Old School Tank Thread

[Lowell Lemon]

Yes everything in the tank was reel, the bio balls where a recent upgrade from a roll of polyester padding that the wet dry came with and they where supposedly the greatest invention ever for our wet dry filters.. lol. The picture was taken right as my tank was coming into its own after years of struggling with supper high nutrient levels and not enough lighting, the tank was a morph from a fish/invert tank that I set up in the early 80's to a reef in 85 starting with the addition of 80+ pounds of fresh harvested rock from Fiji and Hawaii, It went right into my tank uncured and uncleaned right on top of the original rock substrate complete with air driven under gravel filter after Setting up my wet dry and completing the cycle I promptly headed to my LFS to purchase the only reel live coral that I had ever seen a Goniopora needless to say it didn't last long or did the replacements purchased afterwards.. Even though I had a huge bio filter in place the tank was still being illuminated with the original single bulb glass hood fixture that came with the tank and of course I had no idea lighting was so critical.. Over the next couple years some LPS became available mostly hammer and bubble but I still had very little to no success even though I had added another light fixture complete with a plant grow bulb that I was sure was going to be the magic bullet for coral growth but in the end it just helped turn my tank into a swamp.. lol. It wasn't until John B figured out that the Philip 03 bulbs coming from holland where the ticket for coral survivability that I decided to completely redo my tank pulling out the under gravel filter and substrate, built a light fixture that would hold 5-48" fluorescent tubes 60/40 actinic, added bio balls to the wet dry and installed 2 skimmers one a home built venturi and the other a huge 5' tall ozone injected countercurrent that came from a public aquarium.. lol. From that point I was keeping most everything alive and a lot of softy's started becoming available which did great in my system but I still had little growth from my LPS until I started using kalkwasser as my top off water, it dramatically changed my tank.. All the nuisance algae disappeared, coralline algae started encrusting everything, and most of my LPS started growing like crazy laying down inches of skeleton over the years, the elegance in my avatar was the size of my fist when I purchased it and almost the size of a football when I sold it years later.. The best pic's of the tank are from the mid 90's if I can ever find them, the back wall was solid purple including the overflow and power heads and the bulk of my corals where fat and happy, I used rubber bands to "pinch" off pieces of leather and shrooms which I tied to small rocks a early form of fragging

Good old John B. Burleson I presume. I remember when Julian worked for John. We never met in person but spent lots of time on the phone. Now I have to go digging in the 35mm films.

 

[Cichlid Dad]

I'll start with a couple from the web

I know this is a very old thread, question, the dinner plate green coral to the left bottom pic. Is it a cup coral? Asking because it looks like mine. Just hoping when it grows up it will look like that.