gastone

I don't get accused of that too often.

April!!! How are you supposed to take me ski diving?

Jean Marie, I am always willing to take donations for my school projects, but if you have any young students that are looking, I will gladly take a back seat. Garrett.

What's on the opposite side of the wall? Different room circuit you can tap into?

What we need is more stuff... more projects. IOAOI is a manufacturer that supplies reef items, mostly skimmers, though they have a sweet little DC nano pump that I'm in love with. They offer new products for free on R2R on occasion, they just ask that you provide objective, detailed feedback. I've received 3 skimmers and a nano pump from them. I still use two of the skimmers and passed the 3rd along to another WAMAS member. I've purchased more of their nano pumps as they are cost competitive and work really well. Anyway, Tom (IOAOI employee and poster on R2R) reached out to me and asked if I'd like to try out a new nano AIO in that they are just releasing. Without asking my wife I of course said yes. The tank arrived and was unbelievably well packed. There were 3 shipping boxes, all that fit very tight, rigid foam corners and a foam enclosure. I think I could have dropped it off of a 3 story building and nothing would have happened. The glass is crystal clear, the corners are mitered at 45 degrees which is very slick. The tank arrived with a 2.75" filter sock and a return nozzle. I went ahead and ordered another IOAOI nano pump (it really is a sweet little DC pump). The tank is setup up as a mushroom tank. Here's where I have two nits with the tank. The rear chamber is divided into 4 sections, and the middle divider is just that...right smack in the middle, which means mounting a light is tricky as most of them have mounts that are best geared to be centered on the glass frame. I had two Kessil A80 Tuna Blues (and an extra Spectral X Controller) laying around so I used the opportunity to mount both of them. My other gripe is that the filter sock holder is siliconed into place so there's no option to use the first chamber for anything other than a filter sock. Not a huge nit as I could probably cut it out if I decided to move off of the sock and go with a media basket or the like, just something to consider. I went with a 50w Hygger heater and an optical ATO hooked up to a 1g mason jar. There's also a cheap little ph/temp/salinity monitor hooked up. Here's the rub. I'm on a budget as these are classroom tanks and I mostly use stuff that's been donated or I have laying around. To include live rock. I've probably been gifted about 50lbs of lr from various breakdowns. And that's awesome. There's also often a reason for a breakdown that involves some not so good. The rock (and sand) that I used for this build has a bit of algae. There's some bubble algae, some nasty bryopsis, and some really, really cool scroll algae, Padina pavonica. These tanks are maintained as fairly low nutrient systems. Currently each one houses an Azure damselfish (Chrysiptera parasema). I received 3 of them from a recent local tank breakdown. I wouldn't buy one, but they were free and I had to put them somewhere so one was assigned to each tank. That's it for fish. I feed them a few pellets a few times per day. They don't go hungry, but not are they overfed. I'm hoping that the algae issue will rectify itself with time and without too much intervention on my part. I do pick out some daily with tweezers, but that's about the extent of it so far. As far as corals go, I picked up a fairly large mushroom recently. If anyone is able to identify it, that'd be awesome. It was about 8" in the display tank I purchased if from, about 7" when it settled into my 20G cube, and so far about 5.5" across in this tank. I'm hop been fragging and gluing to the back wall, and a few different zoanthinds. Well, that was fun I thought. But the desk looks unbalanced. So I decided I should add another Coralland IOAOI tank on the other side. For this one I wanted to do a clam tank. I had a Dalua Pixel Reefer that I'd won in a raffle and is quite white. I was having a hard time figuring out what to do with such a white spectrum, but I thought a little clam tank would be perfect for it. I had a maxima that I'd picked up some time last spring and had survived some silly mishaps, to include an alk overdose that saw the pH spike to about 9.6. Ouchies! I've recently picked up a nice, small derasa from the Reefing USA show that I'm hoping will be fine in the nano for a year or two before it needs to be upgraded. There's also what is supposed to be a Fiji yellow leather (we'll see... still not convinced) that I thought would benefit from a nice white spectrum, as well as a Koji wada that I just received yesterday. I'm hoping to add another clam or two. For a little bit of blue, I had a Pawfly 15w led that was previously being used on another 3g mushroom tank (since switched over to Hygger kit). Another IOAOI nano pump, cheap 50 watt heater hooked up to a Willhi temp controller, optical ATO supplying kalkwasser from a 1g mason jar. That's about it I think. Circulation is light on both tanks which might be contributing to my algae issues. I know the rocks and sand I reused are leaching phosphates, but I'm also not helping as my circulation isn't high enough to keep detritus in suspension which means it's all settling. The white spectrum from the Pixel is also a contributing factor. Baby steps. Oh, that algae looks awful! I'm going to have to pick up a few small power heads to keep stuff in suspension. A view from the front of the room and view from my desk:

