Bye Bye Mandarin

I woke up in the morning to find the Mandarin Goby on the table. The spotted mandarin is some kinda like a bottom/rock dwelling fish. It never swims freely in the water colum much so it was the last fish i'd ever expect to jump outta the tank. Mysterious death i have no idea why.

Realised that diluting the water actually had quite a serious adverse effect on the chemical concentrations so did a water change today to rectify that. Absent mindedly i forgot to turn on the chiller after i was done with everything so ambient temperature reached an all time high of 29deg. Thank goodness I noticed that. Found it strange that the cauliflower coral wasn't opening, touched the tank and realised that the water wasn't cool. If I had left it any longer, the heat from the lights could have just caused a bigger disaster.

Visited a very interesting shop today. Shopkeeper was super helpful, super friendly and gave me free coral polyps. Very tiny ones but it was a generous gesture I very much appreciated.

Mg and Ca levels are low, am trying ways to remedy that.

A Wet Fishy Day

I spent the whole day checking out fishy stuff today. After that disappointing Xmas eve, it was a very pleasant surprise when Belle said she found my fish and she reserved it. Was even nicer of her to drive me to pick up the fish. Spent the whole day travelling from shop to shop, place to place, pretty crazy i thought.

So i got my kole tang! this fish seems a little over sized tho it was the smallest already. Got bullied the moment it went into the tank. Cowering at the corner but is slowly familiarising itself and gaining ground.

The other fish was a spotted mandarin goby. A really dainty pretty looking fish which i'd never see myself keeping cos it's reputed as hard to keep. Belle convinced me that i shouldn't have any problems with it so there, second fish.

let's see how they go. Pictures will come sOON!

Bio Diversity!

If you ask people who have pets what do they keep? oh i have 2 dogs. I have a cat. I've got a couple of guppies. Would you actually believe me if i told you that I have an entire eco-system teaming with life here in The Deep Blue Sea in my HDB?

Here's what's living inside...
Row 1: Crocea clam, orange mushroom, white mushroom
Row 2: Softcorals cauliflowers, similar speicies, different coloration, button mushrooms
Row 3: another mushroom, & another mushroom, hammer coral
Row 4: mushrooms again, trumpet coral, zoas
Row 5: zoas, sun corals, cleaner shrimp

There are other creatures too illusive to capture with the cam...
1. sexy shrimp
2. false percula clown anemone fish
3. sailfin tang
4. copepods
5. worms
6. shell fishes
7. tube worms

That alone sums up to 15 + 7 = 22 types of organisms inside the aquarium. I have not accounted for the actual number of each of these species. Take for example, I estimate that there are thousands of copepods living inside. no less then 10 worms, 15 tube worms, 3 shell fishes. I've not even started to count the number of coral colonies. There are also different species of algae growing in there. You can imagine wassup at the Deep Blue Sea in my HDB!

Merry Christmas Fishies!

I think i'm getting lazy with this project. Problems just keep cropping up and i'm just looking to solve all these problems and hopefully develop a fix set of procedures that i'd just need to follow to ensure the tank's health. Hopefully this can be done before school reopens too. Also if i can doucment these steps nicely, then I can leave on holidays and not worry about the fishies cos these instructions can be past on to others at home.

Despite the mood and the cheer of Xmas season, today turned out to be a very disappointing Xmas' eve (in the context of the fish tank that is). I got a message from the fish farm today, they said "your kole tang is here!" Rare hawaiian shipment, I left the house almost immediately just for it. I got there, got the whole car muddied cos the rainy mud puddles, only to watch someone buy the last 2 of those fishes right infront of my eyes.

I've been waiting months for this fish. I refused to add anymore fishies into the tank. Many friends have offered to adopt fishies, but I've turned them all down, waiting for this kole tang before i get the rest. I was so excited when I got the message and I even decided that i was gonna name the fish Christmas!

No fish this xmas. On a brighter note, i wish everyone living in the deep blue sea in my HDB a merry xmas! No dried pellet food for you guys today and tomorrow. You guys shall have fresh yummy food!

