Improving slowly

5/19/04
Since things were so dismal last time, I thought I’d give you a quick, more cheerful update. The clownfish are improving. They are perkier and have fewer spots than before. I’ve seen one of the cleaner shrimp over on the clown’s side of the tank for two evenings now, which is probably why the spots are fewer. Best of all, they really took to that shell I put in. They are actually resting inside it, not just hiding behind it. So far, the other citizens are surviving the lower salinity. Something laid eggs on the glass (reproduction is often triggered by adverse conditions, in a last-ditch attempt to keep the species going). We don’t know who laid the eggs--there are 3 different shrimp pairs, but their eggs are usually just released into the water, not placed on the glass, so that makes the most likely candidates the snails, which are very sensitive to salinity.

5/23/04
Here's the completed RO/DI system that my husband installed for me. I’m optimistic that soon the RO water will start to control algae, and who knows what else. The clowns are looking very healthy now and all fish seem happy in the low salinity treatment. The worms, however, have shown signs of distress. The hard tube worm hasn’t come out all week, and the soft tube feather duster has come out too much--its feathery head reaching way beyond the tube end, twisting and turning, until ultimately, the head popped off! This can happen and the worm still survive, so I haven’t thrown the tube out. I moved both tube worms to the (slightly higher salinity) quarantine tank in the basement in the hope they might recover if I could gradually get them back to normal salinity.

Multiple things going wrong

5/18/04
I’ve been putting off writing because the news is not good. The anemone was dead this morning. It had been ailing ever since Sunday morning—not opening fully, or at all, not staying planted. I would find it upside down on the sand and put it back upright, but it wouldn’t stay. I almost failed to get it out of the tank in time. Disintegration happens pretty quickly, and if you wait too long, you have a huge pollution problem. I lifted a stinky mess out with a net.

The really sad part is, I'm worried I killed it. Remember how in the last post, I said you are supposed to get the food to the mouth and it rolled down? Well, the next evening I tried gently placing a cube of fish right on the mouth, hoping he would take it up. Didn’t work. After dinner I got on my computer and there was an email from the dealer, warning me not to try to put food in its mouth, because you can damage it that way! This wasn’t in any book I've read, I had no idea. Of course, who but me would think to try this…you’d think I would know better. With animals, interfering too much is a sure road to trouble. The picture shows the clownfish before this sad event, enveloped in the blanket of her anemone, looking content beyond words. Things really looked good for awhile!

Of course, the anemone’s death is not the only problem, how could it be? The clownfish have ich. I noticed it when I got home from work yesterday. As it happens, the quarantine tank is all ready to use, the clownfish would not be hard to catch, I figured I’d simply take them out and treat them. I emailed the dealer just to be sure, and she advised against that, said leave them in and lower the salinity to 1.017 s.g. (normal is 1.025) all at once, and hold it there for two weeks. Said it has worked for her many times.

Like all things in this hobby, there is much controversy about this hyposalinity treatment. According to articles on the web, it is supposed to be 1) lethal to all invertebrates so should only to be done when there is no reef, corals, shrimp, etc.; 2) recommended to be done gradually over 36 hours; 3) kills the parasite during its swimming stage, which is a small part of its 30 day life cycle; 4) should be maintained for 4-6 weeks to be effective; and 5) is actually supposed to be 1.010, not 1.017 s.g. I know all this from reading about the treatment on websites that I have come to trust as having sound advice.

So whose advice do you follow, the entire life of the reef in the balance? You might think I’m crazy to have opted for the dealer’s approach, but she claims to have done it safely, and has beautiful tanks. Until people break from the conventional wisdom and find that something else also works, no progress is made. Or am I just lazy and following the dealer’s approach because it is easier? Well, I did make one concession. I didn’t lower the s.g. all at once, I did it over 24 hours, just finishing up tonight. I had one other idea. I added a large conch shell as a hiding place for the clownfishes. Without their anemone, they are very stressed and exposed to the harassment of the Coral Beauty. They needed a spot where they could hide, and this shell seemed like just the thing. I put it in this morning, and when I came home from work, the male was resting behind it, so I think it might work as intended.

