Sinularia "bubble"

8/29/04
The old refugium is finally out of the living room! It seems to have a good population of copepods and amphipods already, plus I have seen a reduction in the red slime algae problem. Whether that was due to the new mud substrate, or some other factor, I can’t say for sure, but it is encouraging.

On the way back from Portland, we stopped at a new marine fish store that opened just a few weeks ago. As luck would have it, they had Pseudochromis springerii, a beautiful fish that I have been wanting for some time, and thought I would need to order via the internet, which is expensive (because of shipping) and risky. Better still, this was captive bred. Of course I had to buy it, we wouldn’t want that store to go out of business, would we? My new fish is still in quarantine and pretty shy, so pictures have to wait. But she is about 2.5”, midnight blue, with three aqua-blue stripes on her head.

Speaking of shy, the bicolor blenny that I bought a few weeks ago, who was initially very shy (in the picture, right side), is now very satisfied with his room with a view at the top of the mountain. From here, he surveys his realm (the backside of the anemone’s rock) and ventures forth to snatch tidbits of algae. When he is tired of his room, he rests on top of the powerheads. Yesterday I even saw him on the far side of the tank, but normally he stays closer to home. He has got to be the cutest fish in there.

The sinularia (the same one that closed up and stopped feeding for 2-3 weeks during the summer) has now developed a “cancer” —a balloon-like growth that looks like it needs to be popped! Very curious. I have posted a picture on a marine-fish forum on the internet to see in anyone has any advice.

This weekend I set up the new tank. It will be awhile before it is ready for fish. The new refugium for the back of it is due to arrive next week. Since I’m planning to put a jawfish in there, and they dig, we made some rock supports out of PVC pipe. These should keep the rock from collapsing no matter where the fish makes its tunnel.

Xenia on the move

08/22/04
About one more week to go and I can clean up the living room and get rid of the extra refugium. I’ve got a decent supply of copepods running around in the new refugium. I’ve finished planting Caulerpa algae in there. It is time to sit back and watch to see what happens. I’m gradually removing the old refugium from the flow now, increasing the “out” time by 2 hours a day. I don’t really need the quarantine tank in the basement for awhile either, so I’m going to take that down and move the few shrimp that are in it upstairs. This weekend I moved the remaining worm rock up. There has been no sign of the Aiptasia anemone for a long time, and the worms are dying, so I figured I’d move it before it was too late and hope they recover. Worms seems to be so tricky for me!

I’ve been watching one of the xenia move from the rock it was on when I bought it to a different rock. These things look like trees, so it is so surprising to see a tree up and move itself. A step takes weeks so it is hard to visualize! It begins with the xenia having contact with an adjacent rock. The contact point is about halfway up the stem. Apparently higher is better, and this rock offered a way to get higher. First the midstem gripped the new rock, then the base followed. There is no residue that I can see on the old rock, it seems to have made a clean break. Thus this was not a reproductive act, it was just a relocation. The picture captures this step about half-way through.

Having seen this was possible, I got creative with another stem that was too close to the sinularia. It’s base has been edging away, such that the base is half in mid-air and half on the rock. I placed another rock next to it. As I guessed, it is now edging toward the new rock. Once it is completely on it, I’ll lift it away to a better spot.

Another xenia (the umbrella one), has split itself in half to reproduce. Right now the split is almost complete, there are just a few strands connecting the old and new animals.

I’ve been busy planning the seahorse tank. I decided I really wanted to get a jawfish again. I had one early on that died. These are the guys that dig in the sand to such an extent you really need to make sure the liverock is well anchored. I never got another jawfish for the main tank because I realized my rock was nowhere near stable enough. For this next one, I’ll be better prepared. This will be a small tank with simpler setup. Seahorses don’t like much current, so normally there is not much in the way of corals in with them. Without corals, you don’t need a powerful pump or bright light. What you do need is a well-stocked refugium, because seahorses eat all the time. Their digestive system is very primitive, so they are always hungry. The refugium inhabitants help to supplement the owner-provided food. This time the refugium will be “upstream” in that it will empty directly into the tank, rather than having to go through a pump first. They make small acrylic refugia that hang on the back of the main tank. Water is pumped into it with a small powerhead and it overflows back into the tank from the other side. The unit is about 4” wide, 20” long and 12” high.

