Aquarium Update - Apr 21, 2014

Well it's Andrea here and I have been busy :)

First, I found that I am gathering lots of fish stuff and since I am not very fond of clutter I thought I would do some shopping to see if I could find a storage solution that will hide my mess but fit with the room. I dragged Geoff shopping and after a few trips to various stores here is what we came up with:

Since adding the 3 blue/green chromis, 2 clowns, and 2 cardinal fish, I started to get some algae in my tank. I decided it was time to get a clean up crew for my tank. Clean up crews are critters that eat algae and left over food and help keep your aquarium clean. There are tons of options, snails, crabs, star fish, sea cucumber etc.....

Since I have a wonderful husband and he gave me an early anniversary present, I am now better equipped to take pictures of the critters in my tank. A couple years ago, I got a Nikon D7000 camera for Christmas. It is an awesome camera but I didn't have a lens that would allow me to get close to the subject. I do now :) It is a macro lens which is what you need to take pictures of things that are quite close (NIKON AF-S DX-FORMAT MICRO-NIKKOR 40MM F/2.8G LENS).

I bought 8 snails (here is one eating algae off the aquarium glass):

I bought 2 cleaner shrimp which clean fish of parasites and clean up any meaty pieces of food that are left uneaten - they are hard to get pictures of as they like to hang out in the caves in my rocks:

I got a tuxedo urchin how eats algae too and seems to pick up all kinds of stuff on his spines:

And finally I got 4 blue legged hermit crabs (really small). They eat algae and left over food:

So most of the algae I had is gone and I am hoping the clean up crew won't starve.... they are awesome :)

I was playing with the camera and was able to get a couple pictures of our fish which is not so easy as they don't like to stay put :)

So I should have some more to post on the weekend, I am going to look at a tomini tang and going to a "frag swap" (basically a flea market for fish, coral and hardware) on Saturday.

Here are a couple other photos I took while playing with my new lens :)