paul b

Today I am diatom filtering my tank........No! not for any stupid parasites as that is just silly. I decided to clean a small portion of my back glass. Like 8X8 to see what is living back there and the stuff is half an inch thick and flying all over the tank. I don't like that and it sticks on my gorgonians so I am filtering it out. I won't clean the entire back because thats one of the secrets of a healthy tank so don't tell anyone. For those who don't know what a diatom filter is......You are so young and probably watch Justin Beiber and never saw your girlfriend except on Facebook. Diatom filters were big in the 60s and 70s which is when I got this one. I had to replace the motor a couple of times because they were built, (not very well) for freshwater and when you use them in salt, you can hear them rust. I still have 3 or 4 of them in various states of decomposition. I don't think I could be in this hobby if I didn't have a diatom filter although any powerful canister filter may work, just not as good. I don't use this filter to often or long because it removes anything solid including pods, coral food and parasites which I "don't" want to remove. And if you run gravel or a "reverse undergravel filter" as I do, this stirring up of the gravel is needed maybe two or three times a year as it gets full of detritus and although I like detritus, I don't want it clogging anything. All of us have nose hairs ( some of us really need to trim those hairs) and those hairs are to filter air we breathe in so we don't suck in dragon flies or frogs. But if we had to many, or to thick nose hairs, we would not be able to breathe so those dragon flies and frogs would be safe but we would croak. We would also look Icky. A diatom filter, as the name suggests is that it used diatom skeletons which are much smaller than this ---------> . <---------- They filter out things as small as a micron which is 0.0004" which is smaller than an ich parasite. I don't use it for parasites nor do I care about parasites but if you do, a diatom filter will remove parasites from a semi bare tank of if you like quarantine tanks it will remove all the parasites from there so you wouldn't have to use medications which I abhor (That means hate) Diatom filters use diatom powder which you dump after you use the thing and it is very cheap from swimming pool companies. Vortex used to make them but they are out of business so I have no idea where to get them now....Sorry. If my last working one bites the dust I will have to build one.

I am running out of room with my other hobbies so I will have to sell my steampunk stuff for about an eighth of what it sells for in an art gallery. I have been making live edge tables and now I am making a waterfall table. Very cool. I get so many compliments on my finished table I decided to make more so I bought 5 more pieces of live edge wood. I also have no room for these so I will probably give them away.

I don't think so. He loves mysis and clams though.

I just picked up this cool fan tail filefish. It is kind of rare and I think the guy made a big mistake on the price because it was fairly cheap. The owner gave me the price so i didn't say anything.

Not yet, but his mate, a couple of years younger also looks good. They are still spawning

This fireclown is getting better with age, Unlike me. Here he is today at about 30 years old. This is what he looked like a few years ago. Notice the "bags" under his eye. He (or She) doesn't have that any more.

Jul 6, 2015 (Yes this was an old post. What can I say? I ran out of things to say) I don't have the nicest tank on here. I don't have the nicest of a lot of things, but I don't care because they are nice enough for me. I don't have the most difficult corals on here, but it is not my purpose to have that. I don't have the most interesting fish on here, but they are interesting enough for me. I have no ideas what my parameters are. I assume my corals know and they seem fine. I don't have any controllers or dosers. Don't want any. I don't have any test kits. If I want something tested, I take It to a LFS. They like doing that. I don't have the largest tank on here. It's a perfect size for me. My lights are way underpowered. I don't care and so far, neither do the corals. I don't have a sump. I would, but they were not invented in the 70s I don't use any reactors, GFO, GAC, ABC, Doh Ray Me, or bio pellets. I don't use Rowafas. Don't have a DSB, SSB, or BB. I don't use Purple Up, Marine Snow or almost anything else and I don't want to. I have to many fish, they don't seem to mind the crowd. I have to many Pod eaters, they send out for Pizza. I am jealous of some tanks on here, but I will get over it. I don't have the most hair and I am far from the best looking on here. My wife likes me. I don't change much water, but I assume I change enough. I have plenty of iron and stainless steel in my tank. Is that scary to anyone? I sometimes feed my fish Plaster of Paris with some minerals mixed in. Am I bad? I used copper for years in my tank and never changed the rocks or gravel. I have never dated a Supermodel but I did date some beautiful girls. Also some plainer ones with nice personalities. I use dolomite for the substrate, ever heard of that? My wiring is probably some of the sloppiest on here. And I am an electrician. I am impressed by some of the skill on here with spawning hard fish. I am impressed by creativity, but not by degrees unless they are on a thermometer. Right now I am embarrassed to say I have a fever, which is a Sissy disease and I may have to revoke my Man card. Fevers are so yesterday and Sissy Mary like. Maybe I am hallucinating which is why I wrote this useless thread. I am finished, and I am old, There is no purpose to this post that I know of. Its a hobby, enjoy it for yourself, no one else

