We Now Have Coral!

It's been a while since my last post and a lot has happened since then. We added our first fish a few weeks ago; it's a 6 line wrasse. It hangs out in the live rock and eat pests like flat worms. It's a beautiful fish, but very hard to get a picture of.

About a week after that, we added a royal gramma.

However, it only lasted a couple of days before I witnessed its violent and spastic death. One day it darted out of a cave in the live rock, flopped all around the tank and gulped desperately. I immediately freaked out and woke up Ryan yelling about the terrible things happening to the royal gramma, but by the time we got back to the tank, he was already dead. I have never seen such a dramatic fish death before!

None of the other animals seem to be having problems, so we have no idea what happened. I tested the water, and all of the parameters are correct. Also, our snails are doing really well and they are usually the first indication of a problem with the water. I've been told that things like this happen sometimes, without anyone really knowing why.

About a week after that, we added a banded coral shrimp. It's really cool and cheered me up about losing the royal gramma. It runs around the tank foraging for food and will try to charge you if you put your face up to the glass.

Also, our coralline algae has been spreading. The snails are now purple and there are purple dots all over the back of the tank. I took this picture of one of the snails, and later realized that the 6 line wrasse swam into view at the last minute, he's at the very top.

Just yesterday we added our first corals. We got a frilly mushroom coral and a green sinularia leather coral. They are both soft corals, which are easier to start with. Mushroom and leather corals are also some of the hardiest soft corals, so hopefully we'll do well with them.

We've done well so far keeping the ammonia, nitrates and nitrites down by regular water changes. But now that we've added the corals, we really need to get the hang of keeping the calcium and alkalinity at the right levels, since they will consume calcium and alkalinity to grow.

Green Sinularia:
The rubber band is there to hold it into place until it grows into the rock, in a couple of weeks. It's also still a little shrunken, it will spread out and grow taller once it's used to the new environment.

Frilly Mushroom: