dude that tank is growing crazy well done

Problems aside, it's lookin' great Adam

He's hands down everyone's favourite fish. They definitely need big tanks though, this guy has more than doubled in size since March and now that I've seen full grown ones in person I'm worried even my tank isn't big enough.


Thanks! It's been a big year for them. Apparently ignoring them was just what they needed lol

haha, I'm going to have to have some sort of a frag sale soon. The ones on my rack are about to start plating on to the rack itself.


Right?! I can't believe how many hours I wasted worrying about them not being up to the task. They've got shortcomings for sure, and perhaps I could get better colours with T5s, but they've done their job so far. I'll definitely stick with them in the future.

Make sure you've got a big tank! Also they're slow as all h*ll so if you've got really aggressive feeders you'll need to give them special attention, and I would also argue that they absolutely require some sort of 'feed' mode with greatly reduced flow or they can't catch anything to eat. When I feed I turn my vortech's to feed mode and turn off the return pump for 5 minutes to make sure he can actually catch something. My tank has quite a bit of flow which ferdinand struggled with when I first got him, so if you get a small one you might want to consider reducing the flow until it's big enough to handle it. Also I've heard that cleaner wrasses can harass them to the point of chronic stress. They're not fast enough to get away and the cleaners apparently obsess over their white spots.

Nope, not even a little. It took a tiny nibble out of the tip of my gorgonian the first day I got it, but he's ignored it since. He's figured out that mysis and pacifica plankton chunks get caught in the polyps of my more extravagant SPS colonies like the hydnophora, so he 'hunts' off of the corals, but as far as I can tell he's never actually taken a bite of the coral tissue, he just plucks off food that's gotten stuck. He also ignores my one tridacnid clam, but he LOOOOOOVES frozen clam on the half shell, which I feed mostly for the copperband's benefit a few times a weeks. From a feeding point of view, one of his natural behaviours is a little annoying but it doesn't seem to hurt anything. If you look at the full tank shots, you can see there's quite a few craters in the sand. Those are all from him. In the wild they hunt by blowing jets of water in to the muck on the bottom to expose the inverts that they eat. He never used to do it, but then one day it was like he figured out how and in the space of 2 days he completely resurfaced the sand bed. I rarely have crystal clear water now because he does it often enough that there's always something floating in the water. here's a video of him doing it:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps0d082e20.jpg

Thanks! I see it often enough that I don't realize how much it's changed. I just looked at photos from the beginning of the year and it was practically a desert back then!

Thanks man. I'll eventually figure out how fix them, but man are they annoying to my eyes!

Wow, 12 months in 4 pictures:

Oct. 30, 2012
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps46bc7b95.jpg

Oct. 21, 2013
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps2b3a3f73.jpg

Oct. 30, 2012
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps8d784f81.jpg

Oct. 21, 2013
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psab9183c2.jpg

It's been a big year!

I like your tank who did the cabnetry?

The finishing carpenter that did my house built it, they're called Epic Woodwork. They did brilliant work, not just on the tank (which was awfully challenging), but on the whole house.

Was just touching up my photos in iPhoto. It looks like my photo skills still suck massive monster monkey balls. The images I previously posted are waaaaaaaay to cold.

Here's a better example of what it would look like to your eye if you were standing in front.

Kien, I'm gonna get you to bring your camera with you when you come over, cuz my skills are weak sauce.

Also, I'm trying these hosted on dropbox. Photobucket seems to torpedo the quality.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...k/IMG_5912.JPG
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...k/IMG_5917.JPG
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...k/IMG_5919.JPG

I took a tutorial on correcting white balance in Photoshop and decided to try and apply it to some of my tank pictures. These are top downs I took today, not perfectly accurate to real world, but 100 times better than what my iPhone gets with the native camera app.

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...pscb05019c.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps750a6502.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps0b5d089e.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psf4b81d7d.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps2d0d13fb.jpg

You can see the problem I'm having with my radions in a few of these. White diodes burnt out all over the place. I'm trying to sort it out with Ecotech.

WOW, that's looking awesome Adam. Everything looks great!

Thanks! A couple of those colonies turned out really janky in terms of colours because the phone sensor blue washes everything, so on the phone, reds barely even register, while anything that's blue becomes indecipherable from the background. I tried a new correction in Photoshop that involves specifically setting the black value, the white value, and the grey value manually using a kind of long and annoying process, but it requires there being something that is truly 'white' in the image that isn't blown out or a reflection, and since my sand has turned mostly grey/purple it was hard to find true white anywhere in the tank that's not crazy blown out on a phone camera.

Anyway it's a heck of a lot better than the original photos, but those are the only ones I could get 'right' enough to think worth posting lol.