Meanwhile the reverse osmosis supplies have arrived, and my husband is scratching his head, wondering how to put it together and why the directions are so minimal. It will be a big project to get that working, for sure.

Anemone and clownfish

5/14/04
I went to the fish store on Thursday after work, ready to bring home my clown pair and their anemone host. Since we’re going to be away Saturday, I wanted to have Friday to observe them and make sure things were ok. On the whole, I was feeling pretty good about the tank--things seemed to be healthy and stable and I felt ready for the next challenge. When I got there I told the dealer about the death of the bicolor blenny. This hadn’t worried me all that much, since I’d been blaming it on the feather duster incident. But it worried the dealer a lot. She didn’t buy the feather duster being the cause, and since bicolor blennies are generally hardy fish, she wondered if I had something going on in the water--pathogen, trace amounts of some contaminant, whatever. But the fact the firefish goby is still alive was a good sign, since they are generally prone to die off easily. It was ironic that the one time I wasn’t worried, the dealer was, which of course made me worry, too. But in the end, we decided I would take the plunge.

Let me introduce you to the new citizens. These clownfish don’t look quite like Nemo, as they are not the Amphiprion percula species but rather Amphiprion akindynos, hailing from the waters off Australia (although mine were captive bred). They have a white tail now, but they are youngsters, and will lose that as they age. Of course you don’t have to provide an anemone for clownfish, but I wanted to, despite the fact anemone are very difficult. The easiest type of anemone is the one I bought, so called bubble-tip anemone. An anemone is basically a sack around a gut. There is an easily visible mouth, into which food goes in and anything indigestible comes out (about a day later). They feel rather slimy, as they create a lot of mucus, and of course the tentacles sting as a protective measure (not noticeable by most humans, although some people are sensitive).

The first tricky thing is to place the anemone somewhere that it will be happy. If it is not happy, it will wander, albeit very slowly, in the only way it can, by contracting the muscles that form the sack shape. It wants its base to feel secure against a rock, ideally on all sides. But sometimes they back into an opening in the rock too far and then don’t get light and die (as you perhaps guessed, there is no brain). I did my best to place it in a good spot, and the thing was maybe the size of a tennis ball, all contracted, when I went to bed. The clownfish were not happy that it wouldn’t open, as the Coral Beauty was chasing them and they wanted the protection of the tentacles. They tried hovering among the anthelia branches on the other side of the tank, but that species has no stinging ability and really isn’t big enough to offer them shelter.

In the morning when I got up, the anemone was BIG. The diameter of the tentacle disk was maybe 6-7,” all floppy, and the animal had moved a few inches from where I put it. Later in the day it worked its way into a gap in the rock, so I had to push it out a bit and pull the rocks closer together. I think it is going to stay put now, but tomorrow will be the test. This evening I tried feeding it. You are supposed to get the food right on the mouth, but since the disk was vertical, the food rolled down. The anemone rolled up the lower part of the disk to catch it, and was slowly working the stuff toward the mouth, when along came one of the clownfish and helped herself to the anemone’s dinner. Apparently their mutually beneficial relationship does not extend to sharing food!

I’m sure I’ll get better at this. Here's a picture of the Caulastrea coral (left) with a single polyp in the middle that blew up like a balloon an hour or so after it got a direct hit of a substantial amount of food. The lights were out and I was using the flash, but if you look carefully you’ll see that one polyp is much bigger than the rest. BTW, the dealer said this coral is a colony of individuals, it is not a single organism, so the fat polyp got it all--that meal was not shared with the rest of the beast.

Feeding corals

5/10/04
Last night before bed, my husband peaked in the tank and called me down to see that the brittle star had finally moved from the spot in the rock where it has stayed ever since I released it in the tank 2 weeks ago. The bad news was that it went into the watchman goby/shrimp’s hole. We theorized that it could smell that big piece of tuna the shrimp had snagged earlier and dragged inside. Despite the fact the brittle star is supposed to be a scavenger, I had a few worried thoughts about the health of my goby and shrimp. The star emerged within a few minutes. It’s stomach didn’t look bulged, so I was hopeful it confined itself to tuna. In fact, this was proven tonight, because the goby showed up for dinner on schedule.

