D3monic's Reef

[Jason edwards]

Hi my name is Mike, I am from the Minooka,Il area and a member of Jarc. I just ventured over here today and I figured I should do a intro thread. First off a tiny bit about myself, Im 28 and just got into reefing in february 2009. I took the plung after months of research into keeping coral and the types of equipment I would need. Here is what I ended up with.

I finally decided to go with the nanotuners custom jbj nano cube hqi with 2 18watt pc actinic upgrade. Here are the specs.

Lighting:
150watt radium hqi, 2 18watt pc actinics and of course the 4 1watt moonlights.

Filtration:
I run a combo of chemipure elite, purigen and filterfloss in the chamber box. I also occasionally toss in a bag of carbon.
I also have a 5gal fuge plumbed into the system sitting on a shelf above the DT. Its in need of a serious trimming. Its packed wall to wall with cheato and some of the biggest amphipods I have ever seen.

Dosing:
I am currently using almost strictly Brighwell products and haphazardly doing the Neozeo method. Chems include: Zeolight media, Microbacter-7, Reef biofuel, Replenish, Koralle-vm, KoralColor, Iodion, CoralAmino, liquid reef, Zooplankton-L and Phytochrome once a week

Controller:
ACJ with serial port lab grade ph probe and temp probe. Aquanotes 3.5

Livestock.
1 emerald crab, 1 seahare, 1 pom pom crab, 1 cleaner shrimp, 1 flame scallop, 1 beautifull squamosa clam, The CuC, 1 bangaii cardinal, bonded pair of ocellaris (going to new home soon), Breeding pair of Green Mandarins and 1 little bully of a Spotted Mandarin. Hopefully soon a pair of RSB's and a bluespot jawfish. Eventually I will get my 75gal set up with a divider. On one side will be a pair of spotted and a pair of hybrid green and spotted. I will run a pvc tube under the divider connecting the two tanks and will have a pair of bluespots.

And now what you scrolled over all that text for ...Pics!
Forgive me for having to resort to video. I broke my canon rebel xti not paying attention and cramming the mem card in sideways. :cry:

Older pics:

 

[Jason edwards]

 

[Blackhawk Fan]

Welcome Minooka Mike! My mom works at Morris hospital, not too far from ya!

 

[Yellowtang]

Welcome

JR,

 

[Jason edwards]

Video's
YouTube - D3monics reef (Feeding Time)

YouTube - D3monics Zoas

Mandarin babies (have not gotten them past 200 + hours yet)

YouTube - Mandarin prolarvae at 14hrs post spawn

YouTube - Synchiropus Splendidus (green Mandarin) fry at 194hours post spawn

 

[Jason edwards]

Welcome Minooka Mike! My mom works at Morris hospital, not too far from ya!

Cool! so can I expect that you will be at the Jarc frag swap this saturday?

 

[f u z z]

Very impressive to see a pair of mandarins in such a small tank! Do they accept any other foods besides the pod poulation? My pair has not shown any signs of courtship, but both accept pellets like they were going out of stile.

That's a great little system you have there!

 

[Blackhawk Fan]

Cool! so can I expect that you will be at the Jarc frag swap this saturday?

Nope, I'll be at the NWIMAC meeting in Hobart IN. :tongue:

 

[Jason edwards]

They snack on pods in between meals but thier primary diet consits of Selcon enriched mysis, bloodworms and rods food. No one in my tank will eat pellets not form 1 or spectrum.

 

[FiReBReTHa]

dont forget we also have a chitown forum here!

 

[Jason edwards]

YouTube - Fuge

YouTube - Hermit crab larvae

YouTube - coral overview

 

[Cuda]

Welcome to R2R

 

[Jason edwards]

Thanks for the welcome.

 

[revhtree Verified Admin]

Welcome to R2R!!!

 

[laskopyre]

Welcome to R2R!

 

[Azurel]

Welcome to R2R mike.....Nice looking tank, I like the fuge system you got....Good luck with mating Mandarins.....That is pretty cool if you could get them going to the point of rasing them up.....What have you done to get them to mate? I think once you get your feet wet here at R2R you can start a thread detailing how and what you have done toget them to mate and breed....Sharing that info would be great as mandarins are one of those fish that get argued about leaving them in the ocean due to most having difficulty getting them on frozen food and high mortality rate.....

 

[ahayes13]

First off let me say Welcome to r2r ! :)

Youve got a really nice system. i love the mandarins and commend you efforts on trying to raise the babies. i had a mated pair of psych. mandarins as well and they mated every night, but unfort. my female passed away a couple weeks ago. although i never tried to raise the babies.

love the videos as well ! hope you start a mandarin breeding thread soon. that would be a great addition!

 

[amore169]

Very nice!!

 

[Jason edwards]

Thanks for the comps guys...If my wife wasnt always threatening to leave me over my tanks i would set up a whole dedicated breeding system. But I can argue with her logic. today she said " why dont you concentrate on raising your current babies before you worry about raising batches from several pairs" she had a valid point. Apparently my quantity = more experimentation = more sucess fell on deaf ears. I havnt done anything special to get them to breed. I started out in this hobby with the intent to breed these fish. The more people that flammed on me for metioning that I wanted these fish the more I wanted to prove them wrong. Of course you can imagine the flamming I got when I said that they where going into a nano. I got the verbatum "you need a established tank...blah blah 100lbs live rock blah blah blah. My first Mandarin was My male. I got him after I had set my tank up for a couple weeks. It took me a week or two to get him trained onto frozen foods. After several more weeks I picked up a very pretty reddish female. She took to frozen in about 2 days. They did great and where doing the dance within several days. Unfortunatly I lost her to some horrible bite that took a huge chuck of flesh off the back of her head. It eventually became infected and she died shortly after. I hurridly purchased teh first female I saw dispite my better judgement on the fact she wouldnt eat frozen brine in the store and was really skinny. I tried for several weeks to get her onto frozen to no avail. I did get her eating live brine though. Then I seen they got a beautifull fat female in. I had them feed her and she ate like crazy the same day they got her in so I bought her. Everyone got along fine. She took to frozen right away her and the other female got along fine. Then after a few days my older female quit eating live brine again so I stuck her into the breeder net to recondition her. Once I added her back to the display the newer fatter female tore her to shreads and killed her. Those where some hard lessons learned. Months later I added this darn spotted male. Everyone got along ok. I had spoke to several people who I would concider experts in this subject and they said they kept spotted and greens in the same tank with no issue. Well about a week after I added him he started picking on my female. She really hasnt spawned since then and he is nipping up her fins. If I can ever catch him I will pull him as the spawning pair is of the utmost importance to me...got to cut my story short. Kids out of milk gtg to the store.

 

[Jason edwards]

8:34pm Got another small spawn. It was the story of my life. My wife an I where sitting down to a corned beef and cabbage dinner watching the movie push. I look over to see the Mandarins getting ready to spawn. I slowly get up and walk over to the tank and grab my camcorder off the desk thinking I had a perfect opportunity to film a egg release. Batterys dead. After about 30 seconds of cursing I plug it in and hope they wait a few minutes. One minute later they rised under the bright lights right into the viewing area of the display and released.