crazy!

I impulse bought this duncan (it’s still opening up). Different colours to the usual. I had placed him on the left, and he looked perfect there, but the torch started stinging him so I’ve had to move him over to the right for now.

I’ve got a fair few frags on the sand bed for now until I find a better place to put them. Note the leather is coming back too now that it’s not touching the aggressive torch corals.

Top down shot.

I have an amazing Elegance Coral from Adam at Aquarium Excellence and 2 new pieces which I bought from Reef Secrets, online. The bi-colour torch is such a sweet piece, but the purple and green hammer is HUGE! It’s way too big for my tank. I’ve put it on the sand bed for now, but I might at some stage have to either break it up so I can arrange it on my rock work, or pass it on.

I also have a new Tunze algae scraper. Expensive but it does a much better job than the Two Little Fishies one, getting into the sand bed and also the corners of the tank. The Two Little Fishies one is perfect for pushing air bubbles from the top of the tank though (which gives me that Fluval Edge top down view).

SO EXCITE!

Oh man, looks so good in black (previous models were white).

The controller. I’m using Reef Crest mode and at 30% power it’s perfecto!

The MP10 is tiny inside the tank as the motor is on the outside (which also keeps the heat outside of the tank)! Such a smart design.

As you can tell. I’m totally fish geeking out lately! My MP10 wave maker arrived in the mail today! What a relief! It’s been over a month (ordered and paid for it on the 11th of JUNE!). I’m so happy with it (corals are going to be happy too!).

Corals in the mail!

Perfect distraction whilst acclimating corals!

The 2 tiny orange hammers started opening up right away pretty much!

Got took delivery of 2 small bits of a orange hammer in the mail today from 100% Reef Safe in QLD. They were packed really well, with a heat pack and a couple of chupa chups even!

Yesterday I had a great catch up with Simmy. We were meant to shoot a little too, but instead we got smashed, and all I have on my memory card is photos of her cats Luna and Diego! HAHA!

A few more corals from Aquaristic. A small orange torch and a green leather (as I miss the one in my old tank!).

Hammers are puffing up more and more by the day! New one from this morning on the bottom right corner. Gold tip hammers on the cards!

Morph is also getting bigger.

Small star polyps.

Normal/larger star polyps. They had opened up completely but got pretty grumpy when I took them out and cut off a bit which was hosting an aiptasia anemone. I like how they move with the flow though, very nice.

Sea water storage. Something I should have done ages ago!

I stumbled upon a guy on Facebook, Adam from Aquarium Excellence, who delivers natural sea water around Sydney. He also sells a big variety of drums of all shapes and sizes. I ended up getting a 220 litre food grade drum delivered to me, with natural sea water. His hose was long enough to reach around 1/4 of my house to my laundry! So cool. I now have so much fresh sea water which will make water changes a breeze! I could even do 80% weekly water changes and not dose a thing from now on! Such a luxury! And in an event of a tank crash (touch wood it never happens!) I have plenty of ready to go sea water.

He also sells corals so I bought some green star polyps (GSP) off him. One piece had a pretty big Aiptasia (pest anemone) on it. I thought about keeping it, but then I remembered how quickly these things spread so I took the coral out and broke off a fair bit of the GSP to make sure he was gone for good!

I also took delivery this morning of 3 x small Nassarius Snails from Darren at Reef Secrets in QLD (I got them to keep my sand bed clean). They came overnight (with another hammer coral too) and everything was packed super well, with a heat pack and all snails made it (they buried themselves into the sand bed right away!), and hammer is opened up already!

Photos of the tank tomorrow, not sure if I can capture the snails in a shot as they’re under the sand bed, but I assume they will come out for food!