At feeding time tonight, a piece of flake food accidentally landed right in the center of a polyp of the green striped zooanthid coral (pictured). Thinking that would irritate it, I was just about to blast the piece off with my turkey baster when the fringes around the rim of the flat plate extended and closed around that piece of food. It was totally enclosed in about one second. Amazing to see. This is a soft coral that supposedly lives off the photosynthetic organisms in its cells, I didn't think it was one of the ones the dealer told me to aim food at. If the trick to success is that the food has to hit dead center, they may starve, because the spray of food never seems to get to the right place when I’m trying to aim it--today’s hit was not on the coral I aimed at.

The bicolor blenny has now been missing for 3 days and presumed dead. Did his incident in the feather duster worm tube kill him? We’ll never know. He was small enough that the scavengers in the tank could easily consume the body before I would find it, so its hard to say what went wrong.

Refugium making food

5/9/04
Today I finally spotted small, swimming specs in the sump. This is cause for rejoicing, because it means that the refugium and live rock have accomplished what they were supposed to and are producing small creatures that the corals/fish will find palatable. In a perfect setup, you place the refugium unit ABOVE the tank and let water overflow from there into the tank. In my setup, the refugium is below the tank, but the books say that a significant number of these micro creatures will survive the trip through the pump mechanism into the tank. I’ll have to take their word for it, as it is unlikely I’ll ever spot these tiny copepods and amphipods in the main tank. But it is looking more and more likely that when those feather dusters spread their feathers, they will actually catch something. This also means that one day soon I could bring a Christmas tree worm rock home. These are very small feather dusters that are maybe 1/2” high, scattered around on a rock, in multiple colors, hence the name. Because they are so small, you shouldn’t buy them until the reef is showing signs it is maturing and has plenty of nutrients in the water.

We were having tuna for dinner so I tried chopping it finely and feeding some in the tank. The pieces turned out to be too big (tuna doesn’t mash up very well) and were rejected by all but the shrimp, who grabbed chunks and held them in close and backed into various caverns to pig out. I always aim some food at the watchman goby/shrimp pair, but never see the shrimp come out for food. He did for the tuna, though--hauled a chunk of tuna half his size into the house.

The anthelia coral that was half wilted and half healthy has come back to all healthy. The dealer postulated that it was being irritated by algae. So I used the turkey baster (my most common aquarium tool) to blast away algae for a few days, and it has responded to the treatment quite well.

The photo is of the scooter blenny. He is hard to photograph as he is well camoflauged. This little guy hardly swims at all; mostly he "walks" on his fins.

Needing Reverse Osmosis

5/8/04
This week I didn’t buy any fish, but did pick up two corals. One is a stony coral that looks a bit like saucers on a tree (called candy cane coral for some bizarre reason--sure doesn't look like a candy cane!), the other is a ricordia, a type of mushroom that has lots of little tentacles instead of a smooth surface like the blue mushroom has.

Last time I wrote, everything seemed to be going wrong. A few things have turned out to not be as bad as they seemed. Remember the bi-color blenny backed into the tube worm? He was still in there when we went to bed. Next morning, however, he was very pale-colored and curled in a corner of the tank. The worm , meanwhile, had emerged. The blenny stayed in the corner all day. By the next day, he had resumed normal activity and color, and has not, so far as I know, been inside the tube since. Did the featherduster sting him somehow to get him out of there? The dealer has never heard of such behavior, so who knows? The entrance to the worm’s tube is collapsed a bit, but he still manages to get his feathers out to feed, so we have an apparently happy ending to that saga.

When I was cleaning the tank Friday, the missing watchman goby and his shrimp buddy emerged and proceeded to re-excavate their home. They have shown up for mealtime ever since. Where have they been? Apparently right in that hole with the collapsed entrance. The shrimp that does all the work is only about 1/2” long. Pretty funny to watch such a tiny creature kicking so much sand out the door.

