Continuing our tour of the new reef tank in the Schad Gallery at the ROM.  Part 1 is here.

One of the things that quickly became apparent was that no expense was spared in building this aquarium.  There was a beautiful tank room that would make any reefer worth his salt envious.  Not only was the space clean and organized, but it had just about every toy imaginable.  Like I said in my previous post, there wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but there was certainly thought behind the design.  There are a few things I’d nitpick, but the overall design of the tank was excellent.

It’s been reported that Big Al himself forges these overflows from the tears of reefers who own SeaClones.

The only alarming thing in the room was the salinity bin.  I don’t know if this is the final step in the water change process, but 1.022 is low for a reef tank.

Little does Vlad know, but he’s being stalked by a pair of Solaris LEDs.

Enjoy the rest of the pictures!   Coming up next is the video.  Our editor monkeys are still editing furiously.

Last week Vlad and I got a backstage tour of the new aquarium at the Royal Ontario Museum.  It’s remarkable because it’s one of the first public reef tanks in the GTA.  The only other one I know of is at the Toronto Zoo and while I haven’t seen it yet, I’ve heard it’s more of a fish only tank.

The bad news first, I didn’t take enough photos.  I spent some of my time just looking at the setup trying to figure out what everything did.  I also now know why there are any full tank shots out there; it’s too big of a tank to take in one photo.  No worries, we shot some video that is furiously being edited by specially trained monkeys.

We were given a tour of the tank and its workings by Mary Burridge.  We are grateful she took time out of her busy day to give us the tour.

It’s gratifying to see large tank set ups and see how similar your home tank is to theirs.  It’s also nice that no expense was spared when building this tank.  Everything under the sun (including the Solaris) has been put into this tank.  The setup is modern, with simple and natural filtration being the choice here.  The refugiums are full of pods and macro algae.  The only questionable choice in terms of filtration are the bio balls.

This setup has resulted in big, fat, happy fish.  There was a Regal Blue Tang that followed me across the tank, begging for his picture to be taken.  A healthy Naso Tang was the clear boss of the aquarium, while smaller fish like Anthias, Gobies and Hawkfish darted in and out of the rocks.

The coral was a bit of a letdown.  It was common (Big Al’s) fare.  There were no show stoppers in the collection and some of the SPS looked like they were on their way out.  This could be because of the lighting choice:  Solaris LED fixtures.  I would have rather seen 4 400W metal halides with some high quality reflectors like a Lumenarc.  That would probably help the blue carpet anemone that was stubbornly parked at the bottom of the tank.

Enough talk, here’s some pictures.

The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto has opened a new gallery and it features a 550 gallon reef aquarium. There’s not a lot of information outside of press releases; not even pictures of the aquarium itself that I can find. There is however, a pretty cool behind the scenes tour of the tank from a show called Daily Planet. It seems to be mostly about acclimatizing the fish for the tank, which is pretty interesting in itself.  Does anyone have more information about the tank?

Well its Friday, and almost 20′C. What a way to kick off the pre-weekend (you have to be positive for Friday). So for today, we will try to keep it light and digestible.

Everyone likes tank tours, so for today we want to show you Chris Morris’s website that focuses on many systems in our Toronto area. Its a small sample of what we have here. Please enjoy watching the videos responsibly, as the corals you are about to see may harm your wallet .