This is the full list, including the things that went badly. I've tried to write what each animal has really done in my tank rather than repeat the care sheet from the shop, because the care sheets are broadly useless and the shop staff had never kept half of these either.
Dates are when the animal went in the display, not when I bought it — everything spends four to six weeks in the quarantine tub in the laundry first, which is a habit I picked up the hard way and will never drop again.
Display: 220 litres, 120 × 45 × 45 cm, running since March 2021.
Sump: 65 litres, three chambers, skimmer and a small refugium.
Current stock: five fish, four cleanup species, eleven coral colonies.
Amphiprion ocellaris · in since April 2021
Captive bred, bought as two small ones from the same tank so they'd sort out the pairing themselves. They did, within about a fortnight, and the larger one has run the right-hand third of the tank ever since. They host in a toadstool leather rather than an anemone, which I'm perfectly happy about — I have no intention of putting an anemone in a tank with pumps in it.
They spawn on the back glass every three weeks or so. I don't raise the eggs. The gramma eats most of them within a day and everybody seems content with the arrangement.
Gramma loreto · in since August 2021
The single best value fish in this tank. Picked a cave under the left-hand rock on day one, has never left it for more than a few seconds, and hangs upside down under the overhang looking cross. Eats anything. Has never once bothered another fish, which is not what I was warned about.
If you only ever add one small colourful fish to a soft coral tank, I'd make it this.
Ecsenius stigmatura · in since February 2022
Sits on a rock, hops to another rock, sits on that one. Grazes film algae off the back glass properly, which the snails never quite manage. Mine took about three weeks to accept prepared food and now eats from the surface with everybody else.
One warning: it is small, it is fast, and it will go through any gap in a lid it can fit its head into. I lost the first one that way in 2021 and the tank has had mesh across the whole top ever since.
Nemateleotris magnifica · in since November 2023
Hover in the flow above the middle rock and drop into a hole the instant anything changes. The pair took properly — they share a burrow now — but I understand that's luck as much as anything, and adding them at the same time is the only thing I did right.
Same lid warning as the blenny, more so. These are the classic carpet-jumper.
Roughly in order of how long they've been here. All of these are frags or colonies from local hobbyists or the two shops I use — nothing on this list came in as a wild collected piece, mostly because the aquacultured stuff has been consistently tougher in my hands.
| Coral | Type | In since | How it's gone |
|---|---|---|---|
| Toadstool leather | Soft | May 2021 | Unkillable. Now 20 cm across and the clowns live in it. Sheds a waxy film every few weeks and looks awful for a day. |
| Green star polyp | Soft | May 2021 | Grows onto anything it touches. Confined to one island rock with a 4 cm sand gap and I'd do that again. |
| Kenya tree | Soft | June 2021 | Drops branches that root wherever they land. I pull three or four a month out of the sump. |
| Zoanthids, four colours | Soft | 2021–2024 | The orange ones spread fast, the blue ones have barely doubled in five years. No idea why. |
| Duncan | LPS | Jan 2022 | Three heads to nineteen. Responds to being fed a small piece of prawn more visibly than anything else in the tank. |
| Hammer coral | LPS | Mar 2022 | Steady. Stings anything within about 10 cm of its sweeper tentacles at night, so give it room you can't see it needing. |
| Frogspawn | LPS | Aug 2022 | Slower than the hammer, otherwise identical in temperament. |
| Candy cane | LPS | Feb 2023 | Boring in the best way. Never once reacted badly to anything I've done. |
| Montipora, encrusting green | SPS | Jul 2023 | My first SPS that lived. Encrusts about a centimetre a month across the rock. |
| Staghorn, purple tips | SPS | Nov 2024 | The one that suffered through the alkalinity mess. Regrowing since March. |
| Birdsnest | SPS | Feb 2026 | Too new to judge. Has kept its colour, which is the first hurdle. |
If you want the background to why the staghorn kept burning, that's the whole subject of the alkalinity post — short version, it was the rate of change and not the number.
Soft corals for the first six months, LPS from about month eight, SPS only once you've watched your alkalinity hold steady on its own for a couple of months without you touching it. I did it in that order by accident and it worked; the people I've watched do it backwards have generally lost the expensive piece first.
Clibanarius species · ongoing since 2021
I say "about" because I genuinely cannot count them. They arrived as ten, several have died, several have clearly bred or been smuggled in on rock, and there are always heaps more of them than I expect whenever I shift a rock.
They do excellent work on leftover food and they will absolutely kill a snail for its shell if you don't keep spare empty shells on the sand. I drop a handful of small empties in twice a year and the murders stopped.
Trochus and Nassarius species · ongoing since 2021
Trochus graze the glass and the rock and can flip themselves back over when they fall off, and that alone is why I run them instead of turbos. Nassarius live buried in the sand and erupt out of it at feeding time like something from a film. Six of each in this volume has been about right.
Lysmata amboinensis · in since June 2022
Sets up under the overhang and the fish queue for it, which I did not believe until I watched the gramma sit still with its mouth open. Moults every few weeks and leaves a perfect empty copy of itself on the sand, which has given me a fright more than once.
It will also steal food out of the hammer coral's mouth with no hesitation whatsoever, so target feed the coral when the shrimp is busy elsewhere.
If your tank isn't running yet, none of this page matters yet — go and read the cycling log instead, then come back when the ammonia is gone. If it's running and the numbers are wandering, the alkalinity post and the top-off post cover between them almost everything I got wrong in the first three years.
Corrections are welcome and I cop plenty of them. If I have mislabelled something on this page, and I probably have on at least one of the zoanthids, tell me through the note box on the about page.
Glass Reef — a hobby diary typed up in a spare room in Brisbane, Queensland. Nobody sponsors it, there are no affiliate links anywhere in it, and there is nothing on it for sale.
Copyright © 2019–2026 Dale Prentice. Back to the front page.
Last fiddled with on 9 June 2026, when I added the birdsnest and took the wrasse off.