We’ve decided to break down and buy the Reverse Osmosis water treatment. The guy who was going to lend me one never came through. It appears that success with a reef tank will continue to elude me until I have pure water. The red slime algae (which are actually cyanobacteria feeding on the excess phosphate) clearly irritates the corals, and the fish don’t eat it. Strangely, I’ve had to start feeding nori seaweed because I have insufficient green algae now for the fish. The cyanobacteria are smothering it. The price of doing reverse osmosis is making me cranky (we even have to get a booster pump because our water pressure is too low for it to work), and the logistics of installing it is going to make my husband cranky when it arrives. You have to connect it to the cold water line, add the pump to increase pressure, heat the water to 70 degrees, get it through the RO filter, store the clean water on the other side, store the waste water (for watering plants, washing clothes, whatever), install a float value to shut everything off when there is enough RO water, route any overflow of waste water to the septic system....have I forgotten anything? Oh yes, find somewhere to put the equipment and storage bins in a house that is already packed to the gills, and hope that the well doesn’t run dry. Are we having fun yet?

Blenny finds a new house

5/5/04
Monday I went to a meeting of a new reef-keepers group that has just formed in central Maine. I don’t have to drive far to attend, but some of these people are driving over an hour just to talk to other marine aquarists! Anyway, the topic for the night was how to keep a culture of phytoplankton alive so that you can use the phytoplankton (which you can’t see) to feed zooxanthellae (which are barely visible specs), which in turn you feed to corals. Mind you, when I was contemplating getting into this hobby, the local dealer said the creatures in the live rock provide all you need in the way of micro coral food. Just 10% water change once a week, and enjoy that healthy reef forever!

The enjoyment meter is running pretty low, as the death of the tang this weekend has now been followed by the disappearance/probable death of the watchman goby/shrimp pair. They have stopped appearing for food (2 days now) and the opening of the den is all full of sand. Then the bicolor blenny decided the tube of the large featherduster worm was just his size. He backed in, cleaned up the lip a bit, and hasn’t emerged in two hours. What about the featherduster? Well, it was alive and feeding this morning. Apparently it is unable to assert ownership of its house, or has moved out (if so, I can’t find it) or is dead. I took a picture of the blenny peaking up over the rim though. When I approach, he backs in deeper, so I don’t think I can get him out by being assertive.

The anthelia coral, which I have had for a month and was growing very well, has split into a healthy component (right side in picture) and a dying component. These aren’t plants, of course, but it sure looks like the stems and leaves of a plant, just wilted right over on the left side, while the right side continues to wave in the current, oblivious to the adjacent (and perhaps encroaching?) distress.

Guilt

5/1/04
Sad to be writing again so soon, but I have to report the tang died today. Yes, my impatience did him in. He got sick with marine ich, I had no quarantine tank to put him in, I hoped that the good outcome from when the dwarf angel got sick would be repeated, but it was not, and he just got worse. (Interestingly, he never parked himself near the cleaner shrimp like the dwarf angel had done, and when he was accidentally near them, they ignored him.) I knew better than to do this, I should never have bought him until everything was ready, I feel so guilty! There is a chromis missing, too--whether jumped or died, I have no idea, but gone. Of course the tang had to lie down under all the rocks to die, so I had to take half the reef apart to retrieve his body (which would have badly polluted the tank had I not gone after it). It still amazes me, BTW, how small a space in the rock a marine fish will swim into.

On a more positive note, I moved the ailing Hawaiian featherduster to a more sheltered spot, and it came out of its tube almost at once and stayed out a long time, so I’m hopeful it will be happier in this new location.

Tonight while trying to aim some food at the little watchman goby / shrimp pair I accidentally blasted with the turkey baster a little too hard and closed the mouth of their home with a blast of sand....so much for dinner. They have since re-excavated. I’m sure they didn’t appreciate the extra labor (or lack of dinner).

Was a gorgeous weekend here. I need to have the marine tank start taking less time so I can get gardening done! I don’t know how much longer till things stabilize. Right now, the algae / citizen balance is off--not enough eaters. A tang or two would likely have solved that. But no way am I going to try a tang again without having the quarantine ready, and that tank sits stubbornly at .05 nitrite. Plus even when I get one, the quarantine period lasts weeks. So it looks like I have to keep on being a one-woman algae cleanup crew for awhile.

