August 2000 Featured Aquarium: Jason Cothren aka polypboy
Photographer: James Wiseman
Here's the Photo Album for this aquarium.
Setup Philosophy: Deep sand bed and live rock. Hard to go wrong with that formula.
Tank Size/Age: Tank is a 120g Reefready. LR in the system is about 3 .5 years old. I move once a year (unfortunately) and when I do I always use new sand. I nuked my tank once moving the sand bed, took a solid year to recover from the nutrient bomb.
Lighting: (2) 175 watt MH. I use the German 10K's in diamond horizontal pendants.
Filtration: No "formal" filtration.. I took the cup off the skimmer and use it solely for aeration. The tank had a little hair algae for a while, but a balance was reached and the algae never came back.
Calcium/Alkalinity Supplementation: Kalkwasser dripped via a Kent aqua doser
Fish/ Corals: I got the majority of my corals from making the LFS rounds here in Houston. If you are persistent you come across some nice stuff. I also traded a lot of frags with the local MARSHians. James Wiseman contributed a lot of my plating corals. My fish were also found cruising the reef stores or by having Aquatic Designs special order me fish. Keith the owner scored me a perfect tusk that was only about 1.5” TL. Perfect reef fish, but your gonna loose the shrimp
Oldest fish/Coral: My oldest fish (3.5 yrs) would be “Sam” the yellow tang. He was my first fish. My oldest coral would be a yellow leather that is also 3.5 years old. When I got the leather it was the size of a baseball, now the beast is the size of a soccer ball.
Feeding/Maintenance: I feed flake (OSI spirulina flakes) alternating with frozen (Formula 1, Formula 2, prime reef, angel formula and mysis shrimp). The only maintenance that I do is to scrape the glass and fill it with make-up water. Which comes straight from the tap!!! No RO for this tuff tank! No skimmer, water from the tap, and no water changes. I DO NOT recommend doing this. I think I was very lucky for a long time.
Anything else you want to add that you think makes your tank special: I kept fish that were not supposed to be reef safe in my tank. I think that it was kind of special in that aspect. Full-blown adult angels, harlequin tusks, grouper, butterflies etc. I think I was very fortunate to not have all my stony corals munched on but every time I tried something new, it always worked out. Well, except for the grouper. I also think that my tank focus (Montipora plating species) was really cool. I had reds, green, purple and brown. Big colored plates growing from the rock looked really nice.
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