I have been waiting rather patiently for my aquarium book from Amazon.com. It should come in the mail today. I've been holding off working on the fish tank until it comes in. Ben has done a lot of brain work on our tank. Look like we're going to do a deep sand bed (DSB) with liverock (LR,) fish and invertebrates. It's pretty exciting, but I wish my book would get here. We're going to get this tank up and running in the very near future. We may even start cycling it this weekend. I think at this point it's sand and salt water only, no live sand or live rock. There's this great trick with cocktail shrimp that we have been told about. You throw shrimp from the deli in the tank when it's being cycled. This feeds ths anaerobic bacteria that grow in the DSB! I thought it looked pretty funny. They turn into jelly and get really gross, that's why we want to do this in the summmer! The smell is really bad.
My book came in yesterday, soon after I updated this page. Ben and I are going to start getting our tank up this weekend. I'm so excited. I'll take some pictures and post them here once we have it set up. We may have just acquired a 30 pound piece of LR. That will trim the overall price a bit.
May 3, 2004
Well we didn't get as far as we'd have liked. Our tank has been cleaned out and relocated to our dining room where we will be able to fully enjoy the fish, but we did not get the water in. We are waiting for a hydrometer to come in the mail. That will tell us if our salt concentrations are right. I was hoping the water would get in the tank so we could hurry up and get through the fishless cycle. We've got instant ocean, play sand and some expensive ocean sand from the pet store. Play sand would work on its own, but we could only find the cheap $2.50 sand rather than the "high quality" $4.00 play sand! We'll also be getting our powerheads with this shipment. We're something like six weeks away from getting our invertebrates in the tank.
May 7, 2004
Our tank is up! We have our sand and saltwater in the tank. Now it needs to cycle for 2 weeks before we can put in any LR, er, I think. But, I'm really glad we finally have it started! Our baserock has been orderred and it's going to be shipped out today from Hawaii! I wish I was there! There is nasty brown foam on the water in the tank. This is normal for the type of sand we have in the tank.
