Saltwater Aquarium

My newest animal hobby is my salt water aquarium. The initial set-up took about a week before I could start adding, and I have slowly added in the last few months. We had some initial casualties, most likely due to the small size of the tank which makes maintaining water quality more difficult. However, we currently have two happy healthy fish, and several other critters!

The fish are Nemo (of course - the Clown Fish), and Lenny, who is a Blenny. The picture doesn't do the Blenny justice! He is purple with a bright orange tail, and in the morning has wide white bars along his whole body. They love to eat, and have learned to "dance" for us when we get close! They all really seem to have personalities. The blenny was really shy for the first few days and we actually had to place the food in front of his hiding place so that he would get some! The clownfish has always been fairly gregarious and eats well.

My newest critter is a sea cucumber and he is absolutely beautiful! He is pink, green, yellow, and purple, and I have yet to get a good picture of him. Fred was purchased right before him. He is the brown, slug like looking creature, and he eats algae...and expensive polyps. The beautiful while clove polyps in the picture are a thing of the past...thanks to his appetite!! I have one surviving polyp that is floating around the tank. Grrrr.

The shrimp, spot, is a fire or blood shrimp and has been in the tank since the very beginning. The orange (and green - not pictured) polyps were added later, and the white star polyps (the red tree) were added right after them. We have had two bali stars and the pink formosa until recently when one bali died. The formosa really is a stunner though!! The mushrooms were the very last purchase and now we plan to halt additions until we upgrade to a bigger tank. They are supposed to spread all over the tank and we are hoping that they will do so quickly! We are also planning to take cutting of the daisy polyps and place them all around the tank (with gel super-glue if you can believe it!).

It is very fun to have our own contained ecosystem, and to watch the polyps spread, the beautiful pink coraline algae start to cover the rocks, and fish swim around!