The moral of this story is this, if you want a salt water aquarium, use the live rock to cycle it. It WILL cycle… be patient. Test the water often and watch it. It WILL cycle… be patient. Don’t attempt to use “starter” fish unless you’re okay with redoing all of your aquascaping work.

Anyway, check out the new coral beauty, the pictures of Fishtank 3.0 are here.

On to the meat of the story. We purchased a 46-gallon bow-front aquarium, hood, and stand. Nothing too fancy, but a decent All-Glass setup.
Here are some pictures of the initial setup. (And my snazzy new entertainment center)

The new tank sat in the living room for about 2 weeks with nothing in it but a funny note I put there. Finally, even I couldn’t stand it anymore so we ventured down to the LFS (Local Fish Store) and bought the setup. Now, i’m all excited, ready to go down and grab some chemicals and a pick out what fish we want… you know… like you do with most small freshwater setups. (Day 1 : Chemicals, A few days later : Fish!) This is when I got the first hard lesson of saltwater. No fish for a month unless you want to sacrifice them to the ecosystem of the tank.

Yes yes, that’s right sports fans… no fish for at least a month! Let’s take a tally.

This was almost a month ago. We just added some fish in there… just some “starter fish”, all Damsels. We’ll probably have to pull then out in a few more weeks but, they’re neat to watch and MUCH better than staring at an empty tank. We ended up with a Blue Devil, a Yellow Tailed Blue Devil, and a “Jailbird”. Here are some pictures….
Yellow Tailed Blue Devil and Blue Devil are here
Jailbird, or Four-striped Damsel

Oh, and just in case anyone is wondering what the tank looks like now, here are a few pictures, i’ll put more up later. You can’t see the fish in this one because it was late and we had already killed the lights in the aquarium. Needless to say, the fish were resting in the rocks.

A word to the wise, if you want to do saltwater… start reading now. It expensive, but the end result is much cooler than anything you can do in freshwater. (At least I think it is) The fish are more exotic and you can do more interesting combinations, but you have to know a lot about it before you start.