It’s not everyday that you know of a certain reef aquarium which is being built is destined for greatness, but when that tank is being set up by Worldwide Corals, you kind of just know. This weekend while working on on his brand new, 900 gallon coral farm and display reef tank, Victor sent us a couple sneak peeks into its creation and when we brought up a time lapse he confirmed with us that he’d already done it!
Everything about this tank is set up to be a masterpiece, not the least of which is the skill and experience that World Wide Corals has at keeping and growing corals. However with this display aquarium Master coral farmer Victor is planning to make the tank strictly an SPS tank. To that end the tank is twelve feet long, four feet wide, and 30 inches tall (3.6 x 1.2 x 0.75 m).
The all glass aquarium is set up barebottom with no sand and is lighted with 6 x 250w radium metal halides using Lumen Max reflectors which are flanked on both sides with blue leds, blue T5s, and a splash of white T5s for highlighting. An aquascape of this size could days or even a week to completely aquascape but the more than 650 pounds of mostly Haiti rock has been collected over 6 years, Victor is very familiar with many of the pieces and therefore this aquascape took “only” three hours to complete.
What makes this aquascape really work is the use of oversize pieces of live rock which can be hard to get, as most of them are much too large to use in aquascaping even a large three or four foot aquarium. Furthermore, some of these “two handed” pieces of live rock used in the new aquascape have been used in aquascapes before so Victor is already familiar with them, how they work with other rocks and especially, which side of the rock should be holding corals and facing the light.
The new 900 gallon tank is endowed with a near geometrically perfect aquascape with ample usage of the rule of thirds from front to back, top to bottom, and especially side to side. There’s a lot of use of open empty space for corals to grow and for water to flow through every corner of the virgin aquascape. Worldwide swears this is going to be an SPS only aquarium but who are they kidding, you know a few chalices and zoanthids will sneak their way in there.
Either way, this aquascape is destined for greatness and we can’t wait to see how it will look when this foundation of rock is used to support of field of colorful, exotic and especially large SPS coral colonies. Super huge thanks to WWC for taking the time to make their time-lapse video of the new display and for sharing it with us first.
