Here are a few pictures of my percula clownfish hosting in my gigantea anemone. I have had my female clownfish for almost five years now and she has been hosting in this anemone for about four and a half years. She used to have a male counterpart (bottom picture) but my reef tank suffered a case of Ich a couple of years back and unfortunately he did not make it.
Here’s a quick tip to determine if your clownfish is a percula or an ocellaris (false) clownfish. The percula will have ten spines in the first dorsal fin and the ocellaris will have eleven spines.
Today I completed my new aquascaping, if you scroll down a few posts below this one you can see my old reef tank aquascaping. It wasn’t exactly how I planned it, I have come to the conclusion that I am going to have to upgrade my tank in the next few years.
As you can see in the picture my corals are not exactly happy with me at the moment with all the detritus I kicked up moving the rocks around. This picture was taken six hours after I re-aquascaped. I am hoping that the green sinularia in the middle at the top of the tank will be able to fan out a little bit more to give the tank a bit more perspective, otherwise I am going to have to move it.
Part of the new aquascaping was to increase the flow in my aquarium by using an additional two maxi-jet 1200s. As it stands right now I am circulating almost 24x my aquariums water an hour or about 1100gph. This is a huge change from the tank’s flow before, which was almost 14x. This change should keep my corals happier and my detritus suspended in the water column longer.
Many people are used to seeing grey/silver snails in the marine reef aquarium but are not used to seeing black saltwater snails in there tanks. Reef aquariums with live rock can sometimes have a whole slew of hitchhikers in them. Sometimes they are not seen for the first few weeks but they eventually come out, especially at night.
There can be hundreds if not thousands of different types of snails and for the casual reef keeper they can be very difficult to identify. The important part about identifying a saltwater snail is to look at its shell shape, its foot and its proboscis. Aside from the markings on the shell, the color of a snails shell has little impact on what type of snail it is. A couple of black saltwater snails that come to mind are of the nerite and stomalleta species. You can find more about snails on the right side of this page entitled “Beneficial reef aquarium snails”.
