Building an SPS Monster… my 1300 gallon SPS display… and many past systems
Hello SPS world! This thread is long overdue, and due to be long… I’m a long time hard core hobbyist that got my first saltwater tank at age 11 after having a few freshwater tanks… had the house filled with tanks by high school, and yada yada yada… last year I just turned 40. I know… as Jerry Seinfeld says you can’t yada yada the best part, so I’ll show a bunch of that yada yada in this thread. We all know moving sucks, especially for a reefer, but about four years ago my wife and I built our forever home, and I built my forever reef. I’ve posted a lot through the years here on RC… mainly in Reef Fishes forum… as I’m a hard core fish nut that’s owned many hard to find and unique fish through the years and have travelled to some exotic places where I’ve collected my own fish. Unfortunately I, like many others, have been a victim of Photo Bucket taking away third party hosting, so I’m turning a negative into a positive and starting this thread that so many have asked for showing some of my systems through the years, including my SPS monster I’ve had now for the past four years or so. Many also know me as a hardcore SPS guy, with my childhood nickname and RC username tied to many SPS pieces I’ve owned through the years. You can read many of my reefing philosophies, and about my old systems in two past TOTMs I’ve had here on RC which I’ll post links to below. Over the past twelve years I’ve spoken at clubs and conferences in over twenty states, including four past MACNAs, and have met many of you reading this. Whether we’ve met face to face, or in threads in the past, it’s been such a pleasure… as my wife says I do not do it for the money… it’s all about the passion… so cheers to anyone reading this… because while we come from around the world and may be different in many ways… we all share the same passion… whether you like it or not… you clicked on this thread and are reading this… you my friend, have the passion… : )
To start, this is a system I set up in 2001 just after my wife and I got married in our first one bedroom apartment… a standard 10 gallon that was affectionately known as my “kitchen nano” and was profiled on nano-reef.com. For those of you with Tony Vargas’ book “The Coral Reef Aquarium” this was the first and smallest reef system profiled in the book. I kept Tridacnid clams and Acropora among many other things, and to this day I still own the Solomon Islands percula clownfish I purchased nearly 17 years ago and a few of the corals. One cool tidbit about this tank was that the display acted as the sump for the refugium above… I can do an entire thread on this system (and did back in the day), but I’ll keep it short to get to bigger things…
Front shot…
Top shot…
That system was supposed to hold me over until we got a house… but it didn’t (big surprise there I know). The little footprint of that apartment quickly turned into this…
A 65 gallon sps/clam/Ricordea display, 20 gallon frag tank, and 54 gallon softie/LPS display of in the corner…
The 65…
My old favorite shot of the 65… showing my favorite angelfish species…
And a few top shots… which always showcase the suntans of the corals the best…
For much more information on this system you can see the TOTM article I wrote back in 2004 here… the Tomini tang in the tank made it through two moves and still now resides in my 1300 gallon displays, along with a mate.
http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2004-09/totm/index.php