I started my current tank about a month ago. It is 90 gallons (4ft x 2ft x 1.5ft) and I found it on the facebook market place. To be on the safe side I resealed it because the seller had kept it outside in the cold. The cycling process was a little unconventional. Over the summer I started a small 10 gallon tank because my younger siblings wanted to keep some hermit crabs they would catch at a nearby beach. It was going great! Until I went away for about 5 days and left the tank with my family that's inexperienced with keeping a tank....I'm not sure what exactly happened, but the hermits died. However, the now vacated shells and the tank was still teeming with life. There was a healthy population of copepods and the shells were covered in tiny critters like feather dusters, spinoid worms, and even a nice spaghetti worm. I know many people would consider some of these critters as ugly pests but as a marine biology student whose favorite subject is ecology, I was incredibly interested in these tiny and odd creatures in this 10 gal ecosystem. They made a great clean up crew too. So, knowing that that I was going to start a larger tank in the near future I stuffed in as much bio-media and rock as I could and fed the tank and its tiny inhabitants twice a week with zoo and phyto plankton in order to cycle all the media.
The original 10g tank
By Christmas I had every thing I needed to start the 90 gallon and it was up and running a week later. I am entirely inexperienced with plumbing and sumps so I am running two Seachem Tidals (HOBs have always worked perfectly for me) along with a Hydor power head to add some more flow. My lights are two Kessil A80 Tuna Suns which I hope to save up and upgrade by the end of 2021. I tossed in a couple large frozen shrimp to check if my cycling experiment had worked and to my surprise it worked absolutely perfectly. The tank was fully cycled upon start up. So I added my first batch of livestock which were a trio of Regal Damsels from Diver's Den, pods and Red Ogo from @AlgaeBarn, two Skunk Cleaner shrimp from my LFA, and 10 Nassarius snails and a clump of Blue Hypnea from Salty Bottom Reef Company. I know I should probably have waited to add damsels due to their bad reputation but it was love at first sight and they have been awesome.
A very bad picture of the 90 gal after the first addition of livestock. My main focus of the tank is to collect as many macro algae species as possible and have a macro menagerie of sorts. The rock structures on the right and middle-left have a lot of neat little caves and overhangs for the fish, the left rock has a several little platforms perfect for placing macros, and the center rock, from BRS is in the shape of a stumpy tree (the "trunk" is hard to see in this pic). My hope is to let the blue hypnea (and maybe ochtodes in the future) to cover the top to form my own little marine tree of life to act as a home for pods.
Since then I have added 10 porcelain crabs from Salty Bottom Reef Co and some more algae. I got small frags of Blue Scroll algae and Red King Thorn algae from Sustainable Ocean on Etsy. So there it is my current tank and first build post on R2R. In the near future I would like to add the three Assessor Basslet species and as many cool algaes I can find. Side note, since this is my fist time keeping a lot of macros I'm sticking to red macros for now as they're a little more forgiving when it comes to going sexual.
The original 10g tank
By Christmas I had every thing I needed to start the 90 gallon and it was up and running a week later. I am entirely inexperienced with plumbing and sumps so I am running two Seachem Tidals (HOBs have always worked perfectly for me) along with a Hydor power head to add some more flow. My lights are two Kessil A80 Tuna Suns which I hope to save up and upgrade by the end of 2021. I tossed in a couple large frozen shrimp to check if my cycling experiment had worked and to my surprise it worked absolutely perfectly. The tank was fully cycled upon start up. So I added my first batch of livestock which were a trio of Regal Damsels from Diver's Den, pods and Red Ogo from @AlgaeBarn, two Skunk Cleaner shrimp from my LFA, and 10 Nassarius snails and a clump of Blue Hypnea from Salty Bottom Reef Company. I know I should probably have waited to add damsels due to their bad reputation but it was love at first sight and they have been awesome.
A very bad picture of the 90 gal after the first addition of livestock. My main focus of the tank is to collect as many macro algae species as possible and have a macro menagerie of sorts. The rock structures on the right and middle-left have a lot of neat little caves and overhangs for the fish, the left rock has a several little platforms perfect for placing macros, and the center rock, from BRS is in the shape of a stumpy tree (the "trunk" is hard to see in this pic). My hope is to let the blue hypnea (and maybe ochtodes in the future) to cover the top to form my own little marine tree of life to act as a home for pods.
Since then I have added 10 porcelain crabs from Salty Bottom Reef Co and some more algae. I got small frags of Blue Scroll algae and Red King Thorn algae from Sustainable Ocean on Etsy. So there it is my current tank and first build post on R2R. In the near future I would like to add the three Assessor Basslet species and as many cool algaes I can find. Side note, since this is my fist time keeping a lot of macros I'm sticking to red macros for now as they're a little more forgiving when it comes to going sexual.