Why do fish, and us have a lifespan? Why can't we live forever like Moses who was supposed to live 900 years. (I doubt he lived a day over 600) There is actually a reason we have a life span and none of us ever lived longer than 122 years and that was only one French woman who didn't have a reef tank. The reason for this is something called a "telomere". What is a Telomere as most of us are not researchers, doctors or Martin Scorsese. A telomere is a little cap like thing on each end of a chromosome, sort of like the little thing on the end of our shoelaces. (aglets) It helps protect the end of the chromosome. A chromosome which is an "X" shaped thing (for part of it's life) which is a chain of DNA and is a part of our genes and as aquarists that’s all we need to know. They are in every one of our cells which we and our fish are made out of. Every creature including grasshoppers, pods and aardvarks are made of cells and all of them have chromosomes in their cells. Being we are all built out of cells, if the cells die, we die. Our cells constantly divide and eventually die. Every time our cells divide the telomere on the ends of the chromosome get shorter until they are so short, the cell can no longer divide. When that happens, we start to age until there are no more cell divisions taking place and our cells die. We then die of old age. In humans that happens around age 80 give or take 20 years. Of course in fish, copepods or Nancy Pelosi that time is different. Of course fish and us die of other things like if we are in a 6 hour lecture and the instructor is droning on and on we can die of boredom or get hit by a Toyota Landcruiser occupied by Noobs on there way to a frag swap. So if we can have a way to make those telomeres last longer we will have found the fountain of youth. Most of the early Spaniards were looking for that but they wore armor while conquering the natives in the steamy Caribbean and stunk so bad they just dropped dead from the smell and athletes foot. The good news is we already have. In all of us there is also something called a "Telomerase" which is an enzyme that elongates or at least stops the telomere from shortening. That good news is not so good because even though that telomerase stops the telomere from shortening, it allows the cell to keep living without dying which is called cancer. We don't want that. OK thats how it works in a perfect world but we don't live in a perfect world because we have things like Twitter, Facebook and the heartbreak of Psoriasis. Now whats interesting for us as aquarists is that some things can actually cause those telomeres to shorten prematurely. When that happens it shortens the lifespan of the creature. We know that many of the fish we are trying to keep, in too many cases just don't live as long as we would like. I am not talking now of disease but something all our fish face at one time or another, some fish face it constantly STRESS There is a reason for this and recently, in Humans anyway there have been research done which correlates stress with "Cortisol". Cortisol is in all of us and varies throughout the day. Any kind of stress will cause a rise in Cortisol. Even good stress like for instance if we go skydiving, even if we wanted to go or we accomplished a back flip on top of a bi-plane while eating a hamburger from Burger King. But these things are temporary and only last a few minutes so the effect doesn't cause harm. Cortisol temporarily increases heart rate and blood pressure to help us deal with the stressful situation like running away from a saber tooth tiger. It will also start to dissolve bones to supply more calcium which the muscles need and for nerve conduction and limit wound repair and it actually causes the muscles to turn to sugar for that quick flight response. One of the worst things it does is "suppress the immune system". Of course this is very simplified and cortisol doesn't magically appear. It happens through the limbic system, the pituitary gland and many other things. We all make cortisol. This is normal. But with stress, cortisol levels stay relatively high rather than cycling throughout the day and those biological changes I just spoke about like higher blood pressure, a suppressed immune system and bone loss continually occur. We can see why that will be a problem. One more important thing excess Cortisol does, due to stress is shorten the telomeres, or the lifespan of the creature. We unfortunately are constantly causing our fish stress. Every day in the sea fish get stressed. They are constantly trying to evade predators and fighting to get enough food. But this is normal for a fish and wouldn't affect it's cortisol levels or lifespan. Unless of course that predator eats it. That may shorten it's life. In a tank, depending on the lay out of the tank, the fish may be exposed to continuous stress. If the tank is to small, has a predator or antagonist. Food that is unrecognizable or the most important one, a lack of a "natural" place to hide. Fish in the sea naturally hide from predators constantly. If you dive you will see this. They can dive into a tiny space in a coral head and know immediately that they can fit in there. You very rarely see a fish dive into a hole, then back out because they can't fit. They know they can fit due to their "lateral line" which gives them a sort of ESP of hiding places. They try to get into a hole that they can just about fit in so that shark, moray eel or Jacques Cousteau can't get into to harm them. Fish never get cut on the sharp edges of the coral and depend on the tightness of the space for safety. Fish really hate PVC elbows in a quarantine tank because it is usually stark white, smooth and much to big. Fish are not stupid and know they are not safe in that hardware from Home Depot. They also don't want to see us even if we look like Angelina Jolie. This is a big stressor in fish and remember that fish was just a few weeks ago in the sea minding it's own business. Someone captured it and stuck it in a vat with hundreds of other fish, with no where to hide. Then in a plastic bag for many hours or days. Then into your quarantine tank. Talk about stress. Of course those are the lucky fish as many others suffocate on the deck of a ship, are boiled and stuffed into a little can labeled "Dolphin Safe". This very procedure actually "causes" disease that many of us are trying to prevent. Remember fish in the sea are exposed to every disease and they have no problems with any of them. But now we are stressing them, sometimes for 60 or 70 days before we even put them in our reef which "we" feel is something the fish will like. They don't. Elevated cortisol which does all those unhealthful things like suppress the immune system, causes bone loss, suppresses wound healing and shortens the telomere which shortens their natural life span. Some other things raised cortisol does (In Humans) is interfere with memory, bring viruses out of remission, cause allergies, eliminate sex drive, increase belly fat, cause auto immune disease. It does all of these things because none of those things are important when we are running from a Tiger and all the body’s defenses are primed for one thing, getting away. Now if the fish, or us is constantly stressed, all of those nasty things causes the fish to become sick. This is why many times we have a fish in quarantine for something like ich and the fish then comes down with something else. We are causing those diseases that we think quarantine is helping. It is not, "unless" that quarantine tank is set up like a normal reef that the fish was accustomed to with associated real, natural hiding places. Medication is another big stressor. If we as Humans get a rash or ich. We can put on a topical salve like Calamine lotion. But we don’t drink the stuff like a fish has to do. If we use copper to eliminate a parasite, that fish is also drinking that copper which is a poison when inside the fish. Copper is also a poison if we drank it but most of us do not suffer from ich. So if stress and medications actually cause illness in fish, what can we do? This is something most of the Old Timers in this hobby figured out a long time ago. If they didn’t, they would not be old timers because their fish would continually die and they would get out of the hobby and get job at Home Depot loading toilet bowls into Mini vans. All fish come from the sea fully immune from all sea based diseases. We just have to cultivate that immunity by eliminating stress as much as possible and feeding the fish something that thy were used to eating in the sea which is whole sea food with all it’s associated bacteria. But that is for another rant that I am sure after reading this, very few will read.

