Shot a couple of video clips of out 180g saltwater reef tank and thought folks may enjoy watching the flurry of activity that is our pride and joy. Converted them to .wmv format so they can be viewed with Windoze Media Player or Xine.
Full Tank
Our old digital camera took a crap on us… not sure what happened.. tore it down a as many pieces as it would come and didn’t see anything obviously wrong with it… oh well too bad it was only a year and a half old. But I picked up a new one anyhows. Goofing around yesterday and managed to snap a pretty decent shot of one of our new colony of zoanthids that lives in one of our saltwater reef tanks.
Since our rather large saltwater tank loses a tremendous amount of water each day due to evaporation, the more water evaporating increases the salinity of the remaining water in the system, so after reviewing a bunch of different designs I created my own Automatic Top Off system to replace any evaporated water automatically. No more lugging 5 gallon buckets of water up from the basement each day!!
Since I’ve never seen a system designed like mine I’ve adopted the name DATO (Dakar’s Auto Top Off) for my design 
Here’s a simple drawing of how it works, for more info look at the DATO thread on Captive Reefing.
Feel free to adopt my design, or adapt it to fit your own needs.
Yesterday afternoon around 2pm I called in an order to Dr’s Foster & Smith for some ‘bloomers’ for our female Springer Spaniel. She just had a litter of pups a few months ago and is again coming into heat, so she’s getting some fancy britches to wear for a couple of weeks to ensure she’s not bred again! Yeah yeah yeah who cares, the cool thing is the order arrived at 11am this morning! For some reason they shipped FedEx Overnight (with saturday delivery), but charged me for standard ground (5-7 day) delivery. Gotta love that place, they have everything for all of our critters! Even slipped in a couple of new pumps for our saltwater reef tanks with the order. They are only a couple hundred miles from us and we have to pay sales tax on everything since they are in state, with shipping like this why bother driving?
Of the last 5 orders from them in the past 8 months or so 4 of them have been shipped overnight without my request or paying for it, but never a saturday delivery 
More phone/mail/net order companies should take note of this and follow suit.
After setting on a long waiting list Angel finally got her Sailfin Tang. She’s just plain gorgeous, thought I’d share a good close up picture.
and here’s a shot of her in our tank, don’t let the picture fool you about the size of things, the sailfin is a little over halfway full grown, about 8 inches long now and will get to be over a foot long. This tank is a whopping 6 feet long (180 gallon).
And yes, we are completely out of our minds… but we love it. Next tank will have to be 300+ gallons
