Hello, new member!!

[drufrog]

I hear that!!! Reefing got too expensive but I see this as having a dry land reef with the exotic plants. I am very excited to do plant research on the different broms, ferns and even aquatic plants.

[JimO]

I'm a reef convert myself, but I still keep a small reef set up (27-gal bowfront) with mostly mushroom and soft corals. It's been stable for over 8 years and with some lighting adjustments and hair algae control measures, it has really improved recently. I even have a moon coral that had died back to about the size of a petri dish (half its skeleton) and now it is actually growing back over the dead skeleton. I also have a bubble tip anemone that went from healthy brown, six inches in diameter, to a white pathetic looking thing the size of a quarter. With my new high output T-5 fixture, that darn anemone has recovered its symbiotic algae, looks great and is back up to over half its original size. My maroon clown fish is much happier.

I just can't part with the reef, but now I have seven dart frog vivs as well. One thing I like about the dart frogs is that losing power isn't a crisis. I had to buy a substantial generator a number of years back when all those hurricanes hit Florida. We were out of power for a total of about 11 days over a 2-month period. If if wasn't for the generator, I would have had a stinking mess. Five days straight without power in a viv probably wouldn't permanently harm the plants and the worst thing might be changing out some stagnate water.

Oh, and welcome to the site. Do your research if you want dart frogs. They aren't hard to keep as long as you understand the conditions required and the limited number of some species that can be kept in a single viv. If you would be content with a pair of the larger terrestrial species in a 20-gal long or 29-gal, then dart frogs are in your future. But, it's like a reef tank with the frogs being the fish and the plants being the corals. You keep fewer fish in a reef setup, but the corals and inverts are just as interesting. I was never a plant person, but the viv plants have really grown on me (no pun intended). Former fish folks who liked lots of fish in their tanks often don't adjust well to dart frogs.

Feel free to ask questions. We like to help people.

Jim