No, not really. Anything that would kill it would kill my other corals and leathers of which I have many. I never really liked SPS anyway and the only reason I have any is because years ago people were arguing with me that my tank was to dirty to grow them. Then they grew all over the place. There have been three things in the past 10 or so years that let me have less and less of them up until a few weeks ago when I cut out a lot of sponge and killed many more of them. My sponge is here in this article. https://reefbuilders.com/2018/04/02/five-reasons-sponges-are-bad-for-a-coral-reef-tank/

I am slowly making a big change to my tank. I have so much blue encrusting sponge that I think it is either sucking nutrients out of my water or it is adding some sort of toxin. It is beautiful and looks like light blue montipora but you can't eliminate it. You can see a milky substance come out of it when it is cut. (angelfish won't touch it) The last time I trimmed a lot of it, I lost almost all my SPS corals and many of the Zoa's. The Zoa's are all tiny now and they were huge. My green star polyps disappeared and that stuff will grow on your piano if it's close enough to your tank. But the good news is that gorgs and leather corals grow like crazy so maybe they like what the sponge is putting into the water or taking out. I am slowly changing the tank over to leather corals, mushrooms, gorgonians and of course sponges. It's this stuff.

I do have a little update on my tank. It is still running.

Linear activator to lift the front of my tank to make it easier to feed fish after shoulder surgery. My arm will be in a brace for about 6 weeks so I won't be able to use it, not even to wave at a pretty girl or scratch my nose. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnXE0I4SOUg

I am playing with the camera. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpBeEUDhb9o

For people who want dragonettes like this little female Ruby Red, scooter bleeny or mandarins, just look at how many pods she can eat in a couple of minutes........Thousands a day so unless you want to go broke buying pods, an aged tank is best. I have a pair of these, mandarins, scooters and blue stripe pipefish so many pods are essential. I have never bought a pod in my life.

Just finished, kind of proud of this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1Z96fyv0uo

Beautiful day here in Long Island today so I collected 40 gallons of water behind my house. The alk was 7 and the temp was 40. I didn't test calcium but the salinity is 1.016. It is crystal clear so I don't have to do anything to it except warm it up and maybe add some salt.

Today is Palm Sunday and tomorrow is Vietnam Veterans Day. History of Vietnam Veterans Day Officially designated in 2017 as National Vietnam War Veterans Day by President Donald Trump, the holiday is marked by ceremonies and celebration across the U.S.

