Coral Babies

Our first two fish in the main tank are Eddie and Freddie, the coral babies. They are yellow clown gobies, also know as coral gobies. They are really tiny fish, about one inch, and look quite lost in our big tank!

We got them on Sunday and they are feeding well. They are mainly carnivores and seem quite happy eating all the copepod and mysis shrimp you can see all over the glass walls of the tank. They also like the flake food and the oyster eggs. Freddie is a bit paler than Eddie but they are both lively wee things. They mostly do this thing where they freeze on the spot, either on the rock or glass but sometimes in the middle of the water. Its quite entertaining to watch!

The tank is amazingly clear, our Internet bought clean up crew (CUC) of 20 hermit crabs and 10 turbo snails have polished up the rocks a treat. Water tests are all normal, although water temperature has been up a bit due to the hot weather. Its great to have both tanks up and running at last.

The coral babies are in quarantine in the main tank now and after a few weeks we will start thinking of introducing Boomerang, Comet and Darty (if we can catch them!).

Nano Upgrades

We have done some alterations to the Nano tank to make everything run smoother. We added a skimmer into the back of the Nano tank. Its a TMC V2Skim 120 Nano Protein Skimmer. Its pretty neat and fits nicely into the 2nd chamber at the back of the Nano with the lid down. It has a wee collection cup which is easy to empty. It produced a soda stream effect for the first 24 or so hours but is working nicely now.

Before we added the Clownfish we added a small wall between the main tank at the front and the back sections. I've read on the forums that its not uncommon for fish to jump into the back section and get hurt or killed. We've not taken any chances and I got some 1mm plastic at work and we've superglued in a partition wall to prevent any accidents - better safe than sorry.

We've removed all the bioballs, carbon and ceramic rings and have used a small piece of the black sponge over the inlet to the 3rd chamber to kill the micro bubbles from the skimmer. I would have loved to move the heater to the back too but I've read about them shattering due to the variable water levels. We've not removed the sponge from chamber 1 as it does a nice job of filtering off the bigger floaters. I expect that's the best place to put the heater to prevent any likelihood of it shattering. At the moment we have a small sock of Rowaphos in the 2nd chamber but hope to remove that soon.