Welcome back! Not much to add as I agree with @YHSublime. As for the live sand, you can keep it going indefinitely in a bucket with a few inches of water, a small heater and a small pump for circulation. The question is, how long has it been unheated and/or out of water. If it's been unheated/out of water, you could experience a large amount of die off which you may want to just avoid all together. As for the skimmer, definitely overkill. Throw up a trade offer for smaller skimmer. Most people upgrade to larger tanks, which means they'll have smaller sized equipment available. That's a sweet looking tank btw.

Back to the fun stuff. Mr. Werner (the resident Bio teacher) brought up a group two weeks ago. I wasn't prepared for them and didn't have anything set up to do. Fridays are best for me currently as I don't have students on Fridays after 11:00 so we agreed to meet up in two weeks time. I'd isolated a few RBTAs (Entacmaea quadricolor) and had the cabbage (Sinularia brassica) that we'd fragged originally last fall which had grown back and was ready to be cut on again. He returned today with the students. We always start off by talking about safety. Washing hands, wearing eye and hand protection. Being careful with scalpels (!!!!). Next we talked about the reefs, conservation through propagation, what they've seen, what they know. Some of them will surprise you with the knowledge, and some of them have never been exposed to anything of this ilk. They were all into it and excited to cut stuff up. First a video: We started with the cabbage. I cut off a generous strip for them to slice up. We labeled our ceramic frag plates with their names on the bottom in sharpie, and then weighed the corals. Every two weeks we'll pull them out and weigh them again to see how they are progressing. Using the grid lines, we also took two measurements of each plate with calipers. We'll also document growth that way. Four students cut up the cabbage. Of course we forgot to start taking pictures as the first two were were slicing. One of the young ladies was excited to return them to the tank. Nem time: Cutting through tissue is not something that is intuitive or easy. There's a certain "grainy" sound from the cabbage, and the BTAs are tougher than you think. They are also small and slimy and not easy to hold down. The second young man had a tough time, but I'm hoping that both halves will be okay. After slicing they were dropped in some iodine to help disinfect for a nice recovery bath. We chatted some more, talked a bit more about the brine shrimp hatchery, the freshwater shrimp breeding station that we are setting up, and a bit about the Redsea tank that @epleeds donated to us last week. Our plan is to set it up as a paludarium. I'm not necessarily a fw guy, though I'm willing to learn. Mr. Werner and I are designing it out and then we'll have the students start to work on the build out. Realistically, given the timing, I don't expect it to contain whatever fun crustaceans we are aiming for until it's stabilized... I expect next school year.

On the off chance that someone has an RO/DI unit laying around that they wouldn't be opposed to donating... I'm currently using 5g buckets to bring in about 20g of top off per week, plus water changes. I don't mind doing it, but it does get a bit tedious. After today we will be managing close to 200g of aquarium spread across 12 different set ups. In addition to manually topping off the fw shrimp breeding stations (anyone have any fw shrimp while I'm pandering?), we have 7 different ato's going, with another one coming.

Tamara, I'm trying to read your article (thank you for all of the awesome links), but I'm getting the old "404 page not found" message. Garrett.

That's a healthy budget, Javier. I'd recommend that you go to a few of the local stores and see if you like what they are running over their tanks. We are lucky to have some great stores in the DC area. You can also look at the member tanks in the dedicated tanks forums to get an idea, but then you are left to the whims of they photographer and camera and spectral accuracy doesn't always translate well in reef photography.

Eric, thank you for the offer. The truth is that I just a snuck another nano tank into the building that I didn't tell my better half about. I end up purchasing about half of the equipment I need for each tank out of pocket (WAMAS members and even a few vendors have been extremely supportive). Hmmm..... I wonder if I could set it up as fw. That'd be less expensive at least. Let me look into it and I'll get back to you.