I can't tell what is wrong with your tank from here. But years ago I almost killed my entire tank with a tiny bit of "New Fresh Scent Clorox" Hello Oragami.

I made another video. It's not exactly Steven Speilberg. The butterflies are best friends and that 6 line is spawning.

Someone asked me how a reverse Undergravel filter works and what is the advantage of it. In the beginning, when we all kept bait, I mean fresh water fish we all ran undergravel filters. That was the only way to go and in fresh water they work perfectly. When salt water started for home tanks in 1971 in the US (a little before that in Europe) some of us switched our tanks to salt but we kept our UG filters. Most of us did change the gravel to something different than the purple broken glass we had in fresh water and we removed the sunken chests and deep sea divers fighting sharks but there was no salt water gravel available. After unsuccessfully using blue driveway gravel I discovered dolomite. You can still get it at a mausoleum or museum, maybe an archaeological dig in Egypt, I don't know but I assume crushed coral would also work. I first ran my salt tank using a normal UG filter and in less than a year it crashed and I had to rescue my fish. There was no coral, live or dead rock then but we did have bricks, cinder blocks and roller skates. Much of my "rock" was asphalt that was dumped in the sea before I was born. I still have some of it and if you look close you can probably see remnants of the yellow line that was painted on it when it was a street. :oops: I am not sure what the problem was by using a UG filter the normal way. We didn't have powerheads so they were all run with bubbles and they didn't run to fast but the salt creep on the lights caused us to have to turn on the lights with a stick because GFCIs were also not invented. As a matter of fact, to do anything on the tank we had to unplug everything and the only thing we could keep with success was electric eels. Anyway, the UG filters, after a few months became totally clogged rendering them useless similar to some politicians. I decided to reverse the thing and instead of the water going down through the gravel, now it came up through the gravel. Something happened. It was a good thing. The tank didn't crash. It kept going and fifty years later it is still running. Not crashing is a good thing but not the only benefit. I learned from Robert Straughn "The Father of Salt Water Fish Keeping" that the bottom of the tank is the perfect filter and the largest thing in the tank. Mr. Straughn used UG filters constantly but at that time, in the 50s he didn't quite understand the function of bacteria like we do today and he used the filter as a particle filter. That works but you have to clean it constantly and as a whole, humans are lazy. I discovered that if you pump water through the gravel at a slow speed and maybe strain it of particles first, the thing would not only last forever, 50 years anyway, but the tank would thrive and it would be easier to keep smaller fish. A sand bottom has very little oxygen going through it as it is stagnant. But gravel, even if it is just sitting there has water flowing all through it. But if we give it a little help and push a little water through it, multitudes of creatures colonize it causing it to be a huge eco system. Tiny tube worms, brittle stars, pods and bacteria completely fill every void. Those tube worms filter the water and the brittle stars remove particles. Very little detritus is left and a little detritus is good because it even provides more living space for those creatures which hate clean, sterile places to live sort of like Ozzie Osborn. Those tiny creatures can breed in multitudes feeding smaller fish like pipefish, mandarins, dragonettes and anything that eats pods. I have many of those fish, they are all spawning and I never have to feed them. This silly thing is the manifold I used for many years. I built a new one now but it is the same principal. It is of course an old HOB filter. The three tubes coming out the bottom go to each of the 3 UG filter tubes. The one on the left doesn't do anything and was a mistake, it is blocked. Water is pumped into the thing from that hose on the left. I don't have a sump or I would have to divert some water from that to here. I run about 250 GPH down each tube so about 500 GPH is pumped into the manifold where the water is evenly separated. Faster flow is no good, it has to be slow. Once or twice a year I stir up the gravel where I can reach with a canister filter or diatom to remove excess detritus. If it was left forever it would probably clog eventually and besides, I like doing it. Of course if your present system lasted longer than fifty years, do that.

That picture was in the summer on Montauk. I didn't have a picture of today on that computer so make believe it is snowing and I am being chased by a walrus while drinking a hot chocolate with a little rum in it.

This morning like every morning I took a walk. I walk about two miles so it's not like I will be entering the Olympics or anything. It was 23 degrees and it was just before the sun came up. All of a sudden I got this uncontrollable urge to do the Macarana and I twisted my knee. One of my knees was replaced a while ago with aluminum or "Mastic". (some kind of fish food copperbands are supposed to like but I am guessing) I almost fell down as it was a little painful and I contemplated calling the paramedics just because I wanted to see if they had a helicopter. Then I realized it wasn't that bad so I limped home and put some of that "heat rub" stuff on the knee. Now everyone knows none of that stuff ever does anything for pain but it smells so good. I have a few different kinds, some smell like pine trees, some like cedar and some like camphor so I use all of them at the same time. I am still in pain but I smell like a forest filed with mosquito repellent which is kind of refreshing.

Your welcome.