July 16, 2010

the tale of two tanks...

I guess if you can't live near the ocean the next best thing is to bring the ocean to you!
My kid sister gave us her old 38 gallon tank so since we have a space big enough we decided to make this tank a saltwater tank.
An expensive and time consuming adventure to say the least but so far we are really enjoying the adventure so far.
The first step we had to clean out the tank and scrub off the water marks.
Then we added our live sand and water then began the slow process of adding salt to our mixture.
We finished our 7 day stability treatment yesterday so we were able to purchase 20lbs of base rock (that's the stuff that looks white) and 10lbs live rock (that's the rock that looks a rich darker brown/gray)
So this is what our tank looks like now.
We more than likely will move the rock around until we find a "look" we like but when we added everything yesterday it stirred up all of the sand and it was like a dust cloud in there making it impossible to see what we were doing.
But for now it looks like this.

Photobucket

On one of our pieces of tonga live rock we have this:
Photobucket
Not really sure what it is yet but we "officially have one living thing (beside the rock and the sand) in our tank!!

Our next step is to wait..
again..
but this time we want to make sure that our ammonia levels haven't spiked so when we add in our "cleaner crew" we won't kill everything we add.
So our next purchase we will be adding :
Photobucket 30 blue legged hermit crabs
At least their bright blue legs will give us some much needed color to the tank!
Photobucket 5 red scarlet hermit crab
Photobucket 10 astrea snails
Photobucket 10 margarita snails
Photobucket 10 cerith snails
My son is going to freek out.
He HATES snails with a passion!!

...once these guys are well established we will move on to the fun stuff!
Brightly colored fish and corals!!
**happy sigh**
by that time the weather will probably be turing and the color will be greatly desired.
We can not wait!!

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