Been slow going at school. Had a sand bed that I believe was leaching phosphates in the IM30. Part of the issue with purchasing a used system and not being aware of its history and care. Took me awhile to get it mostly under wraps. I removed 80% or so of the sand bed. Added a hob refugium that I've seeded with some caulerpa (any got any chaeto?). Running some GFO. PO4 is stable at about .098ppm. a wee bit higher than I'd like, but trending well from stupid levels. Started two new nanos. Both 8g aio setups. One has a maxima and not much else and the other is supposed to become a shrooms tank, but I've got some rearranging to do to get there. I'll get pics up soon. The maxima came out of the 30 and has some algae growth on its scutes. Grrr. I'm sure the white light I'm running isn't helping with algae. On to fun stuff. I picked up a few things from @reef_jon to include some gsp. Figured that would be easy for the kids to frag. I've got a new student that is very interested in the tanks and we talk daily about them. I pulled a few of them, including him, to frag up the gsp. They did awesome. Yesterday, the science teacher showed up out of nowhere with a group of kids. I was totally unprepared for them, but we had an awesome chat. There were 7 of them and 5 of them were very much interested and engaged. Two of them weren't, but that's okay. It was mostly conversation and q&a. Maybe when we get to cutting stuff they'll come around. One of the young ladies was adamant that we set a date to come back up and do some fragging, so we are looking at March 14th as our next get together. I'll have to figure out what to do, but I do have 3 rbtas in isolation that we can split, so that's a start.

I teach and currently maintain 6 small tanks in my building. Here's the kicker. I'm a math teacher and the work I do with the students is more of a 'club' and not a formal curriculum. We approach the tanks from a hobbyist perspective, while I drag in our biology teacher to touch on certain aspects. I'd offer a marine biology teacher, @MaeganWink if you are looking for specific curriculum ideas. Also, I agree with Isaac. One of the tanks I maintain is in the biology teacher's classroom. It's a 2g pico with some softies and caulestrea that @YHSublime donated. There was a Peterson anemone shrimp, but he jumped after a few months. This tank is dead simple and does fine as the bio teacher doesn't do any maintenance and other than top off and and monthly water change I leave it alone as well. I typically go into the buildings at least once on the weekends to take care of things, but I enjoy it and it's not work. I have permission to access the building over the summer, and enough autonomy to keep the cleaning crew out with their chemicals. I'm headed out of town for 9 days this summer. My tanks at home are pretty straightforward. I'll make sure the ATO reservoirs are full and have one of my daughter's friends feed the tanks, but the school systems are a different animal. Someone is going to have to get trained.

Finally did some much needed tank maintenance in my son's room. @YHSublime's tank is set us as a fw planted tank. I know next to nothing about fw at this point so we started pretty simple. Right now there's a Beta (Pollito - my son's favorite animals are chicks), two mystery snails, and whatever hitchhiking snails I received from some Monte Carlo carpet that I purchased. I moved some shrimp into this tank but Pollito seems to have quite the affinity for shrimp. Pretty sure he murdered every last one of them in a matter of minutes. We are running CO2 (mixed using Citric acid and baking soda) from a kit I purchased on AliExpress. Sweet setup. Easy to use and dial in. We also have a few spider plants growing out as well as some Buddha decor. I need to figure out water top off. There's quite a bit of surface area, hence evaporation. Ultimately I'll probably go with an optical sensor and a 5 gallon tank housed under the nightstand to the right. Next we have the two gallon shrimp tank. I did a landscaping class at @CapitalExoticFish last summer which is when I got this tank. No fish in it now, just some neocardinia shrimp, red, yellow,.and blue. I've got a very small pico CO2 kit that I have yet to hook up, but I will once the Monte Carlo establishes in the larger tank and I can transfer some over. At school I'm going to do some revisions to my current phyto/pod culturing and I'm going to switch over a few of my pod setups to freshwater shrimp breeding. The students should get a kick out of that and we can setup a few tubs to try some crossbreeding and see what happens. I suspect ugliness. But that's something worth finding out imo. I'm using a little 500ml water bottle and a mechanical ato. Love it. Dead simple. Lastly is the SW tank. Not a terrible number of changes. Still only the two sexy shrimp. Have added a few random mushrooms, a small rock flower, a small lobophyllia, and a holy grail micromussa. It may not look great in the pics...it was wedged against the back wall and I'm afraid the back of the frag was suffering. Pretty sure it'll bounce back and do just fine. There's also a few random zoas.

Leo, welcome to WAMAS. I kept fe tanks in college...I wouldn't call it successful, but I did do it. Switched to sw and I'm now getting back into fw planted tanks. Of course I also have 11 sw tanks (all sub 30g). A nano like yours is a tough way to start. What are you doing for top off? Lights? Filtration/water circulation?