Various pictures from my Marine Reef Tank. Taken in Spring 2004 when it was in my apartment in DC and I was just playing around with my new toy—My digital camera.
N.B. the following has a lot of undefined terms in it that require some expertise in either marine biology or tropical fish/coral keeping. I was going to define some of the terms but it would take too long and I did not find any good web pages to link to for explanations. Wikipedia failed me on this one…
The tank itself is quite old, nearly 12 years. It’s moved several times, from my place to my parents’ basement when I went back to college after working in the fish store for two years. Then to My apartment in DC and most recently to my bosses’ house for him to take care of and learn ‘art of reef tank maintenance’. The sad fact is he is doing a better job of it than I was, because he pays better attention to it. Keeping a salt water reef tank is really not as hard as all the rumors would have you believe. It just takes diligence. A few weeks of neglect in a healthy tank is not too hard to recover from but if you go on too long it starts to reach a point where you have to fight to bring it back. My tank has reached that point several times. But despite my failures as the lord of the tank there are several inhabitants that have been residents of my tank for quite a while; the ‘old man of the tank,’ (the gray and black fish with the blue spots,) has been in the tank 6+ years. There is also a starfish older than that and a frogspawn coral that is about the same age. The frogspawn is the one featured in most of the pictures of coral in this set. It’s a light brown and green member of the Euphyllidae family of corals. The green color makes it look quite nice under the ultraviolet light of the actinic blue power compact lights on the tank.