Troublesome Sunnies!

Sun corals are a pain in the ass though they can be really pretty. That's quite true for all things pretty ain't it? ie. troublesome girlfriend. Feeding was sucha hassle. The Sailfin tang's gotten alot braver and everytime i deliver food to an individual sun coral polyp, it has the guts to actually 'challenge' my pincer and nib food out of it. So what do i feed the sun corals? shrimps cut into tiny shreds. Each polyp is hand fed with food delivered to every mouth. Not all polyps can be fed cos its just too time consuming but i feed as much as I can. Sister got a lomograph camera and there's where i got the inspiration for this picture.



Following the frames from left to right. 3 polyps have extended. Delivered food to 2 polyps. The one higher up swallowed it quickly. All the tentacles have retracted to push the shrimp bit down its 'throat'. the lower polyp is still having trouble ingesting the shrimp bit. The top polyp has opened up for a second helping. Notice that polyps that weren't extended at the start have started extending. The third polyp has decided that its' bro is unable to handle its food portion and so bends over to snatch part of it. Another piece of shrimp is delivered to a polyp that has just extended right at the bottom. The first polyp its extending its body, squeezing its food down its throat. You can see the lump along its body.

Interesting eh? Its hecka troublesome! Anyway I've observed some new growth in the suncorals. new polyps forming but at the same time, a couple of old polyps seem to have just rotted away. I'm wondering why. Perhaps it got choked by sand or something. Sun corals are propoagating but yet 2 polyps have faded away. Is everything good?

New Toy for Xmas!

Google's blogger has been acting up lately so i've been slow with the updates. Anyway I've gotten myself a new toy for xmas! and its a refractometer! Thanks to bro Honda from the reef club, passed it to me at great price.



So here it is! What does it do? it gives a very accurate reading of the aquarium water's salinity (the amount of salt inside the water). In a previous post, I discussed about the hydrometer, how it worked and how it measured salinity. a hyrdometer is a useful device to have but it will only give (i prefer to use this term) an indication of salinity. Its accuracy can be easily affected by bubbles stuck on the swinging measurement arm or salt crystals forming on the device itself because you don't clean it well after use. Besides that, the principle its built upon has an intrinsicly large margin of error.

How does a refractometer work? Its basically an optical instrument with a prism being the basis of its physics. You drop some aquarium water onto the prism, hold it up against the light and you peer down the device. I believe that because water with different salinity levels have different refractive indices, the refracted light is directed onto a scale to give a correseponding reading. Pretty complex? ha! I think it's pretty cool!

My hydrometer indicated the water's specific gravity was 1.021, the refractometer gave a reading of 1.025. Grossly over the acceptable range of 1.020-1.023. Diluted the water and dang calcium and magnesium levels plunged.

Its dead

Gotcha! its not dead. The cleaner moulted and I fished out the shell. You know I've had cleaner shrimps with me since I started with this marine aquarium hobby. They've moulted so many times but never have I once watch a shrimp moult. It'd make a good documentary clip for this blog i'm sure if i could catch it moulting.

They moult in the dark i suppose so i'm on my way to DIY a LED moonlight to illuminate the aquarium, simulate the moon!

Pod Cast!

Ever wondered what copepods are? I blogged about them sometime back about the sudden population explosion of copepods in the aquarium. So here you get a visual. There you have it, copepods grazing on the algae groing on the aquarium wall.



I believe that these are only medium sized copepods and the adult ones grow up to twice this size. These that you see here are like 2mm in length. Copepods live inside the porous rocks and in the sand bed. I imagine that the whole colony would have established an entire network of tunnels running inside the rocks. Each rock would be like a city with many 'roads' running all through it.

Copepods are small but yet they form an important part of the food web. Maybe not so much when it comes to land creatures, but the food chain can be pretty intriguing when it comes to the life in the sea. Krills are small but yet they are the ones that keep the giant blue whales alive. Without krill, blue whales will have nothing to eat. Likewise for copepods, they help form the foundation of the food chain in the reef environment. Even in an aquarium, a healthy population of copepods can be a very healthy supplement for the fishes' diet. Copepods are filled with fatty acids and other nutrition that is not easily substitutable and in some cases, fishes depend solely on them. Not essential, but it is defintely beneficial to have pods living in your aquarium.

