Good evening folks. Tonight's Daily Nature Fix is sort of bittersweet for me. It's a few photos of my saltwater aquarium in it's prime. It's hard to believe that was around 5 years ago now. It was a 40 gallon tank with around 70 pounds of live rock in it. A few fish, but mostly corals. Forgive the quality of the photos, but they were taken with an iPhone 4 at the time.
^^^There she is! Everything in there was live and natural. No fake corals or other fake decorations. I had the tank running for around 4 or 5 years, I'd say. If you notice the lights at the top of this photo; they were a big part of why it looked so great. For the first few years, I just was using store-bought T5 HO lights. They did alright, but nothing really thrived. Then, I built my own light fixture from scratch. I used high-output LEDs and mounted them on a piece of aluminum I got from work. After just a few months, the corals were really taking off. Everything in the tank loved the lights.
^^^Here you can see a purple plating montipora coral. Below it is two pieces of a blue chalice. That purple one was about the size of a quarter for months. Once I put the LED lights on, it grew immediately.
^^^Here is an open brain coral with a little clownfish hanging out around it.
^^^To the left is a long-tentical anemone, which some of the clownfish would nest/sleep in. In the middle is a rainbow montipora, one of my favorites. It would encrust the rock it was attached to and be a gradient of green to orange. On the right in a cabbage leather coral.
I really do miss that old tank. Saltwater isn't hard at all, like everyone says, but it is expensive to startup. When we bought our new house in 2013, I had to move the reef tank from the old apartment. It was as difficult as you could probably imagine. I set up a new, larger tank in the new house. A 75 gallon. Got the water perimeters right and warmed up. Then, back at the old apartment, filled totes and buckets with the aquarium water, put the corals and animals into the buckets, and made the 1.5 hour drive to the new house. A lot of the corals didn't take the move very well. Some of them died and others just never perked up. All of the animals made the move alright. Things just never took off like they did in the photos above though. Then, after just a few months, the sump (another aquarium under the main one which does nothing but filter the water) started leaking. The expensive stand ended up being shit particle board and began swelling up and breaking down. Now I had some 750lbs of water, rock, and sand sitting on top of a soggy, shitty stand. Every day I was worried stand would give out and the entire tank would come crashing down into our brand new home. I decided to get rid of it all. I sold the corals and animals on local for-sale websites and the took everything apart and got rid of it. Someday I might do it all again, but probably not in the next few decades. I hope you enjoyed the photos of it in it's prime though!
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*** These daily blogs showcase the natural world. It is all original content using photos, stories, and experiences from my own travels. ***