Wow, I've let this blog go fallow. While I've let this blog go stagnant, my fish tank activities certainly haven't.

Last time I wrote here in May, I was running a 20 Gallon long reef tank. Lot has happened since then. Over the summer, I had a crash in that small tank. Newbie + small tank = likely disaster as it is very difficult to keep the water parameters stable. I had an incident where I added a cup or so of top-off water and all the corals shriveled up to nothing. A few of them died within hours. The rest took a week or more to recover.

At that point, my top priority was to get a bigger tank. I quickly moved everything into a 40 gallon tank and ran that for a few months while I looked for an even bigger tank.

The end result is this, that I set up in November, a 75 gallon tank.

And here are a few random pictures from it.

I'll leave it at that for now. Though I'm going to try and get back active on this blog again. Shorter posts and more of them!

Just like the in ocean, I suppose, things die. They're replaced with new life. Now someone doesn't just plunk down a replacement in the ocean like I can do in the tank. One cannot deny the god-like role we play as aquarists. Maybe that's what makes it fun.

Coincidentally, I was at the pet store chatting it up with my favorite shop-keepers. All the while, my tank inhabitants were feasting on the peppermint shrimp.

The first sign that something was wrong was that my Bonsai Cardinal was looking particularly guilty as it swam around the tank. Note the shrimp antenna protruding from its mouth...

First order of business was to capture him and get the antenna out of there. Once I had him in the net, I was able to pull it out. The other end was easily down in his stomach with just a little bit of meat left on the end.

Next... find the shrimp. Didn't take long...

Way in the back corner of the tank I found several crabs munching on various shrimp parts. All that was left was the tail that you can see here. There's no shrimp body on the front end of that tail, by the way.

I don't know what happened. Previously the shrimp had been acting fine. I had just a few days before done a fairly significant water change (maybe a 1.25-1.5 gallons in this 20g tank), so maybe that did him in. I've noticed that there are few empty snail shells around as well.

Fish and corals are doing great, as are the other snails and crabs. Will keep a close watch.

So that's the bad news. More to come on coral status as well as a new LPS coral...