New rock and stock in the 50!

I received the 50lb box of Key Largo dry rock yesterday and had a pretty good time laying it all out and figuring out how we wanted to arrange the rock. The rock itself was ordered from marcorocks.com and there was very little breakage during shipping, probably a small handful of rubble which was nice actually. It's very heavy rock and is practically a big system of holes and tunnels. Some may not like it but I thought it looked neat! Anyway, Carly decided on a 'cove' style build so I measured the tank and laid out some paper on the bar to the size of the tank and started putting the rock together. Here are some pics of the rock, there was a pretty good sized large piece and several mid-sized chunks and a few smaller pieces. Good thing I only ordered 50lbs because more would have been too much for the display with what I had already.





A few pics of the rock actually inside the tank. I was afraid I might bury some snails and hermits but I think they are all still there. A note here on setting up a reef. You really want to have the rock in there BEFORE you put the sand in, but due to budget constraints that didn't happen so I buried them in the sand as much as possible so that anything making a tunnel underneath it (gobies/shrimp) might not get crushed from an avalanche. Water was of course milky for a few hours but then everything started to settle and by the next day it was all clear.









I actually had ordered a few critters and a fish from an online source and got free shipping thanks to Nathan Paden (padens.com) and the guys and gals over on the Lubbock Reef Club (lubbockreefclub.com) because it was a group order. I got an Emerald Crab, a Peppermint Shrimp and an Eyelash Blenny. After I finally got them in the tank after the Fedex truck was 2 hours behind, in this cold no less, I was skeptical that anything would survive, but they all are doing fine so far and the Eyelash Blenny is a hoot to watch! He definitely has some personality and the wife and kiddo's really like to sit and find him in the rockwork. He seems to get really curious when someone is around the tank and peeps his little head out and looks around with the most silly looking face I've seen on a fish.