Setting up a reef tank can be a lot of work – getting the whole system right where you want it in terms of the placement, rock scape, lighting, flow, chemistry levels, not to mention gear selection to get your reef where you want it, and there can be a lot of challenges along the way. But we tell you what, once a reef tank reaches a certain state of stability and equilibrium and you’ve ironed out most of the kinks, getting down to the curation of live corals can be hella fun and very rewarding.
It can take as little as three months or sometimes up to a couple of years, but once you’ve got a stable reef tank it’s either time to add some fancier corals, remove and thin out some of the initial starter corals, or in our case a little bit of both. As you might have noticed from a handful of our latest videos we’re elbow-deep in polyp work, retouching the placement of different corals, grafting some of the faster growing stony corals, and generally steering this coral reef spaceship towards a more mature layout with a different succession of reef building scleractinia.
We’ve already cut the Red Dragon Acro and Milka Stylophora down to size, making way for some nice, thicker branched and brightly colored Stylophora strains to populate and take over most of the furthest bommie in the Waterbox Peninsula reef tank. All year long we’ve been growing out several frags of differently colored S. pistillata strains and they’ve finally become nice miniature colonies ready for promotion to their well deserved placement and on prominent display.
We’re somewhere around halfway through curating the overall coral-scape of the double sided peninsula reef tank but man does it feel rewarding to finally be placing corals where we want to watch them grow for the next couple of years. It’s taken us a pretty long time to get to the point where both the reef tank and our cinematography skills dovetailed into these reef-working videos but we really enjoy bringing them to you so you can look forward to many more in this style in the coming weeks and well into the next year.
