Thursday, September 29, 2005

B: You can do your homework on the boat!

Susan was kind enough to have us over on Tuesday night for a viewing of their beautiful salt water aquarium of which pics can be seen regularly on her blog, so I thought it was time that I posted a few pictures of my own tank. The rest of the content of this post is just fish geek stuff so you may want to stop reading here.




Tank Setup
45 gallon all glass display geometry tank
Coralife 6700K (freshwater plant range) 96 W CF fixture (timed 12 on/12 off)
150W + 100W Ebo Jager heaters
Hagen Fluval 204 cannister filter (filled with sponge filter media and GAC, but mostly used for circulation)
3" coarse sand mixed with flourite over 2" flourite base




Tank Occupants
3 - Altum Angel fish
1 - German Blue Ram (had a mated pair until I lost the male a month ago after 2.5 years)
1 - Algae eating "shark" (variety forgotten)
1 - Clown pleco (~8" long and growing!)
3 - Neon tetra (sadly I had 20 but most died of neon tetra disease)
7 - Albino Cory Cat


Plants
Red Wendti Crypts
Anubias bartieri, nana
Java fern
Bog log host for fern and anubia



I had the stand and this was the biggest tank that would fit it. I don't love the "display" style tank, because it is tough to fill that uppermost 6-12" of the tank, but the angels seem to love the height. I wanted to go planted, but I have had dificulty with most of the tall plants, so instead I have stuck with more parsitic plants trained up on pieces of wood.


Part of the reason we went to check out Susan's tank was that we are considering switching the tank over to salt. Lately I am bored with the tank as it is and Mandy would love to have a saltwater tank, but I am hesitant to spend the money to switch over a tank that is really just starting to fill in so nicely. I am thinking that maybe instead of going salt I might spend the money to buy a discus, because cost has alway been the prohibitve factor. I figure if I am willing to buy saltwater fish why shouldn't I be willing to buy a discus. Salt is way more beautiful and interesting, but I hate to dump everything in this tank and just start over from scratch.

What to do ?

2 comments:

Lefty said...

you really don't get the scale well from the pic. That angel is 8" tip to tip.

susan said...

Ooh, I like the pictures! And you're right on the scale -- I was thinking more like 3".

And if you're having trouble deciding between salt and fresh, maybe one of each? :-P