Tank birthday and I'm a Geezer

[Paul B]

It is big. My hands are just very big so it looks small. Tang police

 

[Paul B]

I found my pipefish, alive and well watching TV in the back of the tank. I still have the pair of bluestripes and the dragon face. I think the bluestripes had a little argument and decided that they would spend some time apart, but now they look to be starting the spawning dance again so I assume they made up. I have no idea where the dragon face went. Maybe Bayone New jersey as I couldn't find him for a few days. Unless he was fooling around with the female bluestripe as she is a cutie and a real tease.

 

[Paul B]

I just collected some mud for the bacteria on the South Shore of Long Island. The water is 45 degrees and the mud is loaded with amphipods. I will dump them in my tank tomorrow.

 

[Paul B]

Last night I collected some scurvy seaweeds, algae and muck from the side of a wooden dock on the south side of Long Island. It is now suspended in a net in my tank as I just want the bacteria and amphipods but not the slimy looking algae. This is another one of my methods that purists will say is going to crash my tank due to parasites, anthrax, Godzilla fry, invasive algae, etc. My tank depends on these infusions as I think bacteria is necessary and I also feel that it gets stagnant if you just have bacteria from a LFS. Of course this is also just something that bounces around in my head and may be completely wrong.

 

[Paul B]

I am not sure how long I will be able to keep acropora. My clown gobies spawn every two weeks but they only spawned on one of them. They destroyed it and there isn't much left of it and now they are spawning on the other larger one. Their eggs take up about an inch of tissue and it kills the coral. In a few months, they will destroy this one. I am taking it out of their salary.

 

[Sobo's Reef]

I have a green clown goby that would do the same except he wouldnt spawn. He would just live in the sticks Lol did it with birdnest, stylo, acros, etc. Cool but annoying bc it hurts the coral and in your case, kills it :/

 

[Paul B]

Yeah but corals are easy, how many people have a spawning clown gobi? As long as the gobi's are happy, the corals will grow someplace else. The fish don't really care how much they cost either.

 

[Paul B]

I have some time to just look at my tank and I like to do that with the pumps off. All the fish come out, the crabs look around in astonishment, the brittle stars peek out and the pipefish get a chance to hunt without their prey flying all around them. Occasionally I see some sort of amphipod make a B Line to the surface or, I would imagine, to a close friend. If he is lucky, and fast, he will make it. The pair of pistol shrimp come way out of their burrows along with the watchman gobi. They seem to be wondering what happened to the pumps and maybe could be of some help fixing them. The copperband darts back and forth because he knows that no pumps mean feeding time.
The very old fireclown stirs up the gravel with his tail to impress the smaller, younger female, but she plays hard to get and doesn't even notice him. Then he goes back into the bottle to clean out the detritus.
The pair of mandarins find it much easier to hunt in calm water and they take the opportunity to go to places where it is normally to turbulent to search for pods.
I can't tell what most of the pods are doing but you can see them climbing up from the gravel to the lower parts of the glass where I didn't clean. Maybe they find more food there or maybe they just go to hang out with friends. The possum wrasse seems to do cartwheels behind the rocks. I never figured why he does that but he seems to enjoy it.
The only ones who don't seem happy are the corals. Especially the LPS with the long 5" tentacles. They just hang limp and look very sad.

 

[Paul B]

I used to think it was so amazing that all corals would all grow those same little cement plugs on the bottom. Who would have thought.
The lights just came on in my tank and I was looking for something un orthodox to write about in this thread, but all I see is the aluminum DIY LED light fixture on the counter weight system. The 5' PVC venturi skimmer, the home made rocks and artificially aged broken bottles, the home made baby brine shrimp mandarin feeder, the DIY auto top off that is fed from my DIY DI chamber and gravity feed system and DIY reverse UG filter. Now I need to harvest the new born shrimp from the DIY shrimp hatchery and shell separator and get some blackworms out of their DIY worm keeper. Then I have to open the white worm farm and collect some whiteworms that supplement the mandarin to keep them spawning and I will shoot them near the mandarin with the home made suckie feeder thing.
But for the life of me, I can't find any un orthodox things to write about. Oh well, today I need to check out how much rust there is on the DIY stand and make sure the home made leak detector system under the tank and in the skimmer effluent bucket is working

 

[Paul B]

I got 2 bananna fish today, just because I can

 

[JRWOHLER]

Interesting little fish, almost impossible to find anything about them. (purple banana fish, Yellowstripe Threadfin Breams, Pentapodus aureofasciatus) Found all those names and still know nothing about them. So tell us where did you get them etc. Have you seen them diving?

 

[Paul B]

I got them here on the Island. They have a few of them but they guy told me they stay small, this site says they get up to 8" so I may soon have to get the fishing pole out.

http://www.reefs2go.com/product/F-MISC-BANANA/Banana-Fish-pentapodus-nemurus.html

I get all sorts of information about these fish which leads me to assume, that no one actually knows about them. I have found they get either 3" or 18" so there is a little variation there. I would get a bunch of them, but I don't need whale shark fish in my reef
http://s272.photobucket.com/user/aandtsociety/media/2009 collecting trips-/whip-tail-.jpg.html

 

[JRWOHLER]

Heck even the name is different than the one I found, I am sure they will do well for you as all the rest.
Very cool looking in any case.

