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some very modest growth photos. i got this monti capri frag from bro joe_p a month back and i kind of chipped off a bit of it trying to superglue it down, but its grown slightly now. not great growth for a month i guess, but in time, maybe i will have a nice scroll shaped monti cap! first pic taken july 2nd. pls click on thumbnail to view ya! second pic taken july 28 (yesterday) hmm... the colour of my monti cap surely has changed huh? perhaps its my inferior lighting. well...

some specs regarding my tank. tank: its about 2.7 feet by 1 feet by 1 feet, with a built in side refugium to the left of the tank (see whole tank pic and mysids vid). lights: 2x 24w HO T5 aqualight 10000k tubes with ten blue LED bulbs built into the casing between the two tubes, and one 11w extra daylight pl light. i intend to add two more 11w actinics but am waiting on that till i have more disposable cash. powerheads/flow: flow within the tank is generated by one overhang filter with attached skimmer (980L per hr), and 2x 60L per hr powerheads (one to return water from the refugium area to the main tank and another hidden under rocks. my system is really low flow compared to many others, but this is not due to a lack of wavemakers or powerheads. its just that wishing to keep primarily gonioporas, ive found that they do best, and extend their tentacles furthest in low flow, and i have thus shaped my tank to have that. ive tried placing powerheads at varying locations in my tank but it usually just impedes their polyp extension, especially of the stokesi. to counteract the low flow issues such as nutrient buildup, detritus collection, etc, ive scaped my tank so as to allow a gradual water flow through the various coral heads. the branching gonio is actually placed slightly forward from the back glass side, and i have planted some macroalgaes there to help with nutrient export. also, i dont have as much live rock as people usually do. skimmer: my skimmer is the simple venturi kind that is attached to my overhang filter. it skims out a dark yellowish pee-like liquid with lot of bubbles and powdery stuff. nothing like the skimmate of a beckett obviously, but it suits my needs sufficiently without taking up lots of space. i considered getting more skimming power, but ive tried out several air stone driven skimmers and my friend's red sea prizm on my tank, and they didnt skim out significantly more effectively than my present skimmer. sandbed: my substrate is comprised of 2.5 inches of powder fine oolithic sand, and i'm going to add a fighting conch soon to help with sand bed maintenance. does ay one have experience with them? can tell me if theyre useful at foraging for diatoms on the sandbed? i hope to add a sump soon to my tank, to put the miracle mud that i planned to place in but have no area to at the moment, and to create a larger chaeto refugium and increase water volume, but its put on hold for now due to cost. lastly, chilling: chilling is provided by my six-fan set placed behind the lights (see whole tank pic). ive changed the adaptor that powered the fans at 12volts to one that runs at 7volts so as to reduce the blowing power. ideally i would like an adaptor that runs at 8 or 9volts to reduce the temp down to 26deg, but my present 26.5-27 is fine i guess, and i can save money by not buying another adaptor. thing is, i does kalk and reefbuilder daily, so the evaporation of about 0.8 to 1L per day allows me to dose the additives with distilled water for make up. if i can afford a good calcium reactor though, i think id prefer then to use a chiller to minimize evaporation.

yeah sure you can la. small amounts changed frequently is better than large amounts at once though ya. cheers

and heres a video of my sailfin swimming around my tank. i really hope the videos are viewable. sailfin_tang_swimming.zip

above is a video of some live mysid shrimps in my side refugium, and heres a video of my pulsing xenias: pulsing_xenias.zip

heres a pic of one of my ###### shrimps. i have three in my tank, but my friend who came by to help me take these photos on his really good cam only took this one shot. thanks to my friend chris for all his help though. i'm going to try to upload some videos now as .zip. pls do tell me if they work ya as i tried installing some free video editing software earlier to remove the audio track to make the files smaller and its screwed up my windows media player and i cant even view the vids myself now. mysids_refugium.zip

thanks bro gouldian, djviper, loster, damien, and diabolus for your lovely comments ya! stay tuned for more. shall post up more soon, and hopefully the videos

oh thanks diabolus! i shall try to check them out this wkend or give steven there a call. thanks again.

