I was reading about your marine tank experiments. I'm not completely familiar with marine or reef tanks, but a friend of mine is VERY much into them. It looked like you were using macroalgae. I recently came across a site about doing a "planted" marine tank using sea grasses. I was wondering if you were experimenting with anything like that. I could imagine such a tank looking quite beautiful!


http://home.comcast.net/~slardizabal/

There are many species and forms of seagrasses, they are variable in culture, some are very difficult to grow, while others are relatively easy.

They are very suitable for tanks, Samantha wrote a good overview article on Reefcentral about them recently and she took a number of things I've learned and applied them.

Give it a read, I'll hunt for the link etc.

Regards,
Tom Barr

This may be the link to the article that Tom was referring to.

http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2006-04/sl/index.php

Bill

That's a fantastic article. I think I would like to try this kind of tank as my first marine tank. Time to start reading up on marine! :-)

I want to set up a 180 gallon tank that is part seagrass, part reef. I've been reading all I can on the topic, and it appears I should mix mud into the bottom 2" of substrate in the seagrass portion. However, I want to keep a small colony of jawfish after the seagrass is established. Won't they dig down to the mud level and cause it to be distributed all over the place?