This page contains all the tank events from 1 July 2007 to 30 September 2007.
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Happened upon this quite large Brittle Star hiding in the sump tank. It is about 5 cm across.
Alice spotted a Caribbean Red-legged Hermit Crab out of its shell. We put the shell next to it and it was obviously trying desperately to hide but to no avail: the Cleaner Shrimp was on the prowl. The crab's body is a bit like a scorpion or shrimp with a curled wormy tail that has small flickering appendages, visible if you look closely about one minute into the video.
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We thought we'd have a go at making a time-lapse film of the Green Star Coral opening-up just after the lights have come on in the tank. It hasn't come out particularly well, but here it is anyway. Photographs were taken at one minute intervals for 45 minutes.
The Euphyllia has been putting out some quite long fronds. Here are two particularly wavy ones, like a pair of little eyeballs on stalks.
Some quite large creatures are appearing in the sump tank now. These seem to be proper brine shrimp, more than 10 millimetres in length if one includes tail and antenna. Difficult to photograph though.
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Ever since we started the new tank there has been a mysterious long, thin, white growth between the live rock and the back wall of the tank. It is quite difficult to photograph, but now that it's so big you can see clearly that it is a sponge.
Alice spotted that two of the Caribbean Red-legged Hermit Crab appeared to be having a meeting, hidden amongst the Pulse Coral. We got out the Mesoscope and took a look. Notice how the left one "spits" at the right one about half way through.
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Realised today that we haven't seen the Pyjama Wrasse for a few days. We've checked the inside of the weir and the sump and it's not there, so if it has escaped it must still be in the pipe. It had been bullying the Clown Fish: hope there hasn't been a revenge attack.
Happened to be looking in the tank on Thursday evening and was shocked to find the Long-nose Hawkfish with one of the Cleaner Shrimp in its jaws. Fairly certain the Cleaner Shrimp was still moving, so we don't think it was just the Long-nose Hawkfish cleaning up the body of a dead tank-mate. We know that the Long-nose Hawkfish do occasionally do this but we're slightly afraid it now has a taste for meat. We will watch out for the fate of the remaining Cleaner Shrimp.
On a more positive note, we went to the fish shop today and they had an Orange-spotted Goby. The sand in our tank had been getting quite gunky and we were missing Gobiness anyway, so we bought it.
Having reached for the camera to take a photo of the Goby, we managed to take pictures of a few of the introductory meetings with other tank occupants. First was the Long-nose Hawkfish, which did a side-on body challenge. You can't quite see it in this first challenge but the Orange-spotted Goby opens its mouth very wide when threatened in this way.
Next was the Regal Tang. This time you can see the open mouth.
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Finally, the remaining Cleaner Shrimp has a feel around.
Oh and, just for completeness, we've been having increasing problems with brown algae growth, so we've upped our Caribbean Red-legged Hermit Crab quotient by three. We don't think the one pictured below arrived in this shell, which was supplied as a spare, but it certainly occupied it in pretty short order.
Having been pretty lax in measuring nitrates recently (since they seem to have been stuck at 25 mg/l forever), we bought a new kit and were pleased to find out that they are now down at 12.5 mg/l. The strong growth of the Caulerpa in the sump tank is probably helping.
Two odd things happened in the tank today:
Time for a general update. Anticipating the summer and wanting to avoid the die-off we had last year, we've added a cooling system to the tank in the form of the Deltec EcoCooler, the 700 watt flavour. This is basically a box containing a plastic mesh through which the tank water is poured while two computer fans blow air across it: cooling by evaporation. It is quite noisy, especially so since we've mounted it above the sump tank, but it is low power and we can use our IKS Aquastar unit to control it.
The Finger Leather Coral has recovered from its illness completely.
About two months ago, just before we went on holiday, the Orange-spotted Goby passed away. We've not managed to get a replacement yet, but intend to as the coral sand on the bottom of the tank is getting a bit gunky. We also had the replacement Clown Fish die on us, so have now replaced it yet again with a larger, beefier, been-in-the-shop-longer creature to get back to a pair: the two are swimming happily together.
Finally, to keep Alice happy we decided to get a Bangaii Cardinal again. We hope it doesn't suffer from bullying like the last one did.
