NeonRabbit's Proxy Reef Jar experiment

NeonRabbit221B · Mar 19, 2021

My sister's fiancé is an avid diver and seemed interested in my reef hobby so for christmas I sent him some LR, ceriths and some aiptasia as a little desk experiment. Well the LR bag tore and had some die off I hadn't planned for and it nuked the aiptasia. I think he was disappointed at first but was eager to continue on a small setup.

He seemed interested in the coral keeping and I sent him a ton of information on Reef Jars, basic setups and had numerous phone calls totaling several hours about reefing. He ended up getting an air pump, 1 gallon jar and ABI reef light and seemed increasingly excited about keeping some easy coral. Today he went to a LFS and picked up 2 lbs of LR, a few hermits and snails and a Kenya tree. Wrote out the instructions to acclimate them and seems like he will be finishing the jar setup later today.

This build thread will be a proxy build thread for his first reef setup. Any tips on guiding him? Tagging @brandon429 as I know he likes stuffing animals in tiny containers as much as I do.

Mike from TN · Mar 19, 2021

I’ll be following along! Can’t wait to see what it turns into!

NeonRabbit221B · Mar 20, 2021

The crazy SOB did it. He ended up going with a Kenya as his first coral and got 2 lbs of additional live rock, blue legged hermits and an unidentified snail. The LFS store owner tried to convince him that he would need to cycle the jar for atleast a month before adding anything and said it would never work.

Here is the jar! Got a cool skeleton from a Scoli or Lobo which I guess is to some extent a "rock"

The last jar I did I made a DIY stir plate to generate random flow so on the question of flow I am not sure how to tell him to judge flow via an air pump. Here is a short clip below that I hope attaches fine. To me it looks too strong but he filled it to the rim. Thoughts? I think it would be good to cut that in half... I will be sending him a little care package of duplicate items I have such as an API test kit for kH and Calcium, coral food, air valves ect. Very excited to suck him down the rabbit hole.