More New Citizens

04/30/04
This new coral is called an "open brain"! This one has a mouth (actually, several mouths) and I’m supposed to squirt food in the direction of the aperture once a day. Feeding time is getting complicated, trying to make sure everyone has his due. The tiny watchman goby/shrimp pair that lives in a hole in the sand has to be fed near the hole because they won’t wander far from safety. I’d aim a squirt of food at them, which was working great until one of the fire shrimp (about 100 times bigger than the shrimp that lives with the goby) figured out what was happening. Now he hovers around the hole waiting for the squirt. His presence keeps the goby/shrimp from coming out. I tried luring the fire shrimp away by feeding some elsewhere first, but that only worked once--that is one smart shrimp.

Despite all my elaborate preparations for a good quarantine tank, the filter still isn’t mature enough to take new fish. With saltwater fish, you have to wait for zero nitrites, and I’m not there yet. The fish I was waiting for didn’t make it anyway (dealer had shipping problems). Still, I felt compelled to purchase a tang that had arrived in last week’s shipment. This particular type (a Kole tang) is billed as the best type for consuming algae (not that I’m obsessed with algae or anything). Of course, the fact the fish has been alive and ich free for a week is not any guarantee he is ok, so I did take the precaution of releasing him in the refugium, so if he does get sick, at least I’ll be able to catch him. (I won’t think about the fact that if I need to treat him for anything, I don’t have a tank to put him in.) As a further precaution, I bought two more cleaner shrimp to put in there with him. Yes, I should have been patient and waited another week, but I’m not good at patience. Also bought a Scooter blenny today. He runs along the bottom on his fins, really cute. Plus a Firefish goby.

This picture is of an Abalone I’ve had for weeks but seldom see. Today it was clinging to rocks in just the right place. His body is oriented vertically in the picture. Look for the row of vent holes in the shell. To the left of that, you’ll see the feelers that come off the fleshy part. It is amazingly strong. Several times I’ve tried to move him to a different rock so he’d eat the algae on the other side of the tank. I grab him when he looks precarious, and that muscle instantly grips so hard!

I did a heavy cleaning today in preparation for family coming to see the tank tomorrow. I hand gathered lots of slime algae from the sand, then when all the debris settled, siphoned off some more. Monday I’m supposed to get a reverse osmosis unit (on loan from another aquarist) that will give me a chance to see if using RO water makes a dent in the algae. And, whether running an RO unit will waste more water than our well can spare. These units are notorious for throwing away 4-5 times as much water as they purify.

Brittlestar

4/27/04
The suicidal chromis from last episode did make it, at least for awhile. I returned him to the main tank the next day and everything seemed fine. But yesterday when I got home from work, a small body was found in the protective grill around the overflow. Was it the same one, a little weaker than the others after his rug sojourn? Or did he really hate tank life that much, and like Nemo, was willing to risk all to escape? Boy, thoughts like that can make you feel guilty about having a fish tank....(If any of you haven’t yet seen the movie Finding Nemo, do go rent it, it is marvelous. The rumor is that many well-meaning--and presumably unsupervised--little kids flushed fishes down the toilet after seeing the movie, to let their charges go home...)

There is another new arrival to tell you about. Last Saturday I returned to the shop and purchased a brittle starfish that I had seen there Friday but didn’t want to buy until I researched it more. (Normally I shop on Fridays so my husband won’t know how much money I’m spending....did I say that? I meant so he won’t have to wait for me while I spend hours talking to the dealer and deciding what to buy.) Anyway, this fella is black on top, reddish on the bottom, with rather thin, octopus-like arms with little spikes all over. The arms are more like thick strings than what we normally think of when you say “starfish.” The dealer said they are hard to sell, because after you buy one, you never see it again as they can get into very tight spaces. But the book said they are pretty great scavengers because they can get food that is stuck in the small spaces none of the other creatures can reach. Right now he is in the refugium, as I wanted to be sure he was ok before placing in the reef. Took the picture right after putting him in, before he had time to hide.