The Greedy Sun Corals!

Sun corals are really beautiful. I hated them after I first got them cos they all looked so dead and dying. At that time I didn't really know much about them and it was only then that I started reading up more about these corals. The corals were thin and bony when I got them but I would say that they've put on quite a bit of 'weight'. Its been a while now and I guess the water conditions in the tank has been favourable and hence they're growing. I've even spotted new polyps spawning off the older bigger ones. Lovely news! Irony about suncorals is that they do not require sunlight at all! They're non photosynthetic and are often found in caves where's it dark and gloomy. Maybe that's the reason why nature made them this way, to bring some 'sunshine' to the darkness.

For that reason of them prefering a more shady environment, I've placed them under the shadows of rocks. Its true that they do not respond to light. Other corals open up and extend only when the light is on and retract when its dark. For the sunnies, they're triggered by FOOD! Everytime when I'm feeding my home processed mix of grinded shrimp, seaweed and what not and the pieces too small for the fishies to take notice are floating around in the water colum, these sunnies will extend their tentacles fully to pick all these loose particles up. Really beautiful sight. Picking up food particles in the water colum isn't the only way they feed. They literally swallow chunks of food into their mouths if they're available but that will be a post for another time.

The Mysterious Monster

Take a close look and what do you see? If your eyes are keen enough you will see a spikey tentacle coming out from under the rocks. I have no idea what it is. A worm? a starfish? I just hope its not a worm and its not gonna crawl under the clam on the left and bite its tender ass.

FTS = Full Tank Shot

There are many acronyms used by the community of aquarists and reefers and FTS is just one of them. What does FTS mean? its a Full Tank Shot and as promised, pictures of the tank after the rescaping. Overall it seems to me that the tank scape is now more engaging with more interesting angles to look at things.

This new scaping is really different from the past ones. The first one was crap, the second one just had a little more space but was generally a boring stacking of rocks to form a wall. This time after much consideration and looking around Kino's aquarium scaping books and with much referencing here and there...

I came up with something else entirely different. I have created sort of a valley in between 2 rock islands. If you are wondering how it looks like form the top, think about it as splitting a rectangle diagonally. Looking straight towards into the 'valley' you will see a green tube. That's my water return outlet. The long tube has many small holes along it all directed into the 'valley' creating an area of high flow current right through it. As the current streams through the valley it deflects off the glass wall at the front left corner of the aquarium and wraps around the left aquarium wall and the water flow is directed into the next filter inlet which leads to another filtration system. So generally these are the high flow regions while the other parts of the aquarium has a slower flow of water. There's a little bit of everything for everyone i guess.


I've also decided that I should pour some sand on the ground to make it all look a little more natural. If you remember there was a blog entry where I suggested that the bright light reflecting off the bare tank bottom was very disturbing and glaring to the fishies so hopefully this sand will help. It looks prettier now and I plan to have more corals, small bits to lay on the sand as well as on the rocks to complement the rockscape.

Rescaping

I've been staring at the tank for the past week and think that it looks really dull. The rock scape isn't engaging at all. I spent Sunday pouring through all the aquarium books at kino trying to find some tips on rock scaping and after an hour or so, finally got what I wanted. Took another couple of hours searching through the net for inspiration and with some sketches, finally I got down to rescaping it today (technically yesterday). Added sand so it all looks much nicer now. Pictures tomorrow!

I've got a power lamp to illuminate the aquarium but somehow the spectrum seems to be off, so I've been sourcing for a new bulb for the lamp. I've scoured all over Singapore, up and down Sim Lim tower and all the way to the Pasir Ris fish farms but it was all in vain. It was most unexpected when i recieved an email from the Japanese bulb manufactuer whom i've enquired more purchasing details from. They have it! and its somewhere in some industrial estate office so i've gotta go fetch it. Ugh! I hope all the effort and the money will be well worth it.