i'm sure most of you might recognize that my avatar's a pic of a black cap gramma. sad to say though, i havent bought one yet. i set up this tank with the plan of keeping one gramma melacara, but i didnt have enough money to buy one when lck110 brought them in during the aquarama period, and they havent brought any in since. if any one spots a black cap, pls do pm me about it ya! many thanks in advance for that. presently, my tank has only one juvenile sailfin tang (veliferum), and one scooter blenny (ocellate dragonet). the sailfin has only been with me about a month, being a new addition to this tank, but the scooter has been with me close to two and a half years now,a nd hes my favourtie fish as hes got quite a personality. i feed my fishes and carnivorous corals with a syringe and hard tubing, and my scooter pecks at the tubing even before i have a chance to squirt the food out. her colouration (i think its a she) has also changed alot in the course of my care, going from a molted brownish and faded camo colour to the rather distinct whitish and black stiped areas of the present. pls click to view ya in my previous tank, i had a mated pair of clowns along with a baby blue tang, but i decided to sell them off during the interim between my old tank's decommissioning and my new tank's set up as i tore down my old tank too early. i wanted to keep the clown pair as they were spawning, but let them go at an offer of $25. hahhaha. very good price right?? think i tan dio with that sale. as for my old tank's corals, i housed most of them, including my one year plus goniopora stokesi (bottom left gonio in my full tank shot) in my quarantine tank, but that wasnt such a good move for my sps as most of them experienced some RTN in that period, so i had to sell them off or give them to friends before they got any worse.

back to photos then. heres a pic of my Goniopora pandoraensis colony. i think its correctly identified buti'm not entirely sure. if anyone has better clues, pls do tell me ya. i really love the shape that this branching goniopora gives to my tank, and its discernably growing back over areas where there was tissue recession previously, so yay! hahah pls click to view

sigh... ive been trying to edit some videos now to reduce their size to upload as attachments, but its not working. for those who might like to check out videos of my mysid shrimps in my side refugium, or of my xenias pusling motion, pls do go to <http://briefcase.yahoo.com> log in as "ianmajeur", with the password being "password". pls do give me feedback about whether youre able to view the videos from there ya. cant figure out any other way to do that right now.

heres my fromia monilis starfish. the first pic is with flash, the second without. sorry if i keep editing the posts ya guys. still new to posting up photos and it turned out way too big so all are going to be thumbnails now. by the way, anyone know how to upload videos?

hi there gouldian! thanks for viewing my tank thread. trying to figure out how to use a video editor now so i can remove the sounds and upload some videos. hahah. stay tuned for more! cheers, ian

hi there everyone! this is my tank: (all photos are thumbnails to full sized pictures. pls click to view) to start off, just some background information about my tank, and me- how and why i came to design it the way it is. my name is ian, and i just graduated from NUS about a month ago. i began reefing about four years back, and have always been attracted to gonioporas. the thing is, gonioporas have had such terrible long tern survival rates that i was wary of keeping more of them. with time however, lots of reading and research, and with my second goniopora having survived to almost a year and a half in my care now, i decided to go ahead and upgrade my old two feet tank to my present roughly 2.7 feet custom made tank. i'm sure some of you must be asking what happened to my first goniopora, and well, sadly, i must say, it died after only a few months in my hands some three years back when the lfs i used to go to advised me that actinic moon lights and no feedings would be sufficient to keep them going. well that certainly wasnt enough to keep them going. talk about a bad experience with lfs advice. ah well. back to my tank: i had it custom made at a tank maker at hougang ave 1, near heartland mall, and it has a built in side refugium to the left side of the tank, where i initially planned to house my live mysids and grow macroalgaes, but have since decided to redo, and have a tumbling chaeto growing area with ecosystems miracle mud instead. here are some more photos before i ramble on somemore.

hahahaha. upz to you bro gouldian- agree with bro loster, nice and helpful.

