Thanks everyone! I realize it's been too long since I updated this thread. Grad school is kicking my butt.
First off, the anemone didn't work out. I sold it, and the clown fish, to someone who was going to do a species only tank. It just moved too often. After the last pics I posted it wandered around to the front of my tank and tried to kill corals worth 4 times what it cost. things are only just now starting to recover.
second, my house is going up for sale this summer, so the future of this tank is very much hanging in the balance. Best case scenario, tank gets sold as with the house as is and it continues it's illustrious life with a new owner. Or, more likely, I'll end up having to sell it's contents and it will become a closet or built in book shelf.
in any case, here's some updated pics. I've been trying to play with different camera apps to get the white balance correct so I'll post some comparisons.
Also, I added a coral beauty angelfish and 9 anthias. The coral beauty was a mistake as some of my favourite corals no longer have any day time polyp extension because it nips at EVERYTHING! Not enough to cause damage, but enough to prevent the polyps from extending ever. I bought 6 disbar anthias which are mostly working out swimmingly (one hasn't eaten in over a month and does nothing but hide, I'm basically just waiting for it to die), but the 3 purple queen anthias that I bought on pure impulse without doing any research were a clear error. I had no idea how fickle they were to get to eat, or how much food they would need until it was too late. They wouldn't eat anything larger than a cyclopeeze for the first few weeks and withered away to practically skeletal. After QT, I started dumping tremendous amounts of food in to the tank to see if anything would work, and FINALLY they're eating entire pieces of Hikari mysis (not PE mysis though, those pieces are too big). We'll see if they make it, they're not putting on weight, but they're not losing any more either. The massive dump of nutrients lead to an explosion of dinos which I had kept at bay via an ULNS. I'm slowly mopping that up with regularly changed high capacity GFO, lots of water changes, and more strategic feedings. I'm noticing an interesting phenomenon of the dino beds (confirmed via microscope) slowly being overtaken by mats of cyano as the dinos die back. I think the dinos trapped enough detritus in/under them for cyano to locally thrive as the dinos die.
Anyway, enough talk, more pics.
Poorly colour corrected FTS from the dining room
Moderately corrected image from the office
(keep in mind the cabinets are white in real life, so gauge how accurate that pic is for yourself)
An awesome pic of Tron, my doliatus rabbit. He's not that vibrant in real life, but those setting made him look like I was on acid
mah frags
Ferdinand!
Lazarus! He's loving the extra food...
