oh ya! I was gonna mention the cool Stevie Wonder motion of the duncans......but, one thing Tony.....I need a little more than 7 seconds out of my reef porn.....way to quick of a vid for me:mrgreen::razz:

Haha.. yeah sorry. Even Linda after seeing that said "what idiot uploads a 7 second video to YouTube?" ... I had this fantasy I'd try converting it into an animated GIF so that's why I kept it short but then I kinda never got around to the "make it happen" stage... oops! Tomorrow is a new day. Surely I'll have oodles of time for that tomorrow..

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Amazing photos Tony. I'm jealous!

Thanks man, I look at them still and think, "Geez when will I ever get an in focus shot" but at least some of the colours come through! I guess I'm due for an update, that red planet is growing like crazy. Some of the others show a little bit of growth too. For the most part the tank is in that "Grow! Please grow!" phase. It's a bit agonizing to look at corals that were .75" in January/February and see that they are now 1" but hopefully in time things will fill in a bit.

One bit of annoying news, the potter's angel has developed a taste for gorgonians and most of them now have nibbled tips. I might think about removing the potter's, the damage is starting to get noticeable.

Another is that valonia and aiptasia are also starting to let their presence be felt. Going to have to do something about that I suppose..

beautiful fish.
but, they sure dont look like that in the stores.
i'm guessing it is showing mature coloration? probably didnt look like that as a juvenile eh?

tank is looking good buddy!

It might be the adult colouration? Although he's actually looked like that at the store when he was maybe 3". So if it is a juvy/adult thing then this one turned adult colours pretty early. Mind you I have seen orange shoulder tangs at 3" and you'd think they'd still be the juvenile yellow at that size so I guess adult colours can come pretty much whenever they feel like it in the fish world. :)

A couple things that I have observed however between seeing lavenders in the stores, other peoples tanks, and in Hawaii - there do seem to be two major colour morphs. A darker one like this one, and a lighter one where it's more of a pinkish grey in the body with a purple/pink/lavender border along the fins and so on. (I'll see if I can dig up a photo.)

But, lighting can play tricks on you. I've had people see this fish in person exclaim that they didn't even realize the fish was that colourful because between swimming so fast and it being hard to look at because he won't sit still, and the light needing to shine on him just right, he can appear like a brown colourless tang unless you're really looking at him closely.

Of course there's also that fish store tanks are stressful places for fish with seldom the most optimal lighting conditions to showcase subtle colours on fish, so that could be a factor too maybe..

Ya I get that with my chevron too..... Most times he looks kinda drab and plain, but when the light hits him just right you can see the color and patternation on him.....sweet fish none the less Tony

One extreme to the next!! One min (ok maybe longer) can't grow an SPS to save his soul and now you are the King!

Love the coral selections Tony......everything looks amazing!!!

What are the two things that you changed that would attribute to this sucess?
(sorry if you are repeating this....I have had no time to read much these days)

I'm not sure I'm doing all THAT well yet but thanks :) I've just gotten lucky on a few frag purchases.

The only thing I can really think of that can explain the difference is that this is really a complete tank reset. All new rock, plus it was dry to begin with so the starting point should be as reasonably close to clean as I can make it.

Of course, 5 months in I have managed to get valonia, bryopsis and aiptasia in there and they are starting to make their presence be felt. I need to go hunting. Tweezers for the valonia, boiling water for the bryopsis, and I want to get an aiptasia zapper for those little nuisances.

Arrrrgh!! Looks like my third Tunze failure since the startup of this tank. I'm very frustrated right now!!!! Now it's a 6105 that's chattering. I don't understand. Is this a common failure for these things? The other two I could at least rationalize away that they were years-old second hand but even though THIS 6105 was second-hand, I thought they were still reasonably newish. Of course the fact that it WAS bought used means I have utterly no recourse (yet again) to repair or replace it under a warrantee. Yayyyyyyy.

Would just replace them all with a few Vortechs but that prospect is too expensive to consider. :cry: Why, why, why!!!!

At this point I think I would tell anyone considering the purchase of Tunze vs Vortech to steer away from the Tunzes. There clearly is a lack of proper QA being done..