Been a long time!

Just noticed my last post was almost 2 years ago, decided to place a small and short update on what has happened.
Well the biggest reason for the silence was a busy life. Got a new job that costs a lot of time, also got a little girl little over a year ago and all this resulted in less time to spend on the aquarium.

The Red Sea Max is still running, although it has been neglected a bit. Besides the time pressure being a reason for this also a plague of flatworms are a cause. All buttons have died and many mushrooms are suffering. Currently I'm trying to put it to a halt and picking up the RSM again.

The 60 liter crab tank is gone now, it will be replaced by a 30 liter aquarium in the future, but all inhabitants are located elsewhere now (some of them in the RSM).

So that's it for the small update, more information hopefully soon!

Battle against Aiptasia

For some time now I’m having issues with Aiptasia in my frag/crab tank. It’s not the first time ever that I have Aiptasia in a tank, got it in the Red Sea Max at a rather early stage. Back then it was sufficient to inject them with boiling water. I tried Peppermint Shrimps a couple of times but they never been much of a success. Never noticed them even bothering with the Aiptasia and they always disappear within a very short time never to be seen again.

So now I have Aiptasia in the frag/crab tank. First I started injecting them with boiling water again, but I couldn’t reach all of them. Another problems is that the conditions seem to be better for them in the frag/crab tank, because they expand rapidly. Using just boiling water just wouldn’t do it.

I decided to get a couple of peppermint shrimps, just give them a try again. But after a couple of days again no trace of them anywhere and Aiptasia was still growing like crazy. What other options do I have…use a non-natural way with potions. Aiptasia eating fishes weren’t really an option, the tank is too small for that and the Nudibranches are way too expensive, people charge 15 euro’s a piece for them.

I decided to go to our local fish store and buy some Joe’s Juice, claimed by many to work perfectly. Followed the instructions, not killing too many at once, release near the mouth of the Aiptasia etc. And I noticed the Aiptasia shrinking away when it came into contact with the Joe’s Juice. Succes!! But unfortunately a day or two later they were back where they came from. It was too good to be true. I did keep on using it till every drop was gone, but unfortunately at that point the Aiptasia was still there.

I was about to just say f*** it and just leave it there, but then I saw an ad on one of the forums where someone offered 4 Berghia Nudibranches against a reasonable offer. He agreed on 40 euro’s and even got me 5 Nudibranches instead of 4. I slowly transferred them into the frag/crab tank taking no risk of losing them because of a rush or anything. After an hour of slowly acclimating I tried to release them, 3 of them I put in a shotglas and inserted the whole glass in the tank and 2 that didn’t want to let go of the cup I got them in I placed in the tank by hand. One of them immediately went for one of the Aiptasia anemones and killed it. They really worked! But I guess now is the hardest part, being patient. The Nudibranches don’t show much, I saw one of them this morning again, so they aren’t dead yet. Here is the picture I made this morning.

Hopefully I will see some results soon now, and if I’m lucky I can resell any offspring when my Aiptasia plague becomes less.

3 Years In The Life Of...Introduction

This year I’m heading into my fourth year of keeping a salt water aquarium and I thought this would be a nice moment to look back at what happened and share those experiences in a couple of posts.

I will start off with this general piece followed by in depth experiences and information on all inhabitants I have at this moment.

Haven’t had many bad experiences, except for little things like anemone plagues, Planaria outbreak and some switches in water values. The Red Sea Max 250, my first salt water aquarium, has had all these plagues but has been mostly stable for three years now. It has been rebuilt once in that entire period, but maybe a second rebuilt is coming up…who knows.

Since a year or so I have a small tank which I use for coral frags and crabs. This aquarium gave me more problems getting stable, this was mostly because of small budget and lack of patience. However it seems to be stable right now, even though I am experimenting quite somewhat on it.

And then the latest plan that is currently running is the building of an entirely new crab tank that will also have some room for frags but will focus less on that. Also it’s yet unsure if there will be a small aquarium below it to support more room for frags and maybe a mantis in the future.

I haven’t spent much time yet on the technique, I will be focusing a bit more on this now. The Red Sea Max is of course pretty much complete, was no real need to look for lighting or anything since it was all there. But with the upcoming aquarium I will try to get an energy efficient and well running system, testing several options for lights etc.

The series will start with the Fish, followed by Corals and Invertebrates. After all inhabitants have been covered I will do some articles on some technique I have been using as well as issues and plagues I have had in the last three years.

I’m aiming for an update each week, so stay tuned.

Seneye Reef device

For my birthday last Friday I got a Seneye Reef device from my parents. I’ve been looking at it for some time since it seemed like a nice handy device to me, and now I finally have one.

