mogurnda

Most excellent! must not be tempted to do this...must not be tempted to do this...must not be tempted to do this

Great to see the tank moving forward. Love the giant cabinet! Never can have too much space for stuff.

I feel bad for everyone. I would be interested to know the actual numbers for the impact of collection for the hobby, rather than opinions. There was a guy (John Brant?) from NOAA who has spoken for us a few times about the surprising numbers of fish collected for the hobby. As the despair.com poster says, "a single raindrop doesn't think it is part of the flood." Hawaii has one of the most sustainable fisheries for pet fishies, so it is a shame they are being penalized. Nonetheless, despite efforts to verify supply chains for marine ornamentals elsewhere, it still has gone nowhere. As far as I know retailers still have no way of verifying that most of the fish they sell are collected in a sustainable manner. John, how do you know that the fish you sell are harvested and transported in a way that does not damage reefs and minimizes mortality? As hobbyists, we have fallen pretty flat. It blows me away that someone will choose a wild-caught over a captive reared fish to save a few bucks, but that is what people seem to do. Captive-bred mandarins have disappeared because hobbyists thought they were too pricey, despite the advantages in terms of husbandry and the environment. I drove an hour to BRK specifically to buy a pair of CB mandarins, so yes, I am willing to put my money (and more importantly, my time) where my mouth is. I find the argument "other things are worse, so we should not blame ourselves" to be unsatisifying. If your action contributes to a problem, then you should do what you can to reduce your impact. Reefs around the world are suffering from bleaching, unsustainable fishing for food, pollution, you name it. Taking fish for the pet trade has an impact, as well. On top of that, as reefs continue to degrade, it will be increasingly difficult and expensive to import fish for our tanks. It looks as though more species can be reared in tanks, and we should support that industry as much as we can. Law or no, the pet fish collection industry will change. Rather than put our fingers in our ears, maybe it is time to think hard about what the future will look like for the hobby.

Maybe everyone knew this but me. I have been keeping some small oysters that rode in with the plants for the slug system. They start tiny, and are ranging from quarter to half dollar size. I noticed that an oyster would start in one place, and then magically appear in some other spot. Being no dummy, I realized they could move, but did not really think about how. A few days ago, I was sitting at my desk, and saw one of them crawling around an old Udotea plant. I had never put much thought into it, but you can really see the relationship with snails as you watch it extend its foot and crawl around. https://youtu.be/4hexmDdZMnQ Here's a view of the extended foot. Pretty leopard spots. Do you know what your bivalves are doing while your back is turned?

Seems unlikely. I have never seen adverse affects.

Looks like a foraminiferan to me. I'd just leave them.

+1. As you discovered when you took down your fuge, the sand just acts as a trap for detritus. Without sand, you can siphon off debris a lot more easily. Unless you are growing plants with roots, like seagrasses, or rhizoids, like some macroalgae, the sand will do you no good. Chaeto, Ulva, Caulerpa, and non-rooted Halimeda (like H. opuntia) get no benefit from sand. Nope. There is a lot of debate about the usefulness of a DSB, but 2" is definitely too shallow to be of much use. Full disclosure: I am a big fan of sand, having deep beds in both my display and slug/macro/seagrass tanks in the same system. I just found that sand was of no use in the fuge, and made it harder to control sludge and nutrients.

You may consider this to be cheating or off-topic, but I decided to add a few upside-down jellies to my last KP Aquatics order. They don't need a Kreisel or anything fancy, just low flow and a surface to lie on. Here is one of mine, about 2" across. Sorry about the crummy photo, but they have both managed to land in hard-to-photograph spots. We'll see how they do in the long term. In theory, they should be pretty easy to keep. They live in mangroves and shallow pools that experience wide swings in temperature and salinity. Here are a few members of a large group we found in a few inches of water in a ditch by the side of the road. Maybe not as mesmerizing as moon jellies, but still kind of cool. https://youtu.be/Vato1ga7g2I Joanna saw them after a long, lousy day and it cheered her right up.

Totally clever and cool.

I guess it's a lesson about who you attach to when walking about Its there now an anemone on the snail?

