Nearly everyone knows that Unique Corals has been working hard to live up to its namesake over the last few years, aggressively working to source rare and exotic reeflife, and offering great SPS frags as well as colonies. The well-kept secret is that Unique Corals has been steadily working on a large, reef aquarium showroom in the front of their facility that has finally become ripe for full scale development.
Currently installed and running in the forthcoming Unique Corals showroom are two identical 500 gallon reef aquariums, that are each 34 inches wide, 29 inches tall, and 120 inches read 10 feet long! The other currently running tank is a 500 gallon cylinder aquarium that is 6 feet in diameter, and also 29 inches tall.
All of these tanks will eventually be joined by other “smaller” tanks that will be a modest 100 to 200 gallons and each of which will showcase different types of marine life. Each system has been designed with specific environments in mind to truly cater to corals, withuniquemicro-environments that go well beyond the community reef tank of mixed corals that we are used to in the hobby.
With my recent relocation to Southern California, I have been invited to be a “resident aquarist” at Unique Corals to help curate coral culture, species, strains, and generally nerd-out about corals. Perhaps the most special opportunity is especially to lend a guiding hand on the creation of the wonderful reef aquarium displays that will eventually populate the large show tanks of the Unique Corals showroom, culminating a really unique reef aquarium demonstration center.
Just this past weekend we spent approximately ten hours aquascaping the first of the three 500 gallon reef tanks and after just a few days, we already have a reef scene worthy of sharing with the public, although it will be months yet until the coral placement and selection is fine tuned. This tank currently includes 40 stony corals, 10 soft corals, 5 clams, four anemones and approximately 15 fish.
I spent more than 6 years working with about 12 various aquariums at my own house in Golden CO, each set up to test home and hobby-level aquarium devices but there’s a limit to what you can do on your own. With access to much larger tanks, and greater aquaristik resources overall, my new aquarium residency at Unique Corals will allow me the freedom and flexibility to take the Reef Builders product testing and general coralology to a whole new level.
We’ll be sharing a lot more on the progress of this and the other tanks over the next few months so sit back, feel free to critique, and look out for lots more great coral and reefing news from Reef Builders, now with even more “polyp extension”.
