Cleaning - End of Aiptasia?

Yesterday evening it was time for another cleaning round. As always cleaning is paired with trying to kill sea and majano anemones. The big sea anemone was first, and even though I’m pretty sure I hit him he moved back. Well first try couple of the majano anemones, but these are all hidden pretty good and are hard to reach, so I didn’t get all of them.

Then it was time for another attempt at the sea anemone, and each time he moved back a bit and then showed himself again…he was taunting me! Well I wasn’t going to let me got beaten by an anemone. So another attempt, and there went my syringe…or at least the tip of it. I could see it behind a rock, I needed to get it out since it was a sharp metal object. First moved the tube worm and then tried to get behind the rock, but trying to get there I bumped the rock noticing that it wasn’t supporting the rocks above like we thought! And this was the rock on which the sea anemone was attached!

So the next step was simple, get the rock out, pour boiling water over the spot where the sea anemone was located…and while I was at it remove some red hair algae. When everything looked pretty clean I moved the rock back into the aquarium and that should take care of the sea anemone plague!

After that the real cleaning started. Cleared a bucket with hair algae and some water :p. New water in the aquarium, and when that was done I decided to replace the first of 6 light tubes. I started with the front one, and within 2 weeks the one after that will be done. But for now only a 10k Kevin tube was replaced, but already this makes a huge difference.

Cleaning november 2010 - An Update

Last weekend we cleaned the aquarium again, and considering the two birthdays we had I decided to just give an update on how everything is looking now.

The fish are all doing fine, the birthday boy (Foxface) is still swimming around happily. He had a period in which he was more scared but now he is eating from my hand again, so everything is turning back to normal.

Only one that gives some concern again is the Blue Tang. I noticed a white spot on her body again, this time I was able to capture it on photo. She doesn’t seem to be bothered by it and still acts as normal, but I will try to get someone to identify this.

Corals are also doing fine, they are growing rapidly except for the Xenia. One rock is already empty now and the other rock seems to be losing branches too. Guess it’s just not meant to be for our aquarium. Maybe in a later stage I will give it another try, but for now I will just keep it at this.

The mushrooms have the most going on at this point. Many things keep happening with them and of course there are also my little experiments with them.

The oldest mushrooms are doing great, nothing wrong with them. The green mushrooms on my second mushroom rock are in a bit of trouble, one of them is being overgrown by the red mushroom and has moved a bit.

Then we have the red/brownish mushrooms (for whom I have to rethink the colour :p). They are growing everywhere now. I thought I lost most of them, but one of them appears now between the purple mushroom rock, another grows underneath the Soft Coral, one is between the purple mushrooms and the Ricordea mushrooms and I have one in a shot glass to attach to rock. So only one is missing now.

And then there are the experiments, the purple mushroom I cut loose from a rock has attached itself to a piece of rock together with a part of the red mushroom I cut in half. Both look great!

And another coral which is filling up the aquarium is the Kenya Tree. All fragments I intercepted are now attached to rocks and are growing up nicely. I started looking for new owners for them, so who knows what I can get for them :)

The Sea Anemone is still there, we tried to kill it again together with the Majano Anemones, but without much success unfortunately. The Majano Anemones only have one more left though, so that was successful.

Cleaner shrimp first year anniversary

Past Sunday the Cleaner shrimp celebrated his first year anniversary in the Red Sea Max. He is currently the oldest Invertebrate in the aquarium and therefore the first to celebrate his first year anniversary.

In the early days he could be found a lot near the big toadstool we had back then, the cave behind it was his hideout, but also the toadstool was used as a hideout often. After the rebuild he found a new cave where we could see him all day, but unfortunately we had to rebuild again after that and the cave was gone. Now he hides somewhere underneath all the rocks far out of sight. Last few days he shows more often during feeding time but mostly we see him during the night.

His biggest hobby, harassing fish (cleaning actually), wasn’t very successful in the beginning. None of the fish wanted him to clean them. After some months couple of fish sometimes just let it happen (didn’t seem too fond of it though). Some time ago when we appeared to have white spot the Blue Tang offered herself voluntarily to the cleaner shrimp for a cleaning job.

He is a good cleaner, dead organism are his main priority. When I unfortunately damaged the Blue Sea Star he was the first to get hold of the lost leg/arm.

We hope to see him more often in the future and enjoy his fun behaviour, he is much fun to watch (as are most shrimps).

Foxface first year anniversary

The foxface celebrated his first anniversary in the RSM250 this Saturday. In the past year he has done great, it’s a great fish to observe. He changes colours depending on his mood, sometimes he is coloured bright yellow, sometimes with a black strip on his back and sometimes with brown/gray spots all over his body. Also sometimes the colour is more pale/white, mostly when he sleeps or is stressed. Also fun to observe are his spines which he flashes when he feels threatened.

In the beginning he enjoyed the presence of the big toadstool we had. He was always swimming around it and hiding underneath it. After the rebuild when the toadstool died he took refuge in the cave behind the Bulb Anemone.

He did give us some trouble with the rebuild. While we knew the firefish could jump he was the one who jumped out of the small aquarium and onto the floor. It didn’t seem to damage him luckily.

He is one of the few fish actually eating from my hand when feeding. But he also takes the frozen mysis and searches for algae during the daytime. He also feeds on the Sea Pearls we had a few of lately. The smaller ones disappeared rather quick, only the big ones remain for us to remove.

Fragment Tank

The fragment tank has had some adjustments. I already added an Eheim Compact 300 pump for circulation, however this didn’t seem to be enough for the 60 liter aquarium to get the water flow really going. So yesterday I added an Eheim Compact 1000 pump, which should be sufficient for 150 to 1000 liters per hour. This time I even had to turn it down a little because it was blowing way to fast at full capacity.

Another problem the tank had was the temperature, it was far too cold. So I have bought a Sera Precision heater 75w which is suitable for 50 to 75 liters.  And it did the job, because the water is now at an ideal temperature.

Then there was also a third problem which might have been the cause for corals not opening, and that was the lighting. Currently there was a 15W daylight lamp in it from Juwel itself, but this one didn’t produce enough Kelvin for corals. Instead I now bought an Arcadia Marine White Lamp of 15W and placed it instead of the old one. Only downside is that the aquarium only has one spot for lights, and ideal would be a combination with a blue light. But let’s see how the corals manage with this one first.

And then I also done some experiments. I needed to clean a rock from a sea pearl that was located on it, this was the rock with mushrooms and Xenia. Since we already have many mushrooms in the RSM I decided to see if I could get one lose for the fragment tank. Using a sharp knife I tried to get the foot to let go of the rock. While doing this the Mushroom started sliming like crazy, guess it’s a way of defending itself. But in the end it seemed to have worked and I know have a purple mushroom in the fragment tank.

Second experiment I wanted to do was fragging a mushroom. I still had the Red Mushroom in the fragment tank and decided to use this for fragmenting. Using the same sharp knife as before I cut the mushroom in half, straight trough the foot and mouth. Both parts are now in the fragment tank and we will see how they recover.

So the current inhabitants of the fragment tank are a Kenya tree, small dark brown mushroom, a purple mushroom, 2 half Red Mushrooms and 2 Sea Stars. Next to them there are a lot of broken pieces of rock, all from the former Toadstool rock. I did move the biggest part to the RSM for gaining some bacteria and turning into a life rock instead of only having dead rocks in there.