I started a thread for this tank a while back, but since the last update just about everything save the tank itself has changed. It's a mashup of softies, LPS and macroalgea, filtered by biopellets and a small skimmer down in the sump.





The candy cane is a very recent addition. Looks neat on the little wall I had there.



Filtration is pretty straightforward. The sump is a 10G aga with no baffles. The return dumps in through a sock filter with a big carbon bag shoved in it. The pump is a Mag5 split between the return and a Phosban reactor with NPX biopellets. The reactor effluent is fed to an Aquatic Life 115 Skimmer. The level is kept constant by a float valve, hooked to a Minijet in the freshwater reservoir. That pump is on a timer to top off periodically throughout the day.



Lighting is 4 X T5HO with stock Coralife bulbs. Up in the display, the return water, and output from an Ehiem pump are routed through a pair of Hydor rotating heads. I'd guess there is somewhere around 250gph moving in the display.

The stocking is heavy, very nearly ridiculous. I can only attribute the water quality to the pellets, which are amazing. Nitrates bottomed out about 3 weeks after they were added, and haven't been much of an issue since then. That's with pretty generous daily feeding.

Livestock
1 Black Percula Clown
1 Pajama Cardinal
5 Blue Green Chromis
1 Spotted Dragonet
1 Lyretail Mollie (yes it's silly, but I like that thing, lol)

It's hard to keep an accurate count on the clean up crew, but there is a group of 6 or so emerald crabs, a dozen various trochus snails, and a few nassarius snails.

The coral is mostly softies. A mix of leathers, mushrooms and polyps. No zoas though. An early infestation with nudibranches sort of doomed that from the start, as I learned the hard way. LPS has started to find it's way into the mix. There is a colony of frogspawn, an open brain, and most recently the candy cane. It's been doing pretty well. The only change it necessitated was adding the carbon bag to cut down on the chemical soup.

The macros are one of my favorite parts of the tank. There is a good mix of them now.

Calurpa Prolifera
Shaving Brush Algea
Mermaids Fan
Red Gracilaria
Halimeda

I don't harvest it a great deal. The crabs and the molly keep it pretty well mowed. This tank is pretty hands off. I scrape algae every once in a while, and do a 10% waterchange bi-weekly. It took a little while to get here, but the tank is finally getting legs and has a pretty good margin of error. I let my neighbor watch it when I was out of town and no disaster struck. I saw the first nitrate reading in months, so I suspect he tried to feed them to death, lol.

Thanks for checking out my tank