JamesL

While I am not a big proponent of the zoa naming, I will give a shot... the reds in the first picture look like fire and ice, and the second picture maybe eagle eyes?

It was green with lighter green stripes if my memory serves me right. The store used to be called Austin Aquariums. I think someone on here said they changed ownership recently. The "Austin Aquariums" banner was taken down off the building, but they were open (and I didn't think to ask what the new name was). They are located at: 7756 Northcross Dr Austin, TX 78757 The complex is at the corner of Northcross and Foster, with the entrance from Foster being right in front of the aquarium store.

Wow .. now that is a cool setup! You could always do something similar with a barrel and put the barrel on a dolly. I would built something like this if I had to change more than 5 gallons at a time

I want to say around $50, but don't quote me on that. I didn't really look at the price as it wouldn't fit in my tank It was probably about 4-6 inches in length.

While I don't have any of the frags you are looking for, you two might consider splitting a SeaCrop order. They have Fox corals and mushrooms, but no bubble or elegance. (I saw a real nice elegance at the formerly-Austin-Aquariums store Saturday before the ARC meeting).

Ooo... never thought of that. I would not have thought they would put out a good light range for plant growth, but a quick google search seems like some might. Will have to do more research .. might just have to put my Electrical Engineering degree to work Thanks for the suggestion!

So I won the "bubble gum" fish tank (which I found out is a Fantasy Bowl from Nature's Ocean) from the ARC meeting on Saturday (thanks ARC and Horizon! ). I have decided to set it up as a planted freshwater tank, as I have been itching to have some freshwater critters again besides the pond. Seahorses are going to have to wait... I am going to be adding gravel and water tonight, and was looking at the light that is included and I am a bit concerned about how exposed it is. So I am wondering if anyone knows of some small light fixtures I might be able to replace it with. You can see the hood on this page. The main criteria is that the light still fits inside the hood contraption thingy. My wife really likes the "all enclosed" look of the tanks. Thoughts? Thanks!

Holy smokes, that is one huge mantis! And what a nice looking one too!! Nice family addition It is funny that years ago mantis and pistol shrimps were the scourge of saltwater tanks. Now people are keeing them in reef and separate tanks (myself included ... but my pistol is a small one)!

Thanks for hosting the meeting. Your tank is just spectacular! Though I have to know .. how much coraline algae did you scrape off the glass prior to people coming over It was great meeting some of the fellow Austin reefers. Looking forward to setting up the "bubble gum" tank Though I have to admit, it might end up a planted freshwater to start off with. -James

Congrats Starfire! (I think it was the fancy shadow background that helped his image win )

Well don't say we didn't warn you Actually, I heard the air craft carrier tour is pretty cool. Though, I think it is not too pleasant on super hot days.

No prob (and sorry for the long reply .. was eating lunch, so had the time). Freshwater/ponds are so much more forgiving .... And I like the way you are thinking about the seahorses! Hmm ... corporate mascots ....

This is just payback for all those great pictures and stories you post of your seahorses and eels ... I sooo want a seahorse tank right now. Especially when seeing the baby seahorses a guy on nano-reef has been trying to rear. Let me preface all of my answers with: This pond was set up last November when we moved houses. We had a small 40 gallon pre-molded pond at the old house. We brought the fish and plants with us. We literally bought and setup the pond the week we moved, as I felt back for the fish (only 2 then) being stuck in a big rubbermaid container in the garage. Our dogs have pretty much left the pond alone, and so have all the deer. Raccoons do come and mess with the plants (I need to re-pot some), but the pond is deep enough and has enough hiding places they haven't nabbed any of the fish yet <fingers crossed>. There is no UV filter on it. I am using an old powerhead (I think the one that came in my aquapod 24!!) to to circulate water. Basically it is in one of those Bio-filter boxes you see at Home Depot/Lowes for ponds. It has bio-balls, and two filter pads in it. The output of the pump gets snaked out of the pond and into the back of the blue pot and overflows back to the pond. I probably could use a much stronger pump, but I don't want too much water turbulence. Water lilies like calm water. To tell you the truth, I probably should rinse the filter pads out every month ... but I think I have done it once in the past six months The pond is really low care. We feed the fish maybe once every couple of weeks ... they have algae and bugs to munch on. And with the semi-consistant rain we have been getting, I think I have "topped" off the pond once in the six months (I expect that to change as we push into the 90's). Ok all of this talk is motivating me to clean up the pond this weekend (clean the filters, re-pot some plants, fertilize the plants, and remove dying lily leaves).