Just trying to touch base with Justin, and your PM box is full.

I just thought the fact that the crabs rip anemones up to propagate them was particularly cool.

In case you thought reefers were the first to propagate corals and anemones through fragging, pom-pom crabs thought of it long before we did: https://peerj.com/articles/2954/

I am really dubious about the whole Mg thing. One group says it's the impurities that kill the Bryopsis, others recommend using levels that are so high that it's toxic to half of the livestock in the tank. Justin had no luck at all with high Mg, even though he used the magic brand that supposedly had the right impurities. Nonetheless, I was desperate enough to consider the possibility, but Mg has been about 1200 to 1250, so it should have been low enough. I tried dosing CO2, but vinegar is cheaper and stays in solution much better. Bacteria turn it into CO2 soon enough. Not sure if glutaraldehyde would be any better, plus our environmental health people would scream at me for using it outside a fume hood.

Started to grow, but never took off. SPS does fine, but algae dies. Does that make me the worst aquarist ever? Seriously, though, I have been diving into the literature in an effort to get the Bryopsis culture going better. Turns out that fast growing, filamentous algae like Bryopsis, Chaetomorpha, Cladophora, etc, tend to be much more limited by nitrogen and carbon than by phosphorous. The "Redfield Ratio" of 106:16:1 (ratio of consuming C:N:P) only works for phytoplankton, and the ratio is more like 500:30:1 for benthic algae. My Bryopsis was limited by carbon, and a little vinegar dosing (combined with ongoing KNO3, KH2PO4 and micronutrients) has given me much better growth. For normal people who are not trying to culture nuisance algae, but who are feeding heavily and dosing carbon in one form or another (vodka, vinegar, biopellets), I think it would be tough to eradicate Bryopsis.

The slugs wiped out the supply you gave me in a week or so. They seemed to like it. Glad your plague is dying down, but I am a little sad to see it go.

Finally got a chance to send the DNA in for sequencing. Each of three sequencing runs came back closest to Acrosiphonia. I am not completely convinced, because the rbcL sequence is only about 88% identical to Acrosiphonia. If it was the same species, I would expect the high 90s, so I am not convinced it's even in the genus. By way of comparison, the Munter alga is 83% identical to Bryopsis pennata. Acrosiphonia is a temperate and boreal genus, so I am not sure how it would get into the tank. I suspect that Alan's alga is not in the database yet. Here's a close up view. Doesn't look quite like Acrosiphonia, but it's pretty close.

May just be preparing for a molt.

Hay Scott, Glad to hear you're tanked again. Looks like a beauty. I still have corals for you, and can offer help with lifting.

Dang, Tom, that sounds like a pretty big deal. Best wishes for a smooth procedure and speedy recovery.

The girls have been grazing off and on. It may not be their favorite flavor, but I guess it's good enough. On closer inspection, the branches are radial, coming off the axis in all directions, rather than in a single plane like Bryopsis. So, it's definitely not Bryopsis, nor is it Derbesia (what some call "regular hair algae"). Doesn't match any of my guides, but I haven't looked that hard. Will take a batch to work tomorrow for extraction, if I remember.

Thanks for dropping the algae by. The slugs are still not showing much interest, but I will take some into work. I'll be happy to name it after you

In my experience, dwarf angels in the argi group (cherubs, flamebacks...) can be nasty little monsters. I have had them harass blennies to death, so they definitely do not reserve their wrath for other angels. If the tang can't find a place to escape, things may not go well.

I just feel like a loser for not being able to get sustainable growth of the stuff. A. lokani looks like a good candidate. Remember the algae-covered plugs you gave me? Some of the corals came back nicely. You want some back?

I appreciate it, guys. One can always count on WAMAS members to take one for the team. I will probably post about the two small frags for the next meeting. Any idea of what it is? There don't seem to be any actual corallites, except ffor the apical corallites. I guess I should just check with Haywood. BTW. No Bryopsis in this system I am having a heck of a time keeping it alive My bad, really. Hitchhiker posts often have lousy pix and hasty prose, so I can see how you interpreted it that way.