New to the reef...

[dc4]

Hey everyone, I am a newbie in the coral world having just purchased my first coral ($5 galaxea) about 2 weeks ago. I have since added a few toadstools (hammer, torch, octi), duncans, candycane, zoos, furry mushroom, ric, star polyps.

I stocked the tank with 40lbs of live rock and 40 lbs of live sand for my yellow goby and huge tiger pistol <-- larger than the goby. I also purchased a mandarin dragonet from another reefer here that has been trained to eat blood worms and mysis. I have a pair of clowns and my wife wanted a bangaii cardinal so I had to add one of those to the tank as well. There are a bunch of different snails, a pair of cleaners, a pair of porcelain crabs, and a few hermits and it has been up for about 6 months now.

Im really into the softy corals like the toadstools and wanted to see if I could find a good deal for an rbta so I posted online, called a few stores, drove to a few lfs' and I ended up at JL Aquatics (where I first purchased all my starter equipment). They had a tank full of anemones and prices ranged from $20 for green 1" frags to $99 for any rbta. I mulled around for a bit and stared at the tank trying to decide what to do... Should I buy the $20 green bta cause it was cheap even though I realllllllllllly wanted a rbta or should I just suck it up and spend the extra cash for what I was looking for??? I then looked higer up on the sump pipe and there was a lonely brownish looking anemone attached. It kinda looked like it had reddish tips but barely and it honestly didnt look too impressive. I asked the guy working there if it was a brown anemone and he was a bit perplexed and told me that he needed a closer look so he went in after it. Once he gently removed it off the pipe, he told me that it was a rbta, just not the best specimen so he said I could have it for $29!!! I told him to bag it up and Ill take it home with me. I then went to the live rock bins and searched for a good piece of rock with lots of holes with hope that the rbta would find a good spot in it and not roam the tank leaving a trail of death behind it. I also picked up a phoenix 14k bulb to replace the blinding china mh bulb I received.

So I get home with the rbta and place the bag in the tank to start the acclimation process and it started to perk up right away... Almost every tenticle on the rbta had big bulbs and it went from looking brown to red with a green stem! (exactly the type I was looking for). After about an hour floating, I started to add a bit of tank water into the bag every 10 minutes and after a another hour went by, I decided it looked good enough to add to the tank so in it went. It was floating a bit so I cupped it in my hand and directed it to the piece of live rock I bought. Once it was in a hole, I could see its foot extending down form the hole on the other side. Happy as it seemed, I watched it for a good 1/2 hour and it was moving around a little in the hole but is still in the some hole for now.

Here are a few pics for everyone, sorry for the crappy camera phone pics but I hope you like them...