[km133688]

pledosophy, here are some details of my tank for your comment.

I have a 125g. It has a 3 inch sand bed (was a 6 inch sand bed in my prior 55g). There are 4 KUDA horses, 2 tomatoe clownfish, 1 yellow headed jawfish, and 1 firefish (today there are also three banggai cardinal babies who have survived my care in this tank for 10 days (woohoo!) but that is another story).

The tank has 160 pounds of live rock. The rock is layed out in the tank to create two zones. Specifically 1/3 or the tank is for the horses (left side) and 2/3 for everything else. The horses have about 4 square feet of free space to mate and they dance all the time. Most of the rock was used to create two walls to pen in the horses. The back wall is used to hide intakes of filter pumps etc. The right side wall is essentially a divider. Neither wall is impenetrable it seems as the horses hide in the back and occassionally swim over to the reef zone where there is some amount of algae on the side glass and correspondingly lots of pods eating off it.

There is no lighting over the seahorse zone, and 500 watts of MH over the reef zone. Lighting in the seahorse zone is what ever makes it in from other sources. This lack of direct lighting and an area of high lighting elsewhere in the tank has resulted in zero algae growth in the seahorse zone and no algae on the horses.

The reef zone contains softies. Many mushroom variations (purple, blue, red, green etc.), ricordea Yuma, colt coral, finger leather, green star ployps, polythoa... You get the idea. No calcareous corals of any kind, several large feather duster worms, various forms of macro algae, and three small 10th generation bubble tip anemones for the clownfish pair to host in. It is almost comical to see the mother clownfish try to bury herself in one of the anemones because she dwarfs it a bit.

Water flow is very low which is one of the reasons I don't keep calcareous corals, and is provided by one magnum 250 in the seahorse zone, and one magnum 350 filter in the reef zone, and one rio 600 on a phosban reactor on the border of both zones. I run carbon all the time, and phosban (or some equivelant) all the time. I plan soon to put a skimmer in the reef zone, and to replace the magnum 350 canister filter with a UV canister filter.

I feed mostly frozen mysis since all my fishes eat it hardily. I feed horses on the left and everthing else on the right and they don't compete with each other for food. The clownfish stay in their anemones, the firefish hides in under a rock, and the jawfish hovers 2 inches over his hole (also uder a rock). I have started feeding additional items recently to increase my pod levels and offer something the the baby banggai. I feed cyclopeeze, oyster eggs, and one helping of baby brine shrimp in the evening.

Temperature is controlled with an air-conditioner in the room and two 200 watt heaters in the tank. Temp stays between 76 and 77.

Thats the basics. Is this some of the info you were looking for?

Kevin