First (saltwater) aquarium build

[mikst]

Bought another frag today (encrusting montepora). When I was dipping it, an obvious copepods came off. I rinsed him in a bath of tank water then moved him to my tank.
I saw no planeria or anything obviously undesirable. I've gotten brittle stars from frags from this store before but no luck this time.
I need help identifying these little guys. They're like dark black and they move around like earthworms (they get short and fat, then thin and long). They don't move in inch worm fashion which I think is how a parasite does but I can't remember the name (leech?).
These things do not swim, they move on surfaces. I blasted them off the frag and after I moved the frag into a tank water bath rinse and into the tank, I sucked up these little guys and put them in the tank water bath to observe.

Thanks for your help!

Oh I also got a couple red leg and blue leg hermit crabs. They're so cute! They're my first purchased marine livestock.

I taught my kid how to read the refractometer and she became obsessed, asking to test the water from each livestock bag, the tank, the coral bag, the bucket of saltwater I mixed. Hah.

 

[mikst]

Can I get help identifying this thing too? It looks very much like a giant pond snail, but it was in my tank. It just cruises around. Looking very snail like with a shell and soft bits.

 

[mikst]

I finally decided to sand my little 10 gallon. It's supposed to be my QT, but it doesn't look like my 29 gallon is happening anytime soon. I may need to run some electrical and install an outlet for it. That's all fine and dandy and will happen in due time.

So anyway, I decided to sand the ten. I carefully removed the rocks that had corals and put them in a separate container. I siphoned off all the water into two buckets, took the rock work out and looked for my various hermit crabs. I put them all in the container with coral and water.

This part will be a little controversial, but I siphoned out all the detritus and sand sitting at the bottom of the glass and saved it to mix in with the new sand to innoculate it a bit. I put down my two diy base rocks (big dry rock cut in half) and poured 11 pounds of crushed coral sand. Then I rearranged all my rocks in a pleasing to me fashion.

I kept all the chaeto that was growing on the rocks, I love algae. I kept the marineland penguin 200 filter that is stuffed with filter foam. I kept the airstone that sits in the filter aerating water. The filter foam takes out all the microbubbles and the bacteria is growing on the foam like crazy.

Soemthing new is I noticed previously there was little circulation so I grabbed a circ pump from my bin in the garage and tucked it in the back corner, underneath the lip of the filter outlet. It points up and diagonally across the outlet so it ripples the surface basically right in the center of the tank water surface. It's a 480gph pump. It was a sandstorm as I expected. I stuffed a net pot from a plant over the outlet to disrupt flow and stuck window screen over the inlets of the circ pump. You can see it in the top left corner of the pictures. It's less flow now than I'd like, but I like sandstorms less. I can now see the tendrils of the palys all waving randomly and the algae sways throughout, so it seems sufficient.

Unfortunately, all the rock work is covered in sand. I blasted it off with an eye dropper after the video.
I decided my cheapo full spectrum light from Amazon was insufficient, so I broke out the Kessel a80 that was sitting in the garage. It's super blue! Having a hard time deciding how blue I want it. But if I have it cranked full blue and put the full spectrum light on the tank it's pretty pleasing. I can see the corals flourescing and it's not all a weird blue hue.

Anyway, here are some pics. I'm pretty pleased. I tried to post a short video to show the swaying and circulation but I guess that's a no go.