Always something to worry about

08/16/04
“What is that smell?” A day after installing the new refugium, we began to notice a smell. I couldn’t place it, but was worried. I ran a few routine tests, everything seemed ok. About 1:30 a.m. last Monday morning, I woke up suddenly thinking I knew what it was. (Just before waking up, I was dreaming that a wall in the house had collapsed from the pressure of water and a giant wave swept everything away, but THAT dream is not what this story is about, that is material for a shrink someday…)

Anyway, I woke up realizing that the smell was like the smell we used to get when the live rock was curing—sort of like rotting flesh and salt mixed together. If that was the smell, then maybe the refugium mud had dead creatures in it, and maybe their decay would raise ammonia, nitrite and nitrate, all not good for my reef. Really worried, I got up (yes, in the middle of the night) and ran tests for all these things. (When I told my friend Lisa about this one day, she said “and you call this hobby FUN?”). Fortunately these three tests were negative, and stayed that way in subsequent days. I’m happy to report that today, a week later, the smell is almost gone, small creatures are starting to multiply in the refugium, and I’m looking forward to the day I can disconnect the old refugium.

Thinking about that, though, I realized I have a lot of live sand in that old refugium that I shouldn’t let go to waste; i.e., I can’t just take it out and drain the water, cause all the good guys in it would die, and someday I’ll need them. And someday I want to do a seahorse tank. So maybe I should take the old sump (a 10 gallon) tank, and put the old refugium sand in that, throw in salt water, a heater, and filter, and just keep it cooking till I need it. And just to figure out what I do need to have seahorses, I ordered a book about them today. All good projects start with a book.

In the meantime, I’m ready to take down my failure freshwater tank that is in my office. I never succeeded in controlling the algae in it, but thankfully, the other, 50 gallon freshwater tank has been a success. My son and daughter in law kindly took some excess freshwater fish home to Washington with them, so I can drain this puppy and scale back to just one freshwater tank, one reef tank, one saltwater quarantine tank, and one live sand holding facility. I have never known a holding facility to be empty for long. Stay tuned.

New Refugium

8/08/04
Installing a new, mud-based substrate refugium/sump on an existing aquarium takes planning and a little nerve, but I’m happy to report that this weekend we appear to have successfully pulled it off. The old refugium is now running (sitting on the living room rug) along with the new (installed in the cabinet). We’ll leave it like that for a few weeks, then gradually remove the old until the new one is handling it all. We’ll have to put up with a strange-looking obstacle in the living room in the meantime, but the health and happiness of the fish, invertebrates and corals is what counts!

I decided to get rid of the old refugium because it felt like an accident (of the wet kind) waiting to happen, and because I wanted to be able to observe the life of the refugium through a clear-sided container. Since I was doing this anyway, I also decided to try a mud substrate, as I had read so many positive reports on using mud.

We bought a 30 gallon (12x30x16) glass tank to house the new goodies. Using plexiglas and silicon, we glued panels to divide the tank into an input chamber, refugium (with 2 low strips to stabilize the mud), output chamber, and sump. The water enters the input chamber by tubes from the tank, moves from the input chamber through a slot about halfway down the divider, flows through the refugium, leaves there by overflow, then goes through a slot at the bottom of the last divider to the sump, and finally gets pumped to the tank. (The plans for this came from Ecosystem, whose mud we were using.)

Previous to the move, I made up an extra 20 gallons of salt water, and bought some additional PVC pipe and elbows for the extra distance the various pipes would have to temporarily travel. We estimated the tank system would be down for no more than an hour, but it turned out to be 2 hours. We pumped out the old refugium to within an inch or two of the substrate (enough to be able to lift it), emptied the sump totally, pulled out the sump and old refugium, and placed the new tank in their place.
We poured in the mud (20 lbs made about 1” deep bed, probably a little less than it should be). Using a plate to keep the mud from getting stirred up, we added salt water to the mud chamber. While that was settling, I cleaned the pump impeller (it had been in use 6 months, it was time anyway) and we plumbed the pump in its new spot.