 

[Paul B]

If they get big, I have a plan to get them out. Not a very good plan but a plan none the less.

 

[Paul B]

These suckers do eat a lot. They now compete with the coppperband which is the biggest eater by far. I still think the two pistol shrimp are spawning but I can't be sure, they just have that look on their eye stalks. Right now I have the pumps off because I always do that when I feed the tank. All the fish are out like it is the first day of summer. The dragon face pipefish is my favorite fish and right now he is eating new born brine shrimp from the surface. He learned that all the shrimp he didn't see at first head towards the light and congregate at the surface of the water. The mandarins see the shrimp up there but they are Sissies and only make it half way to the surface. Then they go back down to the feeder where they know there are shrimp. All the fish including the copperband and possum wrasse eat the shrimp, but it is just a small snack for them and doesn't even seem worth it. The bangai cardinals look silly with their big mouths eating baby shrimp. The clown gobies are still spawning and should really get a room as they are annoying me.

 

[Paul B]

I have to hold off on some UG filter maintenance for a couple of years as bluestriped pipefish don't survive typhoons. A couple of times a year I normally use my diatom filter to mix the gravel all the way down to the UG filter plate but every time I have done that, I lost the bluestripes. Their lifespan is only 2 or 3 years so I can't do it until they are gone. I can gently do some mixing but I think the bluestripe gills are so small that they get clogged during a really good storm. It is what it is.

 

[Paul B]

I decided to do a little maintenance today but I have to do it very gently as bluestripe pipefish don't survive these typhoons. Every time I have done this I lost them and they are a breeding pair so I want to keep them. Once or twice a year my tank depends on stirring up the gravel all the way down to the UG filter plate. Because of the pipefish I can only do a small section at a time so it will take all day. That is not a problem as I don't have to sit here and watch it. I just blow some gravel with my diatom filter, then go out someplace and wait for the tank to clear, then I do another section. If it were not for those pipefish I would do the entire tank at one time.
Of course I can't do a really good job unless I removed the rock and I am not going to do that as that was much easier before I started growing SPS which are very delicate but every ten years I like to at least try to remove some rock to do a better job. The fish love it. I have 4 diatom filters and out of the 4, I have one working model as the rest I use for parts. They are not really designed to work in salt water and rust badly. They are also not designed very well and leak like a sieve so I always run them in a large bucket. No matter how many times you replace the seals, they start to leak very soon but they do such a good job that I keep using them. When I get time I will design a better unit that will last.

 

[Paul B]

That diatom filter stalled and over heated before the job was done so I took it apart and cleaned the bearings. I also drilled large holes in the end plates of the motor and even drilled holes right through the brass bearings so I can put oil right on the armature shaft while it is running. So I ran the unit again and it worked well but there was more diatom powder in the tank than in the filter so I tore it apart again and noticed that the bag, which is basically paper that is glued together had a rip in the seam, oh I don't know, like the entire thing fell apart. So I got some thread and sewed the entire thing up and threw it back together. Now it works great. I don't remember how old it is but I pulled rusty anchors out of the Atlantic from ancient sailing ships that looked to be in better shape. I think they make these units out of the softest iron that they know will rust even if they are near a TV that is showing a National Geographic show about the Galapagos
Islands. This is not new for me as I have been dismantling diatom filters as long as I can remember which most of the time is last Tuesday. All of mine are sewed together or I had to make entirely new bags. They are a terrible design but they do a good job. Of course it is probably faster to just dump out the tank and start with all new water by the time you re build these filters.
Now my tank is so clear that you can't see any water so the fish are scared to swim.Dance

 

[Paul B]

My tank is running well, everybody is happy, the pair of pistol shrimp are still digging up the entire tank and toppling rocks, the clown gobies are still spawning and killing the acropora's, the fireclown's are still fighting/spawning and both of them hate the copperband but he doesn't care and takes great joy in antagonizing them, My favorite dragon faced pipefish is still looking very cool as are my pair of mandarins, the possum wrasse still hardly ever comes out and I may get another one so I will have two fish I never see and the bluestripe pipefish are in there someplace, but I don't know where. The bananafish are very bright yellow and real Snazzy. The arrow crab shed his shell and the Bangai's will probably spawn soon. Besides that, everything is as it should be.

 

[Paul B]

I think the LFS that I go to the most is going to go out of business. They raised their electric bill by 40% and I think that will push them over the edge. If that happens I have to travel about 3 times farther to get blackworms so I will have to build a much larger worm keeper so I don't have to go there as often. I think I will design a different concept to keep it more compact. But I hope the guy can stay in business as he has been there for about 30 years and he is a friend of mine.
If I can't get worms, I won't stay in the hobby.