I went there a few years back when I visited Corpus for the first time. It is a decent aquarium, but nothing spectacular (like Sheds in Chicago or Monterey Bay in California). They have your typical fresh and saltwater areas. There is a dolphin show also. Actually, just thinking about it, Moody Gardens in Galveston was really cool (and better than TSA). They have different "pyramids" which house a rain forest, an aquarium, and some other stuff.

Thanks for the pointer! It is good to know there is a pond club, though I doubt we would become members (we do own a pond). The reason is we really don't do much with our pond ... we built it, stocked it, and it takes care of itself (not like a reef tank ). It mainly is a "water feature" in the landscape ... even though we will probably add more (ponds/water features) down the road. So it seems at least a few people here have ponds ... post up some pictures! That is the best thing about these pond societies, the pond tours they do. We love seeing other people's ponds. Here is ours. It is a 100 gallon pre-molded pond. It sits on top of the ground, and all the rocks were collected from around our yard. There are 4 fish in there: 1 comet, 1 fan tail, and 2 butterfly koi. Click the pictures for a larger view.

Yeah! I need more to move me out of third place

I agree with Noodle. I use razor blades every week to get the algae near the sand bed and where the magnet scraper can't get to.

Nice looking eel! Sigh ... now I want one again (and a seahorse tank, and, and, and ... )

Hmm .. could be. Is there anything in the tank that could be nipping/fighting with the fish? I doubt the eel would do that. BTW, gorgeous trigger!

Hmm.. you sure it just wasn't damaged from being caught/transported/released into your tank? Sounds like you have everything going right ... good water quality and the fish is eating. I bet it heals on it's own soon enough.

Edit (6/29/07): I am changing my submission! I like this picture better.... Sun Coral (click picture from grande size)

Yeah, out of date information would be a problem (if the magazine articles could still be found). Thus making and even stronger point to having pointers to more current information. But I don't want to detract from current web sites providing good information (like this site).

Good ideas .. and this sorta ties in with some ideas I have for this. While I was not looking for a place to host it (I already have a company to host my software business web site), I was thinking about expanding on the information to include links to web sites (ARC, nano-reef, etc) that also relate to specific "index entries". So say there is a discussion here about how to drill fish tanks. Well then a link to that discussion would be in the index under "Fish Tank Drilling" (or something like that). Thus it would drive traffic towards this site. In the grand scheme of things I would imagine this being a user driven web site, where people could submit pointers to such things. But the more I type this out, almost sounds like a wikipedia site Which just begs the question would this be a lot of duplication of material already on the web. Take all of this with a grain of salt .... just ideas I have rumbling around in my head. This could amount to a bunch of time to do that I might not have Agreed. And that is the big catch there. I used to own all those issues I had index... but I have since gotten rid of them. AFM used to have some of their articles on-line, but I can't find them now (in the brief search I did) since that have changed names/web site to Aquarium Fish International. I think the lack of people being able get the magazine also prompted me to think on what other resources could be "indexed".

Heh .. I actually never thought about that place ... I drive by it every day one the way home from work! Will have to check them out ...

(This was also posted on nano-reef ... just wanted to catch the opinions of people here that might not be on the other forum) Years back, I ran a web site called the Aquarium Fish Magazine Index which provided an index of all the articles in said magazine spanning it's publishing history (1988-2001 at the time). People would use the index to find past articles on particular subjects (like Angelfish or what-not). I even had the publishers of the magazine semi-supporting me by giving me free subscriptions to give away for anniversaries and such. (Now I think that magazine has been renamed to Aquarium Fish International, but that is besides the point.) I took down the web site a few years back when I was totally out of the freshwater/saltwater/pond hobbies. Well I am back into the hobbies again, and am posting to see if all that index information would be useful to anyone these days. If it is, then I have some ideas to bring it back to the world wide webs. Since the time of the index, web searches and forum's (like this one) have supplanted the need to use written references quite a lot. I personally do not refer to books much any more for information on questions I have for fish (that is why I am on this site!). But maybe there still are peoples out there that do Thanks for the feedback!