The plan called for bio-balls in the chamber that receives the tank water and the one that takes the refugium overflow. The purpose is not to provide a home for bacteria as is usual with bio-balls, but rather to prevent algae and detritus from moving out of these areas into the refugium or pump. I’ve never bought bio-balls before, but apparently I got the wrong size, because they were so small (about ¾”) they could go under the Plexiglas divider. Later we discovered that wouldn’t be a problem, because they float, but they floated out of where they belong whenever the pump stopped. I solved that by putting chaetomorpha algae across the top of them to hold them in place. While that seems to be working, and I think the algae will like the constant flow over the top of it, I do wonder how this is supposed to work in a system from the manufacturer as opposed to our homemade version. It seems like even with bigger balls, they would still float. I have never actually seen the manufacturer’s version, I am working totally from pictures and diagrams.

I poured the remaining water from the old sump through a net to catch any stray amphipods that were there and return them to the new system. We initially by-passed the new refugium entirely while the mud continued to settle, and plumbed the overflow from the tank into the old refugium, which was elevated and sticking out into the living room so that it could drain into the new sump section. The tank has two overflow hoses, so after an hour, we let one hose go into the new refugium to add it to the system.

The next morning, we replumbed so the entire outflow from the old refugium goes to the input chamber for the new. We’ll gradually remove the old refugium from the mix over a period of weeks. When it is all the way disconnected, I’ll have to do something to try to gather amphipods from the old sand substrate, not sure what, yet.

One fish (the chalk basslet) decided to jump out before we even got started (he must have seen all those water containers and decided he’d go live in a different one!). Fortunately, we noticed him lying on the rug before any harm was done. During the process, the fishes suffered through a lot of air bubbles until we got the pump flowing correctly, and inevitable cloudy water, but seem none the worse for wear. The bubbles problem was solved in minutes, the cloudiness was gone in a few hours.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the new system. I was able to turn the pump (Magnum 18) up to full flow for the first time. It is quieter, much tidier, there is more room in the cabinet (or will be, when the old refugium is not an obstacle), and I can SEE to observe the macroalgae and the critters living among it.

Aiptasia

August 4, 2004
Did an order from a place in the Florida Keys--a couple who collects mostly plants, some smaller animals and ships nationwide. Mainly I wanted macro algae for stocking the new refugium we’re making, but I also bought some glass shrimp (small beasties to breed and provide food for larger beasties), a new brittle star, some worm clusters, a whole bunch of small snails and micro starfish. All this is basically to improve the cleanup crew. Oh yes, and 3 hermit crabs, despite all my conflicting feelings about those things. The hermit crabs were so small, I promptly lost track of them and can’t say if they are even alive--time will tell!

The sender warned that the worm clusters might have aiptasia anemones on them, so they should be quarantined. I did quarantine them, and they do, indeed, have aiptasia on them, so the problem is, how do I get rid of the aiptasia so they can go in the main tank and look pretty? Aiptasia are small, virulent anemones that spread so quickly, they can take over a tank in no time. Once you have them, getting rid of them is nearly impossible. The books say various things will eat them (easiest for me would be peppermint shrimp), but that even when they appear to be gone, they may not be, and will come back from some spec that the predator missed. So on reflection, it was dumb to buy these clusters, because I think they will have to live in quarantine forever! (And I don’t know if I’ll keep a quarantine tank set up another month, let alone forever!)

A recent article in a magazine on uninvited aquarium guests talked about aiptasia, as well as a nasty isopod that kills fish by attaching to their sides at night and sucking blood or even internal organs. This creature is typically a hitchhiker on live rock, but may arrive by other means, and one of those means could easily be among the fronds of macroalgae that some fool woman just bought from the Keys! The Keys order arrived Wed., and I bought the magazine that talked about these things just two days later. THAT gave me plenty to worry about. One clump of macroalgae went in the quarantine tank, but the other just got rinsed in saltwater and dumped in the refugium. When I saw a bunch of small creatures swimming around in the rinse water, I dumped them in too--didn’t want to waste what I assumed were amphipods and copepods, because they are good guys for making fish food. But any one of those guys could easily have been an isopod. Marine tanks are not conducive to peaceful sleep!

