Today my boss Gary let me borrow his black light from his “wild and crazy college days”. I killed all the lights, removed the lighting rig from the tank and set up the black light. Thanks to the reinforced lip the tank has the light balanced on top without additional work. Here are the pictures I got. Shooting under just the black light proved rather challenging. The low level of light forced me to use my tripod and manually focus. Between my poor focusing skills and the long exposure times they still came out a bit blurry. I even had to take off the white t-shirt I was wearing as it fluoresced too much in the light and was reflecting into the tank! I’ll try for more pics again later this week.

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Unfortunately today Trillian, my six-line wrasse, died. I caught her this morning (one handed no less) and tried a fresh water dip in case it was a parasitic problem. She was more active after the dip, but still very lethargic. I left her in a bag with large holes cut in it for circulation to try to keep her from hiding in the rocks and dying and/or being preyed upon by the scavengers in the tank. When I got home around 5:00 PM she was not breathing anymore. Here are a couple of pics I took in the morning. I still plan to make a page for each fish I have, so I’ll be posting a memorial page sometime.

So two nights ago my wrasse was being very timid at feeding time. She’s always been wary of large motions around the tank (i.e. me) but she wasn’t wanting to come out and eat. Finally she ate a bit but she was looking kind of rough. Last night I got pics of her. Again, mostly stayed in the rock work during feeding. Looks even worse. *sigh*

I tried catching her this morning but thanks to the warty mushroom I failed. The wrasse ended up moving just enough to hide more. No real energy to the process, just get to the next rock and lay down. I’m afraid I won’t have a wrasse this evening.

Pics:

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I’ve started adding the full history of my tank. I have pictures from some phases but haven’t sorted them out yet. I’ll get pretty pics up soon.

In case you are worried, Arthur the clown fish is looking a lot better now. He’s in a lot of said pretty pictures.

My percula clown has a sore on the left side of his chin. It has definitely been getting worse as time goes on. It started off as just a dark dot on the chin and now is a scary multicolored monstrosity. I finally got a good pic of him, so I’ll try uploading it here.

I picked up 5 lbs. more live rock, 2 more RO containers and my skimmer at Down Under. Looks like an ASM skimmer. It will take up a lot of my sump space. Maybe I won’t make a refugium with macro algae. I put the new rock in and started dosing my Ca/pH buffer. The directions on the buffer are a bit confusing, giving multiple dosages without good explanation on which to use when.

The Foster and Smith order came in! I put in the powerheads, calibrated my refractometer and ran tests with my kits:

SG: 1.024

pH: ~8.3? (the color card is difficult to read)

Ammonia: 0.25 (!)

Nitrates: 20 (!)

Nitrites: 2.0 (!)

Ca: ~360

KH: 9

Overall normal, just not stabilized yet.

Got my regular visit from Egg to see my rock purchase. Both of us felt it was maybe a bit light. I need a couple more pieces of flat rock to use as a base for the neat “character” pieces I have now. I rearranged the rocks multiple times before and after the visit.

I went back to Down Under and picked up 20 lbs. of live rock, plus a couple of pounds of rubble. I also got two 5 gallon jugs of RO water. I’ll need a couple more jugs to do weekly water changes. I figure I’ll visit Down Under every other week as I’ll be in Garner anyway. My skimmer still wasn’t in.

Egg and I (he seems to be there a lot doesn’t he?) added my 20 lbs. of sand. Tomorrow I’ll get live rock.