Our Fishies Fishy Blog

Our Pearly Jawfish was acting pretty funny last night… hanging out near the top of the water and sticking his head in the air. He has moved his home about 5 times in the last week or so. I am not sure if he was ill, unhappy, hungry (his little tummy usually looks really full after I feed the fish), or who knows?

I didn’t see him out today. He usually hangs out near wherever his home is. I fed the fish a bit early to see if he came out, but to no avail. No jawfishy…

I will keep my eye out for him, but I think we may have lost him. When we put him in the tank, he hid for a long time and we didn’t think he made it in the beginning. Hopefully we see him soon.

I recently added a lot of snails and hermit crabs as we are battling algae problems again. I am worried that if he did die, we would never seen the remnants…

Due to doggy circumstances. I will live vicariously through my friends (we have stalled growing our tank for the time being). They have been shopping around for a used saltwater set up for some time now, and they found the ultimate 125 gallon set up with everything (lights, protein skimmer, sump, you name it they have it!)… oh, and wooden shelves.

I have never seen a tank like this, it is pretty awesome. The set up has build in wood shelves.

They say saltwater, live rock and sand go in next week. It will be fun to watch them build their 125 gallon saltwater tank.

Those flip flops in the pic are almost as cool as the tank…

We brought Jadyn home from the vet today. She was very excited to see us (the vet said that she was really good, didn’t bark and wanted to shake everyone’s hand). Which is funny because she barked when we got her. Jadyn has a tendency to talk to us thinking that we understand her.

We made her a big recovery nest to curl up in in the living room as she will require constant attention for the next few weeks. Although we weren’t going to kennel train her before, it seems that she will be kennel trained because she can’t be left out to roam around and hurt herself.

Mike told Jadyn that she gets to sit in a kennel next to Zoey all day and bark at her. Not sure that he asked Zoey the Miniature Pincher her thoughts on the subject…

So I guess I need to make some lemonade, but I only want the lemonade if life will throw me some raspberries to put in it…

Last night our puppy broke her leg while playing (she came down on her leg funny after jumping). Mike took her to the vet and she had an x-ray. They found out that she had fractured her leg so they sedated her. She was in surgery most of this afternoon. We just found out that she made it through ok, but we have been left with a $2,500 vet bill (maybe I should become a vet when I grow up…)

Needless to say that puts a bit of a damper on building a seahorse tank, and for growing the reef in our current tank for now. Poor Jadyn.

I got my yearly bonus from work and I have been trying to decide what I am going to treat myself with this year. Mike and I chatted about it and it was determined that I could go ahead and start my seahorse tank in my home office.

Today we went “corral” shopping. From what I have researched so far, important aspects of a seahorse tank are low light, no bubbles and clean water. There are so many choices to tank sizes and tank stands that I just can’t decide exactly what I want to get. I really like the look of a bow front aquariums, but can’t decide on how many gallons to go.

Honestly I am considering an 80 gallon bow front tank for the seahorses. Partially because we are already out of room for fish in our reef tank, and I would rather have too much room rather than not enough. Secondarily, the more gallons of water you have in a tank, the easier it is to keep the water from getting too high of nitrates and ammonia.

I am probably going to officially pick a tank and sump and get started on my seahorse tank next week.

There are cleaner shrimp… coral banded shrimp… shrimp gumbo… and fire shrimp… Ok, I may not be Forrest Gump, but the variety of shrimp that you can get for your reef tank is pretty wide it seems. Although I am officially against anymore coral banded shrimp in our fish tank, Mike did talk me into a fire shrimp.

He is bright red, and has already knocked the cleaner shrimp out of his previous home. Every animal in the tank has its own territory, and new species mean a little reorganization of animals.

I updated the full tank shot here, see if you can play “spot the blurry mandarin goby.” I caught a fairly decent picture of the mandarin goby later when he was up near the glass. I cleaned the glass today, but the spots in the shot say I didn’t clean it well enough.

Newbies in the tank include the new purple firefish (we have two now), our red starfish, metallic mushroom coral, and galaxy coral.

Oh, and I got a great shot of the pearly jawfish today (I will call today “lucky shot day”).

I was reading the about.com top saltwater aquarium myths, and it said:

6. Coral Banded Shrimp kill fish.

MYTH:
Coral Banded Shrimp kill fish.

FACT:
The Coral Banded Shrimp is a scavenger as well as a parasite picker, and may attack other shrimp, but will not normally attack fish. Many people who find their Coral Banded Shrimp consuming a dead fish or invertebrate assume that it was killed by the shrimp. However the shrimp is just doing what it does for a living: Scavenging.

The coral banded shrimp in our tank was a mean fish-murdering shrimp. It did kill the other shrimp, but he also killed the watchman goby. No coral banded shrimp in my tank ever again!

Garf.org is a company that researches coral farming in order to decrease the effect of the saltwater reef keeping hobby on the environment. We are following their protocol for additives to the tank to help in growing our reef.

What we will be using in our saltwater tank based on the Garf calculator:

Tank Information:

SeaChem Supplements

I was informed that our anemone likes to hang out at the top of the tank due to the tank not having enough light. I learned in this process that there is a lot more to aquarium tank lighting than I had ever thought there could be.

I started the aquarium lighting section of the fishwiki. Trying to put everything in order that I have been studying about aquarium lighting. I still haven’t made sense of most of it because there are so many different kinds of lights and watts and kelvins and….!

I also read up on anemones. Most anemones need more than 6 watts per gallon of water (even though the suggested wattage for your tank is 3 -5 watts per gallon.

I knew about metal halide lighting, but the heat that these lights emit require a canopy that is at least 9 inches above the surface of the water. We would have to get a cooling system if we put in metal halide bulbs (which is about $600).

I will have to ask Brady what he thinks about the lighting. Question is, if we add more wattage, will the anemone move away from the top of the tank?

So we have a lot of new coral polyps that we used gel glue to stick onto the live rock throughout the tank… and they keep falling down. Everyday when we wake up we find something new knocked over or moved. We have 3 snails that are about 2-3 inches that seem to be the cause of all of this tank havock.

Today we noticed that one of the feather duster’s head was pulled almost all of the  way out of its tube, sitting next to it was a snail attacking another feather duster. We are going to have to remove these guys if we ever want polyps to live on the rocks long enough to grow onto the rocks.

Grrrrrr… evil shrimp has moved on to evil snails!