I took my son and daughter in law over to the local dealer to show them her large tank (6’ by 2’, 180 gallons). They studied it carefully and declared it was too small; I need to make my next tank 8 feet! While there, I picked up a bicolor blenny to replace the one that died months ago. It was one of my favorite fish, the way it backs into holes and looks at you. I also bought a new Sinularia that is greenish and has many small branches, unlike the first one that has a few thick fingers (pictured in upper right).

I continue to battle cyanobacteria algae without success. We hope to get the new refugium/sump installed next weekend, and “they” say that over time, that should help keep cyanobacteria in check. We shall see. I’ll take pictures and describe the sump conversion project next time.

Hermit crabs

7/15/04
To follow-up on last week’s episode about the sea cucumber, it seems healthy and happy. Since shedding its skin, it looks darker gray, and maybe bigger, but I can’t be sure about the bigger part, since these guys look way different depending on how stretched out they are.

I’ve lost another blue-green chromis (probably jumped, but can’t find a body). Down to four now... I bought some plastic grid that is used for lighting (they call it “egg crate”) with the thought of putting it on top of the tank, but I keep hesitating. It would be a real pain, not easy to get on and off, and I have my hands in there quite often (glass has to be cleaned daily, for example).

Last Monday, I had a really LONG day, leaving in the morning to go to Portland, then meeting fellow reef-club members in Waterville at 5:30 to car pool to Bangor to see the tanks of a member who definitely has caught the bug pretty bad--he has 7 tanks, and has only been doing this a year and a half. He sells his excess corals so I brought along a cooler to bring stuff home, just in case. I didn’t get back until 10pm.

As luck would have it, he had a few unusual colors of zooanthids. I currently have two colors: a green one with long tentacles and a brown with orange centers. Unlike many corals, these guys can mostly grow against each other without complaint, so if you mix colors, you get a nice “garden” as they merge. I bought a pink one of normal habit and an unusual multi-colored one with mixed green center and neon orange rim, small sized, on a branch of coral. To complete the garden, we need a lawn for contrast, so I bought a small piece of star polyp coral. This spreads all over the place, each polyp is thin and never gets tall, so it looks grass-like when it covers the rock (that will take a while, of course).

Finally, being a blue-lover, I had to get a blue ricordia. My existing ricordia is green. The blue one (3, actually, on the one rock) is very small.

I was very tempted by the hermit crabs. I have always thought these were neat, and he had a whole fleet of them, blue-legged and very interesting to watch. The local dealer, however, if VERY opposed to hermit crabs in a reef tank, saying that they kill fish and snails. One day when I was there right after she got a new shipment of blue-green chromis fish in and I was going to buy some, I noticed that half the fish were dead. When we examined the bodies, they had slash marks on them. The dealer said there had to be a hermit crab in there by accident, that they go after the fish at night while they are in the reef sleeping. She began picking up snail shells until she found one that had a crab in it and removed it. Contrary to this, all the books say hermit crabs (especially the blue-legged ones) are exemplary scavengers that do a great job of keeping the reef cleaned up. They claim that a hermit never kills a snail unless it needs to get a new shell and the aquarist has failed to provide any. So you just need to put a good selection of various sized shells (got plenty of those!) in the aquarium and the hermit will select what it needs as it grows and all will be well. Soooo, there I was in Bangor watching these cute little guys, and I saw a hermit side up to a snail, turn it over, and start clawing at it! Now I can’t say for sure there was a snail inside, but the snail in question had a much smaller shell than the one the hermit currently occupied, so he can’t have been looking for a new house, and in theory he wouldn’t be clawing at the snail if the shell were empty....This definitely gave me pause, and in the end I decided not to buy one, for now at any rate.

