Lights for the tank

It’s been a year since we put our lights on the tank and so is time, to our wallets’ chagrin, to put in new bulbs. Our hood is a JBJ Formosa DX, which is 4x65W, and we started with 2 bulbs of 7100K (the blue lights) and 2 10000K bulbs (the white). We’d bought this with the recommendation of switching in true actinics for the 7100K after a year, but when we got home with the actinics, the light was no longer blue but purple. All of the corals, especially the green and yellow, were completely washed out. So, we went back to the fish store and traded them in for a pair of SunPaq bulbs that are half actinic and half 7100K. The blue light is back! You can tell, though, that the daylight bulbs have lost most of their power because the blue light overwhelms the white. We’ll wait a week or two so as not to shock all the tank inhabitants, then swap out those bulbs for new.

While we were playing with the bulbs, I also moved our green zoo frag rock over to encourage it to spread onto one of our main rocks. I’d encouraged a few zoos off of the original colony onto this one about two months ago, then cut it loose and in the last few weeks they’ve nearly doubled in size and number.

I want them to spread onto our big rock (aka the gramma’s rock, since he sleeps in a cave inside it). It’s more or less 15″ long, 10″ deep, and 14″ tall, and already has our original zoo colony on the upper left face and some transplanted orange zoos on the back.

I’m hoping that our gorgeous green zoos can be persuaded to cover the lower left edge.