hi there blueheaven, i think your intentions in starting this thread are commendable, and also, that if there has been flamings or bad sentiment posted within this thread, that it is none of your fault. honestly, the fault comes from individual members who assert their views without really thinking of how others might feel. it happens in other threads and forums too, so i sincerely hope youre not discouraged by how this thread has panned out. sometimes, it crosses my mind too that what a particular reefer is doing might deserve some criticism, but its often better for us all to approach that kind of thing constructively. when your exams are over, lets do have a meeting of some sort ya. and if you need any help organising it, i'll be willing to ya. cheers, ian

hi there happy reefer, ive been using bottled distilled water and it definitely lessens the algae issue. i get my Alpheus DI water from Shing siong at ten mile junction near bukit panjang Lrt, bus interchange there, at 17.5L (12x 1.5L bottles) for only $5. its cheap and works wonders compared to tapwater so you can consider that as an option too ya. cheaper than getting an Ro or DI unit for my needs. cheers, ian ps: try cutting out a small piece of filter wool (the kind used for wet/dry's) and use that to scrub you tank's algae off. this way, the algae remains on the wool rather than is blown around the tank to resettle. ive been running phosguard for three months now, and i use twice the recommended dosage and alls ok so far so i guess you can use that for a while too to reduce in tank phosphate levels. thereafter, its about not adding PO4 back into the tank i think, and tap water certainly does, so if youre going to continue using tap water, then the phosphate remover wont really suit your needs as it'll need constant replacement. perhaps try grwoing some macroalgaes too?

hi there happy reefer, i'm not really in a position to comment as i havent used either phosban or purephos before, (hopefully some fellow reefers who have will read this thread) but i think, if i recall rightly, purephos helps remove silicates too. thing is, there has been no large research studies on purephos because its a relatively small competitor in this field of phosphate removers. also, if i'm not wrong, the removal of silicates requires a particular molecular bond with aluminium oxides or something- i read this somewhere but cant quite find the article now- which makes me deduce then that any silicate removing media is likely to be made of al, like phosguard. actually, i think that rowaphos is the better product for removing phosphates. like i said, if i could afford its far higher price, id use it. but phosguard does its job sufficiently well (at only $25 a litre at clementi's 328), and slight al leechings into the water column does not affect most livestock, for like the above study said, only a large amount of phosguard used n a small water volume will cause al levels to become toxic. substrates such as ecsystems miracle mud also release alumnium as part of trace elements into the water too, so phosguard isnt the only product which does so. hence i think using phosguard according to the packaging's recommended dosage is safe enough. by the way, are you facing algae problems which is why youre looking at using phosphate removers? heres a freshwater article that was posted on reefs.org recently that explains alot of the various situations in our tanks really well. like what circumstances causes diatoms or green microalgaes or cyano, etc. if youre facing algae issues, can give it a browse ya. http://www.thekrib.com/Plants/Fertilizer/sears-conlin.html cheers, ian

hi there klim, your water parameters sound good, perhaps with the exception of NO3 that you can bring down with time. i take it this tank is still cycling without livestock? whats the colour temperature of your MH bulbs? if you have 20000k bulbs, place those on for the moment instead of 10000ks, as the higher blue spectrusm on the 20000k will further fuel coralline growth. but no worries either way, as theres ample light with your MH for coralline growth. gotta give it some time too ya, and i'm sure the coralline algae will start growing like nothing soon. you can pm me if youd like a small piece of rock with coralline algae on it to kick start things ya. cheers, ian

hi everyone! i was just wondering when src might organise a casual meeting amongst its members when i stumbled onto this thread. i really agree with AT that our online discussions ought to be more focused on suggestions rather than criticisms. and even where criticisms sometimes are necessary, we can always put it across in a non-hostile way. there's been quite alot of "flaming" and bad sentiment of late, both in this thread and in the swop shop forum and perhaps the moderators can find some means of privately chiding those responsible for unwarranted harsh language. i mean, we always post "lets have a meeting", but our flaming" and "hostile language" online can only discourage members from meeting right? i think a meeting's a great idea though. maybe we can arrange a monthly meeting at a particular place for coffee or something that is standard, (the cafe that gives src members discount for example?) and whoever is free on that particular day can just turn up- like an open congregation. and an open frag exchange meeting. what do you guys think? cheers, ian