When I wanted to try it I got disappointed by the fact that the card need to soak in water for 48 hours, this also limits you to one aquarium with one device.  At least so it seems for now…

I installed the software on my pc and put the card in my aquarium to soak.

The Seneye device has couple of ways to work, one is directly on a pc that is turned on. This way it will constantly update the server and track your water values.

Another way is through a USB->Power plug. The Seneye device keeps track of all settings but will not sync them with the pc or your website until you attach it to your pc.

Third and my preferred way for the future is on a Wifi device. Downside is that you still need your pc to sync the values with your pc and site, but it saves power. This is something that needs some thinking and planning on how I will make this work.

After having the card soaked for more than 48 hours and the device charged for more than 1 hour I put the card in the device and put it in my aquarium. It didn’t take long till I had my first values, Ammonia being 0.001, PH 8.35 (little bit high) and temperature 24.8.

Unfortunately it seems the website doesn’t play nice with IE8, so I needed to download and install Firefox to get it to show.

Once you get on the website (your personal site) you get all sorts of graphs. First is the NH3 value, this seems to be a constant 0,001 on my crab tank.

Next is PH, this was rather fun to see, in the morning the values are around 8,13 but towards the end of the morning values go up to 8,60 even. It also gives you an idea on what to expect for the coming time.

Same goes for the temperature, you can see the graph go up and down during day and night.

The PAR and LUX values I’m not sure on how to read these, maybe someone has an idea on this how to read these? It looks very nice though :p

The above values are available for your reef overview, here you can also see these values for any other devices you own. When you click the device name itself you get some more values.

First is the O2 value, for my aquarium this was around 7.9 to 8.2. Never measured this before so no idea if this is good or not.

Next is NH4, also an ammonia value. No idea what is good with this as well, it differs greatly, from 5.21 up to 14.18.

Last is the Kelvin value, also a value to do with light, this doesn’t seem to work very well yet on my device. But for the values to do with the lighting, I will dive into this more later.

So far my experience is good with this little thing. More information will follow.

Shopping

Last weekend been shopping again. I ordered some Reef Rack from a store in The Hague and ended up with much more than just a reef rack.
They had these awesome looking buttons for sale, since most of the buttons in the Red Sea Max got lost I decided to buy them, also with the new tank planning I could find a nice spot for them. So now it is still located in the frag tank until I figure out how I’m going to use it.

I also got 2 peppermint shrimps to help me clear out the aiptasia in the frag/crab tank. It is really getting out of hand and I tried so many things at this point. Started with what helped in the RSM, injecting them with boiling water. When I couldn’t get all of them I bought some Joes Juice and used that on them, but this seemed to make things worse rather than better. I had several big ones and now I have a lot of small ones. Time for some shrimps to bring it to an end…if they survive. Because for some reason I never seem to have luck with peppermint shrimps.

Then I got 4 Bumble Bee snails, just because they are small and useful. 2 of them are in the tank itself and 2 in the sump.  See how they do their work.

And my last addition are 2 Electric Blue Hermit Crabs. One of them moved to the Red Sea Max and the other is in the Crab tank. My wife liked them as well, so it was a good move.

Saturday I also cleaned both tanks and rebuilt my sump to function as a fragtank together with the actual tank. I already bought an external skimmer for the new tank, and placed it now on the sump. I also received a filter pump (external) and LED lights so I placed those on the sump as well. Don’t know yet if the LED is sufficient, so currently the corals in the sump are for testing purposes. Hopefully I can built everything I want in the new tank up in there, it would save me work.

Sleeper Gold Head Goby died :(

Yesterday our Sleeper Gold Head Goby died. My wife tried to save him by catching him when he was stuck against the overflow and put it in the crab tank. But when she told me in the evening and I took a look I saw him lying lifeless on the bottom.

I don’t know what did it for him, my wife said his fins seemed damaged so maybe another fish took him on, however he seemed very skinny to me, so maybe he couldn’t find food and starved to death. We will probably wait with another replacement until the dottyback is caught.

Someone was very happy however with the fact that the goby died, this was my Lophozozymus edwardsi. I figured since the poor fish died anyway he might as well serve as food, but where he was located the crabs couldn’t reach. So here is a movie of how the crab enjoyed my goby.

Now before people start saying that crabs eat fish…yeah they do, by they (mine at least) don’t bother with them until they are dead or very weak. They basically eat anything you smack in their face :p

Long silence, but I didn't stop

Been a long time since my last post, reason for this is new job that takes a lot of time and some issues with the aquarium. The first part is now under control, only the issues still remain.
The RSM has lost many mushrooms and buttons due to the Planaria. We are now at the point of "restarting" the whole plan since we now are back on track with cleaning etc.
The fragtank will be replaced, work has started on a new and bigger tank which will be focused on the crabs more than on the frags.

Expect new updates soon again!