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I guess the issue is the lighting reaching around the pole.Isn’t that a Garibaldi from the Pacific Ocean? Are they now established in the GOM or am I mistaking it with something else?
BTW, would be cool setup in a tall tank where sponges and softies only at the bottom and acros near the surface
I guess the issue is the lighting reaching around the pole.
It could work with a sufficiently large tank and some creative mounting.
It could work with a sufficiently large tank and some creative mounting.
Pole in the center, four fixtures around the tank, one mounted around each quadrant. Tilt them at an angle so that you get light coming in at different heights along the pole, rather than all shining top-down and getting the lower level of the pole blocked by the top level.
The corners of the tank would likely suffer with this set-up, but either but there might be enough light coming from the opposite edges to support low-light corals.
How would one compensate for the lack of rocks and hiding spots for fish?semi related: I wonder how things are going in the Gulf after that Big oil spill a few years back
Its a cool idea and I have thought about doing something like this. Fish choice would be important. you could still have some cave structures at the bottom of the tank in a deep enough tank. But I was thinking barnacle blennies, assessor, dotty backs, mandarin or scooter blennies, for a smaller build. If you have a 3d printer you could do some metal looking structures for larger fish in a larger tank to hide in also.How would one compensate for the lack of rocks and hiding spots for fish?
in the ocean that issue is quickly addressed by encrusting sponges, barnacles, et et …How would one compensate for the lack of rocks and hiding spots for fish?
Great minds think alike... I had Barnacle Blennies in mind while reading the start of your sentence haha ! One could make the structure of pvc covered with agracrete and glue some barnacles for the blennies.Its a cool idea and I have thought about doing something like this. Fish choice would be important. you could still have some cave structures at the bottom of the tank in a deep enough tank. But I was thinking barnacle blennies, assessor, dotty backs, mandarin or scooter blennies, for a smaller build. If you have a 3d printer you could do some metal looking structures for larger fish in a larger tank to hide in also.
Make the pillar out of agracrete. I have made stuff with agracrete in the past using wet sand as a mold to make the the shapes I was looking for.....ish. I made a column with a couple branches near the top. I stuck wooden dowels in the sand at different spots inside the column mold so when I poured the agracrete in the mold it had spots for frag plugs. Once it was solid I dug it out and removed the dowels worked really well. This was a long time ago I was using t5 and mh lights had no issues growing corals on this structure. The structure looked like stacked rocks not smooth like the pics above, smooth would have been cooler. People always asked how I got the rocks stacked like that.
How would one compensate for the lack of rocks and hiding spots for fish?
I wonder if this could work with a 20x20x20 cube... This is the next tank I'm getting since my 24x24x24 cube is scrapYou make it not lack them. Put your rocks in the corners of the tanks and around the floor of the tank, but keep them pretty low vertically, especially around the pier. It would need to be a taller tank for the pier structure to have the right sense of scale, so a single layer of rockwork on the bottom shouldn't detract from the central idea while giving both filtration and shelter to your fish.
Since the structure would be artificial to begin with, you could also start the tank off with "shelves" wrapping around it, almost like a spiral staircase. Cover the shelves with encrusting corals/sponges, and drill holes for (vertical) frag plug placement in the structure to give you places to mount corals and other life away from the shelves.