• Button Polyps, assorted colors
  
• Finger Leather, unidentified
  
• Leather, encrusting unidentified
  
• Gorgonian, Purple Bush (photosythetic)
  
• Gorgonian, Yellow Deep Sea (non-photosythetic)
  
• Green Star Polyps
  
• Mushroom anemones, eight assorted varieties
  
• Leather, Sarcophyton
  
• Xenia, Elongata (pulsing/beige)
  
• Xenia, Thin Bar (non-pulsing/brown)
  
• Xenia, Umbrella (pulsing/pinkish white)
  

• Branching Green Frogspawn with pink tips
  
• Green Bubble Coral
  

• Purple Stylaster coral (non-photosynthetic)
  

• Anemone, hitchhiker (unidentified) with symbiotic shrimp I purchased
  
• Blue Linkia Starfish
  
• Brittle Star
  Cleaner shrimp
  
• Sandbed critters (amphipods, copepods, feather duster worms, spaghetti worms, bristle worms, unidentified small snails and hermits, planaria worms)
  
• Snails, assorted species: Nassarius, Cerith ("Baha") and "Margarita" snails all from Premium Aquatics. I added 50 Nassarius, 12 Baha and 12 Margarita snails in September 2000. I go a week or two between glass cleanings now -- that is such an improvement over the first six months of the tank's existence, when diatoms and hair algae ruled everything.
  

• Anemone, Carpet. Died after being in my tank for nearly 18 months. It didn't move or walk about the tank at all, then one day I found it clogging up the overflow from my 29 gallon tank to the 37. There was a fair amount of tissue damage, and an infection caused the anemone to die about two weeks later.
  
• Crab, symbiotic. I've had 3 of these filter feeding crabs in my carpet anemone, and they keep dying violent deaths. Something is ripping them apart...
  
• Clam, Maxima (fell off rock into sandbed, suspect sandbed critter killed it)
  
• Clam, Derasa (fell off rock into sandbed, suspect sandbed critter killed it)
  
• Damsels, Yellow-Tailed (10 died back in the dark ages of my education)
  
• Firefish (My bad - I bought it at PetCo)
  
• Flame Scallop
  
• Hammer Coral, brown (badly damages when purchased, lingering death)
  
• Leather Coral, Finger
  
• Leather Coral, Toadstool
  
• Long Nose Hawkfish (Flame Hawk beat the crap out of it)
  
• Shrimp, symbiotic 1" long (unidentified). Disappeared after about 6 months. Suspect Flame Hawk made a snack out of it.
• Sun Polyps (My bad - unaware each polyp would require regular feeding)
  
• Snails, snails and more snails(Some lost to hermits, others improper acclimation/lingering stress from shipping, others possibly to low specific gravity during first year of system setup)
  
• Tang, Blue Hippo (suspect it ate a small, indigestible Valonia bubble algae. Lived for more than a year -- the tank was possibly too small for this fish.)
  

Maintenance

Water changes (2-4 hours/month) vary but average around 15% per month. I mix all salt with reverse osmosis water purchased at a grocery store. There is a spare 15 gallon tank in the stand under my 29 gallon anemone tanke I use for mixing water (The 29 gallon tank is rather top heavy since it is on a tall stand and the spare tank helps stabilize it). I make up a batch of fresh saltwater a day or two in advance of when I will need it, which helps the salt mix stabilize before being added to the reef tank.

Temperature and specific gravity are checked before and after water changes. My Xenia tells me if my pH is okay - it melts if it gets too low. I don't test for anything else anymore.

Kalkwasser (15 minutes/every other day) is dosed every other night. Kalk is mixed during the day and left to settle for at least six hours. I drip dose half a gallon at a time from a two-gallon jug that sits on a bookcase above the tank. Airline tubing with an airline valve at the end to control flow rate has worked well for me. The half gallon of Kalk gets dosed over a two hour period. The airline valve clogs if I try to slow the drip rate more than this. I'd like to get my hands on a valve used for IV bags.

Iodine is dosed sporadically and randomly. I've read a lot about iodine being needed by mushroom anemones, xenia and caulerpa algae, all of which I have. Problem is, I have no way of measuring iodine levels. Consensus at www.reefcentral.com seems to be that iodine is maintained by regular water changes and feeding. I don't dose iodine unless I've gone several weeks without a water change. I probably won't buy any more iodine once my supply runs out.

Macro algae are harvested from this tank and the attached 29 gallon tank when necessary.

Algae scraping (1 hour/week) takes up most of my maintenance time. I have tough green calcareous algae that grows on all four sides of the glass. It out-competes the coralline algae. Note: After adding the snails from Premium Aquatics, the tough calcerous green algae has disappeared. I spend about 15 minutes per week cleaning algae from the tank. Instead of using a razor blade to scrape the algae away, now I use a sponge to wipe algae off.

Reading posts at www.reefcentral.com is practically a daily part of my maintenance routine as well. I won't divulge how much time I have spent there.

Comments

The 37 gallon system originated in 1998 as a fish-only system filtered and lit by a Marineland Eclipse III hood/filter (which is more or less inadequate for a reef tank). After about a week, I had five dead yellow-tailed damsels and a neato biowheel to watch spin. At the time I didn't know anything about reef tanks. I thought it was strange people spent hundreds of dollars on purple rocks.

Sad to say after the die-off I added two more yellow-tailed damsels. They did all right until the guy at the "bad" LFS told me it would take months to cycle with so few fish. He sold me three more damsels. Two days later, five more yellow-tails were dead.

Obviously something was wrong. One night it occurred to me there might be something about setting up saltwater fish tanks somewhere on the Internet. I read everything I could find, mostly in the alt.aquaria newsgroups.

A few months later my face was glued to the glass of my tank as I watched the live rock cure. Fortunately I found a small but excellent LFS, and the owner instructed me how to build and install a plenum with aragonite on top, before adding the live rock. I bought some test kits and was impatient when my ammonia still read .10 three months after adding the rock. I bought another yellow-tail damsel anyway. He lived. He still lives. My ammonia still reads .10. The test kit was wrong. I have no respect for test kits. It took me a year of weekly testing before I realized how inaccurate most are. I don't buy test kits anymore.

Christmas of 1998 I bought myself a BakPak II protein skimmer, a 2x55 DIY power compact lighting setup and The Reef Aquarium Vol. I. These purchases are probably why I didn't give up the hobby. I ditched the Eclipse III finally, and, with it, my hair algae plague. The tank started looking great even though it was mostly empty.

February of 1999 I made my first mail order livestock purchase for a clean-up crew. By this time, I had spent more than $1,000 on a 37 gallon fish tank. I don't like to think about how much money beyond that I've spent to date.

October of 1999 most of the corals were added from an order placed at Jeff's Exotic Fish The branching frogspawn, carpet anemone and sebae/long-tentacle anemone were purchased at the LFS, as were all the fish.

Spring of 2000 I added a 29 gallon refugium and 1x400 watt metal halide lighting.

Currently I consider this system to be 95% complete. I would like to add two more varieties of xenia to try and propagate for sale at the LFS. Several small green star polyp colonies have been cut from the mother colony and are growing about 1" in diameter per month.