Well its been 9 days since I last posted about my new aquarium, in that post I said I would wait a few weeks before putting something alive in it. Well I was wrong, after testing the water, and having the ammonia go down to barely readable levels after a spike followed by a small water change, I decided the aquarium was ready for something.

Besides green slime algae started appearing already, so on Friday night I brought home about 5 little blue leg hermit crabs --- those are cool little buggers by the way. They are already roaming all across the tank and the live rock scavenging away. I still only have the two T5 Power Glo bulbs, which really probably aren’t emitting much beneficial UV rays as they are the same bulbs I’ve had in their for over a year when it was a fresh water tank --- but in addition to the (bad) green algae, (good) purple coraline algae is developing as well.

I noticed some Aiptasia sprouting from one of the live rock pieces, as well as this little bugger pictured below. It’s hard to make out in this picture because it looks just like a piece of the live rock --- but directly in the center of the picture, centered below the two hermit crabs is some sort of little slug of some kind, that waited almost three weeks two come out of whatever little crevice he was hiding in.


Tomorrow night, or at some point this week I’m going to hopefully pick up a couple snails to take care of the green algae before it gets out of hand. Then its time to start thinking about fish. I was going to start off with a couple false percula clownfish, but now I’m thinking maybe a copper-banded butterfly, instead.

After spending the majority of my life growing up around the freshwater hobby/tropical fish business --- with this first saltwater tank, its like everything is new, and keeping fish is fun again.

Here’s a couple more pictures, once again, they are not the greatest as I took them with my Iphone.