[Calawah]

Hi all,

I've been laying low for a while, letting my tank cycle etc. Nitrates have been at 0 for about 3 weeks after an initial spike of 40ppm which was preceded by an ammonia spike. Fairly certain I'm on the right track, so I added fish over the weekend.

I picked up a yellow watchman goby, a black and white ocellaris clown and a red scooter blenny. I'm pretty excited to have the additions in my tank and they all seem to have acclimated well.

I know some of you will vehemently oppose the scooter blenny in a newer tank, but I've got pods out the yin yang! I put a bottle of ocean pods into my refugium right when I set the tank up (along with a little live rock rubble, chaeto, and some caulerpa) and I've been feeding the tank with about 2ml of phytoplankton (pod food) every other day. I started noticing pods on the glass at night right away, and now they're even there in the daytime, pretty cool to look at too, we've got a magnifying glass (hand lens) that really lets you get a good look at the little buggers. I also have a ton of the "gammarus" isopods that come out at night and feed on detritus. Not sure if they're good food for the scooter or not? Anyways if I see the pod population drop off I'll probably start a separate pod culture, cause I'm already attached the scooter and I would be loath to lose him to starvation.

Next up: corals! I'm thinking of starting with a frogspawn and a galaxy. Very interesting to watch and should be a pretty good set of "starter" corals. The Phyllangia that came on my live rock survived the cycle and seem to be thriving. I'm going to wait a week or two before adding the corals, to make sure the water quality is bueno. So far so good, I've been feeding the fish about a 1/4 cube of spirulina brine shrimp every day and the nitrates are still pegged at 0. Any unconsumed bits get wolfed down by the nassarius snails pretty quickly.

Thanks for reading!