Sea Cucumber

July 11, 2004
The sea cucumber cleans the sand by eating it, removing whatever nutrients are attached, and ejecting it from the other end of its body. The hole in the center of this picture shows the exit end of this simple creature. The rest of his body is hidden under the open brain coral.

Tonight, the cucumber is shedding its skin, or at least, a layer of its skin. Not knowing that this might happen, I naturally headed to the books, where I learned that both healthy and unhealthy sea cucumbers may shed skin. And not just skin. They are also prone to “that nasty little habit of evisceration when a stressed animal sends its guts, gonads and potentially every part of its entrails out of its anus or mouth, depending upon which way the wind blows.” The follow-up to this activity is the regeneration of all these organs. The danger for the aquarium is the pollution all this causes. The book advises that you promptly remove the expelled items. Ok.....hope it is done shedding by bed time!

I finally found an internet site that has seaweed available for sale. Since most marine aquarists are interested only in the animals, not plants, very few people have seaweed, and I’ve only seen two species available locally. Both of these I have bought, and you may recall that a month ago I was worried the red bubble one might be unsafe, and I relegated it to the quarantine tank. I have since been able to get it identified and learned that it is safe to keep in the main tank, except that the tang would consume it all, so I have it in the refugium and pick a stem from time to time to give to the tang. Anyway, I’d like to have lots of different types of seaweed for visual interest, and also because with enough thriving seaweed, the tang, in theory, would eat a balanced diet and they would grow fast enough to keep him happy and well fed.

Speaking of food, I’ve been worrying about the overfeed/underfeed problem. My tendency is to overfeed--can’t let my citizens starve! And since some of the corals need to be fed, too, it can get complicated distributing the evening meal to everyone equitably. If I feel someone got left out, I grab more food and sling it over. This overfeeding is probably the root cause of my ongoing cyanobacteria algae problem. So I’m really trying to cut back. The corals aren’t supposed to be fed every night--every 4th night is about right, so “they” say. But since I couldn’t keep track of whose turn it was, I had been solving it by giving a little every night.

Did some more reorganizing of the live rock, trying to get better spacing and surfaces to put corals on. I think I’m finally happy with it (until next week, anyway). Of course, the corals grow best if they are undisturbed, you aren’t supposed to keep rearranging. But until you find exactly the right spot where the light is right and the current is right, they aren’t happy and don’t open up properly to feed.

The little guy in the picture is my lawnmower blenny. Cute, isn't he? Next to him on the right is xenia coral, and on the left, the green bubbly stuff is ricordia.

Anemone thriving

07/04/2004
The anemone has amazed me this week. I’ve had to move corals out of its reach, as its extension is fully 10 inches. The “foot” tube has moved forward a bit so it is not so far tucked into the cave, and the top of the disk seems like it is climbing the rock behind it, reaching for all those things I have yanked out of harms way. Portions of the Caulastrea coral that were touched by the anemone’s tentacles looked withered all week, but now seem to be recovering. Only the anthelia has remained adjacent to it, because I’m not detecting any signs of harm so far. One evening this week, after mealtime, the anemone tucked into a ball. I hadn’t fed it that night, yet I imagined it was digesting a meal from the look of it. I started counting heads, and couldn’t find the basslet. The basslet is only 2”, I figured he had become a meal for sure. But the next morning, he showed up, so I guess he’d just disappeared into the rock for awhile.

Got a great picture of the emerald crab, which is cute to watch. These crabs sit next to a patch of algae and pick up little bits with their claws, which are blunt on the tip to make this easier. They just shovel in one bite after another, while I cheer them on, since they are getting the bits the snails can’t reach. I have a total of 3, but you can never find them all at once.

The deep sand bed is showing signs of life. The lower 4” is very fine, compacted sand. The idea here is to have an anaerobic environment to reduce nitrates into their component parts. I have started to see tiny tunnels in this deep portion. If you look carefully, you can see red, 1 mm specs traveling along these tunnels, and one spec can even pass another going in the opposite direction.

My courage about the murex (from last week’s edition) quickly dissolved into worry until I finally removed it from the tank. It is living in the refugium. Not all murex, I learned, are carnivores, but there is no way for me to be sure about mine. It occurred to me that by the time I found out his true nature, I could easily be missing my favorite tube worm, and I’d be mighty upset if that happened!

