I can't wait for the wife to see it tonight :smile:
Let those frags grow while I battle this algae

And don't be surprised if you have to leave the shrimp in for a day or 3

I have to agree, the birds-nest looks good. I had a frag which was doing quite well and while on vacation something knocked it off and it ended up in the pistols cave.... Now im left with a 1cm branch with 10 polips from the salvaging process...
I am also very curios to see what else the pistol might hide in his cave under the rocks as he seems to be quite the pack-rat.

Well they are similar but the top hat snails grow much larger and have a huge algae appetite. My 9 astreas were not able to compete with one top hat snail as the astreas would eat algae for a day and sleep for the next two weeks which is obviously not enough to keep the tank clean.
The one disadvantage about the top hats is the size.... they tend to knock corals down if they are not glued.

With that being said one top hat is keeping the tank algae free and I dont have any experience with the turbo snails as JL always had bad batches of them.

That is one ugly crab! Glad to see that you caught it.

Yeah that thing is nasty. Was it a Gorilla Crab or something?

EDIT: Now that I actually look at it, I'm not sure thats a Gorilla crab. But an Ugly SOB none the less.

Ya, not a Gorilla
It was hairy, but not tarantula hairy :smile:

He met his new buddy this afternoon

http://i749.photobucket.com/albums/x.../LFSMantis.jpg

I figured it's only fair, since he ate the sea hare alive :twised:

I grabbed a few Strawberries while I was there ... can't hurt

Did some algae scrubbin' tonight
I turned off the return and hooked up an XP2, then I went to town with brushes
This is what I am dealing with

http://i749.photobucket.com/albums/x...d/DSC01290.jpg

And after a couple hours of scrubbing and filtering

http://i749.photobucket.com/albums/x...d/DSC01291.jpg

I made a couple accidental green birdsnest frags - clumsy

Next weekend I will start transferring the first fishies from QT :mrgreen:
I'm still trying to get the Bangaii to eat pellets, but the Clown and PJs love them, so they get to go into the DT first

try peroxide dosing for the algea may help you

I've looked into that, and it's been suggested before, but if I don't filter out all the dead algae, it'll just release the PO4 back into the water, won't it ?

yes scrub scrub away dose with peroxide right after.. and a bit every day its how i killed it all in my 50g.. then i stopped and i spent 8 hours friday night scrubbing again.. ppond ppl do this as well too.

you could also try elevating your mg.....most macro algae dont like high mg levels