JamesL

Looking real nice! I love that large open brain. I will have to get one of those some day.

+1 to this. The cause is most likely excess nutrients and light. The article sounds a bit scary. If you are raising a tank parameter high enough to "melt" a living plant in the tank, I would imagine it could do significant damage to corals (which have "plants" inside them). Or at least cause significant stress to the non-hair algae in the tank. My solution when I had a hair algae attack, was: 1) Treat the cause (in my case, water quality .. switched to my own RO/DI water, and added a skimmer). 2) Added more turbo snails. They ignored the hair algae for a few weeks, then BAM!, it tasted like candy to them. Cleaned up the 24g in a matter of days.

The only thing directly on my way home is the Salt Lick. (Ok, sorry for hi-jacking your thread ... back to helping the tank setup). Is there a reason you are looking at both the sump and the in-line filters? The inline filters seem a bit overkill, you could put the heater and chemical medial in bags in the sump.

We need a RCA down south. I truly don't have much time to get out and about these days, thus delivery to the door is about the only way I can get stuff for the tank.

Hey, those are really cool! Might have to look are supplementing my current lighting with some of these.

Wow... just wow. I love the "fullness" of the tank. I bet you could just spend a whole day staring at it and always see something new.

Wow... that rock bonsai is way cool! You could be starting a new trend here Will love to see it populated with corals down the road.

You might also just try temperature acclimating the next batch of snails. Like water changes, everyone has their own opinion on how to acclimate new fish/corals/inverts. I personally no longer use the drip method. I let the bag float on the surface of the tank for 15-20 minutes, then release the critter into the tank (just the critter, not the bag water).

I would imagine the pods could outswim the snails. I was going to put a few snails in my refugium I am setting up.

Ok, mine is not as macro as Starfire's.

I have read about some people putting a few snails/hermits in there to help keep things tidy.

Hey! I was going to post a shot like that of my tuxedo urchin!

Correct.

Looking good. One thing I will mention is you might want to make sure you have enough room between the rocks and the sides of the glass to get in there and easily clean. I made the mistake in my 24g tank of putting the rocks to close to the sides, and had patches of algae that was real hard to clean.

Looks like you had fun! You got a good picture of the eel.

Oh cool, that is pretty darn close to little ole Buda. I might have to take a trip down there that Saturday.

Nice! I have one in my tank, and I love it. Though I haven't gotten any good pictures of it yet.

Might be orange ball anemones.... do they look like this: You might also look at the discussion about them here. I have a bunch of orange ball anemone's in my tank, they seem to like to hide in Zoa's colonies. So far I have not seen any negative effects of them. They are closed during the day, so the zoa's are happy. At night when the zoa's close, the anemones open up.

Interesting ... I might have to try this as I am battling a bad brown algae bloom right now.

Be careful with the hawkfish, they are great looking fish but can be very predatory towards inverts. So you might not want to add any expensive shrimp in the tank

The last pictures looks like some zoanthids... nice hitchhiker on the rock! You will have to wait and see if they color up, or stay more brownish.

Very nice! I love the open brains... I want to get some for my tank some day. I "exiled" my GSP also to prevent a total tank take-over.

In general, I normally do 25% water changes. So when I had my 24 gallon tank set up, I was doing 5 gallon water changes (was convenient to just use a 5 g bucket to pre-mix the salt water). For my 75 gallon tank, I am doing about 15 gallon water changes... this is a bit less than 25%.

Very nice! Can't wait to see it with the final rock in place. One suggestion, I know you mentioned adding more rock, but the current rock cave on the left is might close to the edge of the glass. That is going to be hard to clean.