Every morning I put a “sandwich” of dried nori seaweed and either lettuce or spinach (from the garden) onto a rock and secure it with a rubber band. I lower this into the water and watch the feeding frenzy. The tang and dwarf angel are the primary eaters, but the cardinal fish and lawnmower blenny also frequently show up, as well as the clownfish. The food is gone in under 15 minutes. Mind you, there is always algae visible on the rocks, it is not like there is nothing to eat in there! But apparently THAT kind of algae is not as tasty as the stuff I buy, go figure.

Cardinal fish and xenia

6/25/2004
One last buying expedition to report on. I’m unlikely to add significantly more fish from here, except for the odd replacement (like getting another bicolor blenny some day). Went to the dealer’s to return the big rock that the anemone had been stuck on when I bought it. I’d been debating all week whether to buy a pair of cardinal fish that had been part of the tank contents the dealer had bought from the discouraged aquarist I told you about last time. These odd-looking fish are nocturnal, but in an aquarium them tend to abandon that habit to a large extent. This was a good chance to get two that were known to be compatible, and I took the plunge. This fish is on the far right in the picture above.

I also decided on a nice-looking pulsing xenia (illustrated). This type of soft coral is readily available, but I’m getting smarter now about the size and type of rock they are planted on, as a difficult piece of rock makes for difficult placement in the aquarium. This piece had several stalks on a rock just the right side to put a cap on a cave in the live rock in my tank. Finally, I picked up a cluster of tiny worms. As you might have figured out by now, I’m very partial to worms! When we collected seashells in the Florida Keys, I was thrilled when I found some great worm rock shells; now I’m equally thrilled when I find a good live worm. This cluster is several very thin tubes, quite small, each with a tiny swirl of feeders, pretty cool.

There was a pretty black snail in one of the dealer’s tanks. She didn’t know what it was, or whether it was reef safe. It had come in by accident in a shipment, and she had kept it to see what it did. In the month she had kept it, it hadn’t caused any harm. I decided to take a chance. When I got home, I put my shell collecting books to good use figuring out what kind of snail it was. Turns out to be a West Indian Murex, which, according to the book, eats snails and barnacles and the occasional soft coral. So, not sounding promising in the safety department. And yet, it is worth taking a chance for a while to see what happens. I read a magazine article recently about a type of anemone that has been labeled a “fish eater” for decades. The author decided to try to keep some in his tanks, and found that this statement was false. There must have been some incident that started the statement years ago, but subsequent writers had simply perpetuated it. I’m not saying my Murex won’t eat corals and snails in my tank, I’m simply saying I’ll consider it innocent until proven guilty. Today a small snail was crawling over it, cleaning algae off it. I thought, “watch out, buddy, here be a possible dragon.” Too bad I can’t post a warning sign to the other inhabitants!

This picture is the Sinularia coral. This was my first coral, but I haven’t posted a picture until now. Early in the month, I mentioned that it had shrunk up and refused to open and feed. This lasted for nearly three weeks. I thought it had surely died, and even asked the dealer how you tell if a coral is dead. Then one weekend while I was in Portland, it shed all that gunky algae and sent out the feeder hairs like nothing had happened.

The new tang I bought last week was taken out of quarantine and added to the tank when I put in the cardinal fish. It went really well. To catch him, I used an acrylic trap--just an open-ended clear container with some food in it. When he went in, I covered the opening with a net and it was a relatively stress-free capture. Then I introduced him to the tank during dinnertime, so the other fish were busy eating. I didn’t think he would eat that night, but he did. So far, he is getting along really well with the others. Tangs can be really bossy, this is why you add them near the end--otherwise they think the entire tank is their territory and you can’t add anyone else. Only the Coral Beauty had any differences of opinion with him, as he took over her favorite cave. But it was reasonable--he is bigger than she is, so he needed the biggest cave to fit inside it! Like the Coral Beauty, he is hard to photograph, as he moves very fast and spooks easily, but he is visible just to the left of center in the picture at the top.