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?