o2manyfish

Hey Guys, A couple of people sent me links to this thread. So I thought I would pop in and say Hi. So a couple of the questions that were brought up... Tank Longevity The 400g display tank is the continuance of a 18 year reef tank. I ran a 125g since 1989. During 2004 I upgraded the display tank to a 360g tank, and also created an outdoor frag system totalling about 1150g total. In 2005 I swapped out the 360g for a 400g tank, all acrylic with an entirely open top. The system is extremely automated. Currently the tank is part of an 1100g system, which includes a 360g Geo-thermal coolling tank, and a 250g sump. The display tank has about 22000 gph of flow, which is supplemented by a 26g surge tank mounted one floor up, which flows at roughly 28000gph via a 2" pipe and cycles about every 90 seconds to 2 minutes. Because a good portion of this system is outdoors, I get quite a bit of evaporation. During the winter I evaporate about 5-10g a day (even when it rains, their is evaporation from the surface area and the air movement. During the summer time, when the outdoor temperatures average 100 and this past summer we had a couple of weeks at 115 deg + (farenheit- so no one gets scared) the system evaporated close to 35g a day. With the massive evaporation, and top off via Kalkwasser, the system remains very very stable. There are no detectable levels of any of the ordinary tank stability culprits. I very rarely feed my fish. My opinion is that a well established and balance reef tank should be able to sustain itself. In the past several years I have suffered a couple of catastrophic losses. However, none of these are attributable to system instability. I suffered one loss (1300+ SPS pieces) when an act of nature converted my system to freshwater. I suffered another major loss 4 months later (500+ SPS pieces) when during the swap from the 360g to 400g tank my clams started to spawn. At the time I had over 40 clams in the system. Overnight they converted 1600g of water to peasoup with zero visibility. Even after massive water changes (700g & 1000g) visibility was only a couple of inches into the water. Now as for the "Photoshopping" rumors / comments. Photoshop was used to crop and save the photos. The only photo that had any photoshopping done to it is the one of the Blue Millie with the Blue clam behind it. There was NO photoshop color, contrast or balance changes to any of the other photos. My tank is lit by (8) 250 w Helios 20k DE bulbs. I use an Olympus camera and let it set the white balance. Which works well except for when shooting the blue corals and clams when in blue light. As for the accuracy of the colors. I can say that the colors in person are much nicer. Shooting 20K tanks and getting the richness of the colors to show up is difficult. In person the colors are brighter and more contrasting. The blue millie, in the photo being discussed, is an ORA frag that I have had for about a month. Its color is a rich metallic blue. However, for those who are photoshop mavens if you look at the colors for over saturation, notice that the clam shell is brown and beige - not blue. The zoa's are red in the back, and orange n the front. The blue dots on the live rock - which give the appearance of color alteration, are actually airbubbles on the live rock, after the surge tank went off reflecting the 20K lights from above. There is a live webcam on the camera. Tank lights turn on at 5pm Pacific Standard Time, and turn off around 2:30 am Pacific Standard time. Access to the webcam is on my home page at www.o2manyfish.com. If you have any questions please feel free to post or email me directly. Dave B