reef

lysmata debelius(fire shrimp)

Time to share your photos. Here is a few cool pics.

it is a worm that lives on the coral. they normally live on porites corals.

Leather corals might be a good addition. Capnella , Sinularia etc, You should be able to keep most corals in your tank.

i am sure you can get actinic bulbs try Organism

t8s are fine, cool daylight is ok, but you should add also a blue tube otherwise the tank will look yellow. maybe 3 daylight and 1 blue/actinic tube

There is not set amount of watts for a fo tank, just put in what ever you need to light the tank up, If your tank is 150 cm then i would go 4 x 54w.

You don’t even notice the glitter on many tanks anyway, especially if you use t5s with halides, If you really want glitter lines all you need is an incandescent bulb on the tank and you will get glitter lines with t5s, Also note that if using blue metal halide bulbs you don’t get much glitter lines anyway, glitter lines are more noticeable if using low Kelvin bulbs t5s on a fish tank will also make the fish colour look much better. Metal halides tend to wash the colour of fish and corals.

If you are going fish only i would get t5s. and latter on if you get corals add more t5s, you can keep all corals under t5s.

hard to frag a acan, also they grow so slow. mine has not grown in 5 years. the orange is the same as the greens etc.

The modern reef aquarium is a good book i found. fluz8r wrote Nothing wrong with that, waiting for the pics as we all love tangs

A few in my tank , many others i had in quarantine. No. Only some have the worms

I guess it is no knowing what they are. Bit like leather corals, you dont seem to see many in shops these days, everyone whats colour

Porites coral sure are available, but no one orders them.

Not at this stage as i only have a real small bit. More pics

Can you share some of the pics of your tank as a example to see what people are raving about.

Some pics of favorite corals Bubble coral, becoming pretty rare , used to see them all the time but not often seen anymore, the green ones are even more rare . Meat coral, Take a guess Pretty amazing zoos Plain umbrella leather, for some reason you dont see many of them. very nice coral and hardy once settled in, yellow polps, these things have take over the tank Lithoyphyton finger leather

very much so xfactor, i did go over the top by saying great but your post is what i was getting at. A Hobbyist once told me for example what a great knowledge a certain person had and been in reef keeping for 20 years etc, when i heard who the guy was i laughed as his tanks looked like they where still in the 1960s, covered in algae, lost a lot of fish. and was using under gravel filters. even covered this in my post as a example. I used think my mates tanks was fantastic when i started and looking back it was crap, covered in algae and millions of pest anemoes

Sock Puppet account??

Colour depends on your taste . However using black as a background tends to make your tank dark, it does not reflect at all ,

Yes that is a good point sapphire ,

That is always the case especially in NZ where we only have a handful of experiance reef hobbyist, experiance hobbyist are not always the best to talk to unless they a have anecdotal everdance that they can keep a great tank. Because you have been a long time in a Hobby does not mean you can keep a great tank. everyone thinks they have a great tank until you compare it other tanks. I used think my mates tanks was fantastic when i started and looking back it was crap, covered in algae and millions of pest anemoes. Many hobbyist have a opnion based on no facts or experiance so info on the forums have to be taken with a grain of salt. Its basically easy is to talk rubbish behind a PC. The best info to keep a tank is marine magazines/books or websites that have articles by qualified people. However saying that some forums do offer good advice. here a good site, http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2008/1/

So you can't do that with marines??

You could start off with goldfish. I started off with goldfish, freshwater for many years and then went to ultimate. reef keeping.