I got a new piece of live rock this afternoon. I spotted a piece at the LFS this morning when I went to get some of that cool blue algae. The bit of algae was $15 and it came apart into clumps when I put it in the tank, so I’ve got a bit of it in a few places.
The macro-algae isn’t really blue, I think. I think it’s fluorescing under actinic lighting. Once out of the dealer’s tank it appeared to be a dark red. In sunlight and room light it appeared red. However there was red algae in the tank at the dealer’s and the red algae was still red, not blue, so the lighting didn’t color the algae, but instead caused the color to change (I think).
At home, in my tank, with it’s 50-50 bulb (the dealer had metal halide), the algae isn’t purple. It’s a very dark red with a faint purplish overtone. (Click for bigger images.)
Compare those two shots of the algae in the bag and in the rock of my aquarium to this shot I took at the dealer: Blue Macroalgae.
After I’d measured the back right corner for the rock I went back to the LFS to measure the rock. Unfortunately it was way too wide at the base. It was a lovely piece. 
But then I saw another “tall” piece laying horizontally in the back of the tank. When he pulled it out I saw that it, too, was a nice looking column—with an extra feature of a ledge near the top! It weighs 4.5 lbs, bringing the total amount of rock in the tank to 25lbs. I didn’t quarantine it; the quarantine tank is down, needing to be cleaned.
I bagged the sponge (sealed in a ziptop bag) because I knew I’d cloud the substrate some as I screwed the rock down into the substrate. Based on it’s height I think I’ve got the base near the bottom of the tank. It looks real nice. In the pics below….the left pic is the front view and the right pic is the side view. I’m thinking I can get some excellent “up close and personal” shots of anything that perches on that ledge ’cause it’s right by the glass. 
(Click for bigger pics.) You can tell the water hadn’t cleared when I took the side shot. (Sorry ’bout that!)
Here’s what the landscape of the aquarium looks like now:
On the far left back corner: palace rock. To the right of that and a bit more forward is cave rock, with branch rock (two pieces) stretching from behind cave rock to behind sponge rock and behind the Tonga rock which are next in line, left to right. (Sponge rock is the one currently with a sponge and the Tonga rock is where Elle the featherduster is. Belle hasn’t been out all day, so I changed the current a bit.) In front of Tonga rock is the barnacle, to the right of that against the right side galss is the algae-covered Fiji rock with the new Tower rock in the back right corner. 
This morning I did a less than 2 gallon water change. I shifted the sponge around a bit so I could get a pic of the “dead” area, and be better able to observe if it is enlarging.
The plug the sponge is growing on isn’t glued into the niche it sits in because I wanted the option to move it or remove it if the sponge didn’t do well. That especially worked out well since I could bag it entirely while the water was clouded.
None of the hermit crabs have yet discovered the new Tower rock. I’ll be interested to see if any of them go all the way to the top! With the acquisition of the algae and the new rock, it’s been a fairly eventful day in the 29-gal. mini-reef.
