When you have more than one reef tank to look after, it’s easy to let the style and arrangement of the corals, and the maintenance, slip a little bit. This is especially true in fish stores with lots of displays where it might be hard to prioritize your attention to the smaller details.
While visiting自然水族馆in Melbourne, Australia last week I was invited to spruce up a Red Sea Max 400 aquarium in their show room. Functionally this reef system was in great shape, the animals healthy, but it had turned into a catch-all for a variety of mixed shrooms. The showcase animals in this reef tank were anemones but they had long since crawled all over to wheretheywanted to go.
Thankfully Nature Aquariums had just received a huge shipment from three of Australia’s best coral suppliers so there were lots of corals to aquascape with. The first item on the agenda was to remove all the loose rubble and floating shrooms and put them somewhere else in the shop – another advantage of scaping in an aquarium stores is that there’s lots of extra tanks to shuffle corals around.
一旦所有不必要的珊瑚都被去除,我就将少量的分支岩石安排在一个我认为最有利于制造独特的aquascape的结构中。对我来说幸运的是,主要的岩石是一块固定在一起的几块岩石组合,因此这确实是这种礁石aquaScaping改头换面的基础。
Without using a single ‘show specimen’ of coral, several clusters of common corals were arranged to create a scape which has a prominent feature that is noticeable from across the show room. Besides the regrouped bubble tip anemones, a grouping ofPocilloporawas created to form the left side of the pinnacle. For supporting actors I made a little grouping of PrismGoniastrea在前面之一,几个迷宫Goniastreaon the other side, and a small field of long tentacle plate corals behind them.
Once the aquascape was completed one of the finishing touches was to add a little bit of carbon to the sump to help clear the water. The final step was to add one more Hydra 26 and positioning it over the light-lovingPocillopora为了确保它们变得坚强和明亮。
I wasn’t sure which direction this reef scape was going to take but over just under half a day of letting the display ‘speak to me’ this messy reef was turned into a show tank that I hope will serve as inspiration for visitors to Nature Aquarium, as well as reefers who are interested in doing something more aesthetic with their own tanks.