Its on YouTube!

Moved beyond still pictures, here's one of the sailfin tang taking a snack.

Ah HA! It worked!

So the verdict about yesterday's invention... It worked! HAHAHAHA! There the sailfin tang coming in close for a nib. It was pretty interesting to watch how the fishes approached this foreign object in their little 'home'. All of them were apprehensive, swimming everywhere except anywhere near the clip. Then there's the initial attempts to go near it swimming past quickly. Followed by going near it and staying a little longer, and then the tang started checking out the piece of seaweed and after many returns to it, finally a nibble!

So the clip worked! Actual retail price was SGD$6-7? and guess what's the total cost of MY clip? Just $0.05 for the paper clip excluding the costs of other scrap material of course. Total savings? SGD$6.95! Not very much, but that's how you get more outta ya buck in this hobby.

And yes for the sake of those who've just visited this blog, HDB is a form of flatted apartment housing in Singapore, so its the deep blue sea in my apartment in other words. Cheers Reef Rancher!

DIY Feeding Station

When you have herbi fishes, you'd need to feed them veg otherwise their immune system will weaken. This is a feeding clip. Its meant to hold pieces of seaweed or fresh vegetables in the water preventing them from floating around so your herbi fishies can eat them. Cost? The last time I saw it at the fish shop was SGD$7 and that's crazy! So I decided to make one.
I made this from pieces of scrape aquarium equipment I had lying in my store. A suction place holder, cable tie, paper clip, plastic mesh.
There are of course many ways I could do this. Using a magnet instead of a suctoin place holder will be lovely because i wouldn't need to wet my hands at all putting the feeder into place. However here we have constraints on resources so we'll make do.

Bingo! There you have it! Seaweed feeder with seaweed attached and ready to go. You might be wondering why use the plastic mesh? That's because the area of 'clipping' of the paper clip is very small and hence all the pressure of the clip be on one small area of the seaweed. Changes of the seaweed breaking away when the fish bites is very much higher. The plastic mesh serves to diffuse and spread the pressure so you have a snug clip onto the seaweed.
There you go, DIY seaweed feeder in action holding a piece of seaweed inside the aquarium. How successful is it? It's too early to tell. I've chosen neutral and dark colors so it wouldn't appear to scary to the fishies. So far the fishies have yet to accept it. They all seem a little apprehensive to go close to it. They've all gone into hiding and refused all forms of feeding. Give them a couple of hours, they'd get use to it i suppose?

The Thin White Line

Actually the line isn't thin. Just spoofing off "the thin red line" Mysterious white patches have suddenly occured. This is wierd. One problem after another. Its really disheartening.

On the brighter side of things, exams are over. Have more time at hand to travel around and add more stuff into the aquarium. Waiting for sponsors to come adopt fishies. Many friends have agreed but I guess the time is not right. Alot of equipment still need a little tweaking.

Poor image quality, I apologise for that. Taken with a primitive digital camera, among the first to be launched when digi cams came into existance. I miss the 20D. Gota wait for a while.

DIY projects on the drawing board. Am contemplating more advanced lighting to be installed.

Party On!

Came back from school and guess what? There was a sudden outbreak of copepods EVERYWHERE! on the glass (feeding on diatoms i guess) and suspended freely in the water column. Crazy stuff! So now there's many many living organisms in my aquarium. hundreds or maybe even thousands of mini copepods!

Probably their eggs have been incubating for quite a while now and then its finally time hatch.

Got some sun corals today. let's see how they fare.

Taking it off

Today the cleaner shrimp moulted. It means its growing. When shrimps moult, they shed their shell which has become to small for it and then for a period of time, it will stay in hiding because its new skin is still soft and will take time to harden during which it is very vulnerable to attacks. One of the key elements for healthy moulting of shrimps is the prescences of iodine in the water. Iodine helps their new 'skin' harden.

Thre's quite abit going on. I started a thread on the forum discussing the ill side effects of this chemical media i've used and have subsequently removed. Wonder what other reefers will comment.

The clam looks so succulent I feel like eating it.