Well its time for anouther update and this time its about my rock climbing hermit crabs. How they manage to get where there do I have no idea and Ive yet to catch them actualy climbing but they are getting high up the rocks some how lol and some of the places have nearly vertical patches so its a mystery to me as I know they cant swim up and with the waight/shape of their snail shells I would have thought it would make things difficult and yet they still manage to get to the top of the tank and back down again.
As always dont forget you can click on the pic to get a bigger view and ive marked out where the crabs are (plus you can then zoom in slightly with anouther click)

new corals

Hi guys, well as you can see ive ben buying things again... lol. This time I had a delivery of four corals, a orange crush zoa that looks more like a brown zoa to me, a venus fly trap polyp, a metallic green flower goniopora, and finaly a yellow sun coral. Now unknown to me the yellow sun coral only comes out at night and needs to be fed special foods (small frozen shrimp) which Ive now bought through ebay. When I opened the box I must admit that I thought the metalic green flower one was a fake as it looked like a cube of white stuff with some pale green pant dabed onto it but as you see in the pics its the most lively of the corals Ive bought and biggest, I gues the saying is true just becouse it starts out small dont mean it cant end up nice and big.... lol. Anyway I hope you enjoy the pics and you can expect to see more pics tomorrow as Im getting anouther delivery......


Ahhh the new corals...


The venus flytrap coral



The metallic green flowergoniopora



The yellow sun coral



The orange crush zoa

The start of the aclimatization process

All four corals put in the tank for first time

Three of the corals showing signs of life

The three corals moved to their new homes in the tank

I will be adding pics of the sun coral when it decides to wake up. The guy I bought it from said it could take a few days to get used to the new tank its in before it opens up, so Ive put it in a shaded area of the tank and will keep you posted as to its progress.

new fish.....

Well as you know when I got My marine tank it came with one clown fish which was then named "ellen" so as these fish are social fish and are normaly kept in pairs I decided to get anouther to keep her company, so after a bit of searching on the net I found a aquatic company that had one for sale at a reasonable price. For some reason there was a problem with the payment page and it kept refuseing to autherise payment and it took many tries and about 45 mins before it accepted payment. Yesterday I got woken up by the mail man and he had this very big box (first pic) and looking at it I realised that it was the new fish but was kinda surprised on how big the box was so anyway I signed for it and took it to where I keep the fish and opened it where I saw 4 bags of water, and my first thought was "what the hell!!!" just how many fish did I buy.... So I looked through the bags of water and luckily only one bag had a fish in it. The other bags were just there for protection. I then saw just how small the fish was, he is so tiny. So after puting the bag he was in into the tank in order to aclimatise his water temp to that of the tank I then added small amounts of tank water to his in order for it to not be a shock when he got added to the tank. As you can see from the pics ellen is about 2-3 times bigger than him but so far they have been inseperable so I was right in getting her a friend. I have also included a small vid of both of them eating like mad ( I feed them twice a day )

Hermit crabs

I got two new "inmates" for my marine tank this morning, two orange legged hermit crabs!!! they are so small lol but boy can they move along the sand

Starfish

Well the title says it all really.. I have starfish, or to be exact three baby starfish !!!! at least thats all Ive found so far lol. At first I thought I was going mad becouse you know what its like when you have something new you want to do things with it all the time, and at the moment Im limited on what I can add to the tank (due to money), plus I want to do things properly so Im trying to take My time adding things ( new inhabitants tomorrow !!! ). So anyway I was inspecting the tank and I saw what looked like two tenticals/worms that were slightly spiny and banded in faint colour. No matter how much I tried to take a pic of them I couldnt either becouse they kept moveing or the images were out of focus. then I found them in a seperate place and was able to get a better pic tho still slightly out of focus.

Can you see it?

So I started to inspect all the rocks for sign of life and I found two baby corals which I think are called duster corals that have this ring of fronds that wave about waiting to catch food and when they do they fold in on themselves to eat it, then I found anouther starfish and this time I could see all of him.

See him ?

How about now ?

So I hope you enjoy the pics and as soon as I find anything new or add anything new I will keep you all updated. Bye for now. (dont forget you can click on the pics to get a slightly bigger view)

Well I realised that you may not know what the Aquaray lights look like so this is just two of them as you can see they are kinda bright but they work great in my tank

Yayyy I have the new tank and its all set up !!

So here are a few pics that Ive taken and I hope you like them

first two pics are where the new tank is going to go



Next two are starting the build of the tank and NO thats not me lol thats the guy that delivered and then set up the

tank for me

Nearly there...

And there it is all finished !!! The water is still cloudy from adding the water with the sand so its all stired up

And here is My first fish called "Ellen..." Also you can see two red corrals that I have in the tank

And now to show you the lighting upgrade Ive done. The first one is with the original light tubes I got with the Tank

The second one is with the light tubes and two of the Aquaray light sticks



The third is just the two Aquaray light sticks notice the difference in colour that just two of them make concidered with

the two ordinary light tubes

Fourth all four Aquary light sticks installed. Two of the light sticks have both blue and white led's one has just all white

and the last is all blue and Im sure you will agree the lighting is much better with the Aquarys

The last pic is of just the one blue Aquaray giveing the "moonlight" effect



I will add more pics as I add more things to the tank

its been a while

Well its been a long while since Ive made any updates to my fish blog so thought I would make one concidering my future plans. Im going to upgrade my fish keeping by keeping a marine tank!! In the next few weeks I will be getting My new tank the guy Im buying it from is comming to deliver it and set it up for Me, and yes I will be supplying pics of the set up.
Ive also upgraded the Bristlenose tank by removeing the internal filter and installing a much bigger external filter which does the job perfectly, but after a few weeks I noticed that in the one part of the tank there was a "dead" area where crap and bits of waste were building up which means there wasnt enough water flow and circulation in the tank. So refering to the research I had done for the marine stuff I hit on the idea of useing a small powerhead which basicly is a small propeller encased in a plastic cage with lots of spaces in order to suck in water and then a nozzel to push out that water. Using it I now have plenty of water circulation, the sand seems way cleaner and the fish seem much much perkyer, so its just what my tank needed. I wioll be supplying a pic of it soon plus I will be uploading step by step picks on the new tank when I get it

playing dead

Hi everyone
I thought I would share more things my albino bn gets up to.
last year he was the one that would bury the chunks of cucumber and would dig caves under them and eat them from underneath up.
Well now he has learned a new trick. It started off with him laying on his side against the front of the tank with his head resting on one of the pebbles in the sand. The first few times it looked like there was something wrong with him so I would go check only for him to swim away just as I got to the tank. Now he has stepped up his game by laying on his back and playing dead.
he started to swim out of the ornimental log slowly upside down and when I moved my head to see better he stopped. so guessing what he was up to I got my camera and took this small vid for you to see what I have to suffer with ( prank playing fish!!!!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi8GTOna0jY