Eight months latter and the tank has life, in fact a bit more than we want in the form of what we are calling Green Hair Algue aka the stuff we hate. 

It took an aweful lot of begging, the writing of a starter-up grant, and hours of research, but the tank is up and running. This year the students are even more excited about the project than last year. The students are looking forward to propagating live rock which is one of the highlights each class leaves for the upcoming class.

It is going to be exciting to see what interesting forms of life they plan to introduce to the aquarium they inherited. They have a few hermit crabs, snail, damsels, a watchman goby and two clownfish. We are planning slowing down a bit on the fish to focus our attentions primarily on inverts and corals.

The down side of things these days for us lie in a profound hair algae issue. We did not pay it much attention until it started spreading onto our coral. We have since increased our snails, crabs, and added three urchins, but the problem still persists. (The algae is not pictued yet.)

Other than using some form of chemical, which we do not want to do, any other ideas?