hi there teolt, i'm not much of a guru, but heres my opinion ya- hope it helps in some way. your improvised use of two canisters where youre unable to fit a sump is great, but other than increasing the available surface area within the ceramic balls and coral chips for bacterial activity, the canisters dont really do much in way of filtration, though a canister is the perfect place to place your phosphate removing media. im wondering, for a 3feet tank, is the cabinet not around two feet? would that not be able to fit a small sump? a sump neednt be big. sumps are often used as refugiums for biological filtration, where a deep sand bed is employed and macroalgaes are grown inorder to remove the nitrates and phosphates and silicates from the water column, so even if the sump tank were a foot long, it would still be viable. a sump is also commonly used for placement of a skimmer, which brings me to the question as to whether youre running a skimmer. from the sound of your set up though, i think you can keep the two canisters in place, as i suspect youre surely already running a skimmer of some sort. but if youre not running a skimmer, my imperative would be to do so, as skimmers are the most effective equipments for nutrient removal, and a skimmer is worth more in terms of "water purifying or cleaning" ability than two canisters. all in all however, a sump is not "die, die must have", but it certainly is an easy way to increase water volume and hide large equipment like skimmers, etc. cheers, and good luck on your set up's success, ian

hi seanewbie. i agree with bro lesters recommendations on providing sufficient actinic blue lights, or if you have a 20000k tube, that will do too. its necessary for you to introduce coralline algae into your tank for it to proliferate though. if your tank is stocked with rocks that do not display any signs of coralline algae, it is possible that the rocks are devoid of coralline, either due to improper rock curing or trransporting techniques, so you could try adding a live rock with visible coralline algae on it to spur coralline growth. if youd like, i could give you a small piece of rock with coralline algae on it to kick start things ya. it makes a big difference i think, because it spreads really fast when introduced. cheers, ian

hi there klim. you probably already know this, but i hope its a helpful reminder, that you pick your clams according to your lightings set-up. of the tridacnid clams, the crocea and maximas are the most light demanding, and will require MH or at least T5 lightings, whereas for the squamosas and gigas, T5s and good VHOs or power compacts may do. as for macros not surviving in your tank, its usually either a nutrient issue or lighting issue. what lights are you running, and what are your water parameters like? cheers, ian

yeah, thats true. when clams, or rather, any of your livestocks within your tank spawn, they release gametes that if not fertilized to form viable larvae, will need to be skimmed out or removed from the system. if this does not happen, they will break down releasing ammonia, nitrites, and nitrates in turn, back into your system. as bro weileong and blueheaven suggest, the skimmer really is the best way of removing dissolved organics from your system before it is allowed to break down into undesired nitrogenous forms like nitrate. clams may consume organic particles within the water column but this alone will have little effect on the NO3 levels within your system. also, clams are expensive relatively. if youd like to add some filter feeders to aid the consumption of dissolved organics and help in their way reduce eventual nitrate levels, you can try getting some tube worms. they are cheap, abundant, and do not threaten the reefs in any significant way, unlike tridacna clams which are presently over-collected. try growing some macroalgaes such as chaetomorpha in a betta box or something if your tank does not have a refugium. the macroalgae's growth will not only bind nitrates out of the water column, but also consume phosphates, which is the primary nutrient causing undesired cyano and green algaes. well, hope that helps you in some way, cheers, ian ps: if youd like some free macro algaes (i grow caulerpa nummularia), you can pm me ya and next time i harvest, i can give you some.

hi everyone, ive tried using a chiller before but i find that for tanks that do not run calcium reactors, the use of a fan set is better because, though it creates more evaporation than the use of a chiller would, this evaporation allows for top up with distilled water and kalk or reefbuilder. also, smaller tanks that run with chillers and no ca reactor would require kalk dripping with top up water to replenish ca but would over time cause the salinity to drop because of insufficient evaporation. so think that your ca needs, and your tank size also determines whether fans or chillers would better suit your needs. i run a six fan set that i power with an adaptor at 7 volts rather than 12 to reduce the speed of the fan. you can tweak it to achieve the desired evaporation rate and temp. the downside to fans is that temp fluctuates with the daily atmospheric temperatures. whereas chillers maintain more stable temps throughout. for example, if a chiller is set to chill to 26 deg. the water temp seldom varies one degree from that. for fans though, i get between 26 to 28 deg. more variance i guess. cheers, ian