My Coral Beauty dwarf angel finally took a bite of flake food! Mind you, she spit it right out afterwards, but this is a big step up from approaching the food, then doing a rapid backpedal when she decided it might bite her. She’s been eating algae, so I haven’t been too worried, but she would starve on that eventually, so this is an important step. Maybe by this weekend, she’ll even swallow the stuff!

The dealer thinks she has a tang of the type I want coming in this week. I got a larger quarantine tank set up in anticipation of this. You’ll recall that when I had the ich emergency a few weeks ago, I set up the 10 gallon, but that isn’t big enough to keep a tang in for weeks, so I emptied that and put up the 20. Tangs are the most sickness-prone of all the marine fishes, so you have to be really careful, and a 4 week quarantine is really the minimum.

Suicidal chromis

4/23/04
I was hoping to buy a pair of clownfish today, but the dealer said they have to be added last because of territory issues. But I did bring home a school of six green chromis. These are youngsters, maybe 3/4”, but will grow to 2” or so and are one of the few marine fish that get along well enough in an aquarium to buy more than one. Plus, they are cheap and hardy, what more could one want? Hardiness was proven almost immediately. After I got them settled into their new home, I went to enjoy a well-earned cup of tea. When I came back, I had only 5 chromis! When schooling fish are nervous, they stick together, so there was no way one had just gone exploring on his own. I could think of only two things--either he went into the overflow box (which a grate is supposed to prevent), or jumped out. Sure enough, I found a small body on the rug behind the tank after a minute or so of looking. When I touched it, there was movement, so I gathered him up carefully and placed him back in the water, where his body drifted downward, horizontally, to the bottom. NOt looking good....but within 15 minutes he was vertical, and when I came home from yoga, he was swimming around!

The other new arrival is a bi-color blenny. Cute little thing, about 2.5”, a rock dweller. He backs into the smallest imaginable holes in the rock and just pokes his head out to look at you. I bought him because this is one of the few fish that eat red slime algae, and I have that kind in spades. He proved his worth by taking a bite of it shortly around dinner time. Now if I had maybe 10 of these, the tank might begin to look good! I’ll have to wait on a picture of him until he is braver. Right now the basslet is harrassing him so he is staying in his hole.

On the decoration front, I added a piece of red branch macro algae. I also took a picture of the whole thing, so you could get a distance perspective.

Timing is Everything

4/18/04
This week I didn’t buy any fish, but I did get some more invertebrates and had some more misadventures. Talked to the dealer about my worries that the current is too strong, or too weak, or just not right. She made some suggestions for how to aim the powerheads (that's the device on the upper-right side of the tank in the picture, with some still-attached mushrooms below), and then we talked about the mushroom that you may recall fell off its rock and got buried by the pearly jawfish last weekend. It’s been lying on the sand ever since, seemingly happy, but not very pretty looking in among the algae. I wanted to get it reattached to rock. So the dealer went over the steps for doing this with superglue, and I came home fired up to try it. I placed my new invertebrates ( a green striped zooanthid and a new feather duster), then puttered around with the current until I had an arrangement that seemed to not blast the worm tendrils.

Then I moved on to my next mission, reattaching the mushroom.....except, where’d he go?? Ah, timing is everything. If you’re going to play around with blasts of current, best to nail down moveable objects FIRST. I hunted all over for that thing, even got out the ladder so I could feel around behind the rocks. No luck. That night, I had the idea to use the flashlight, and with that method, finally found the thing inside one of the rock caves. Today I dug it out and successfully glued it to rock! Six hrs later, it is still attached.

Came in from gardening today to find the entire tank powerless--no lights, pumps, heat, nothing. A little airline filter that we had jerry-rigged had come undone, spitting water down the power line, shorting out, and the ground fault protector once again kicked in and saved the day. Not more than a few drops on the floor this time (but another reminder that we really should move those books out of the basement). Anyway, we got it all working again (first rule of marine fishkeeping is have a husband who understands equipment) except for the heater, which would turn on but gave wild temperature readings. We tried drying it with the hairdryer, to no avail. But after dinner, he took it apart and restored it to working order. You are supposed to have a “drip loop” in all equipment so that the water, if it flows down the cord, won’t get to the electrical end. But you should try doing this with 15 cords plugged into two power strips!