encideought

All right everyone, fragswap is only a couple weeks away. I haven't gotten to go before, but I'm looking forward to it. So, what's everyone planning on bringing? How many people want to trade stuff? I'd love to find some cool LPS frags so I'll be excited to see what shows up. I've got a cool green sinularia frag (I got from Coral Hind), a nice gorgonian (from L8 2 Rise), and a few blue clove polyp frags (one with a bam bam zoa on it, originally from watson_barrett) that I'd love to trade for something else cool. I can also cut some pieces of yellow sinularia (from Mogurnda) and pink pulsing xenia (from OUsnakebyte) and offer for free if anyone is interested. Here is an old pic of the green sinularia (it's a really awesome intense green): Here is a pic of the actual gorgonian I'd like to trade: I'm sure you've all seen the blue clove polyps, but here's a refresher (not the actual frags): Oh, and it's not a frag, but I'd love to sell my 150 Watt Sunpod HQI (works perfectly) $125 Thanks, Nick

I used to work in a lab that used zebrafish for developmental experiments and if the females were not bred for a long time they developed large cysts in their ovaries. We called them "egg bound" because they kept making eggs, but had no chance to breed and release them (at least that's what we assumed was happening to them). The fish could usually live fine with it, but they looked awfully sad. I hope your fish is just a good eater though!

When I was asking what fish I could put in with a pair of clowns in an aquapod 24, most people thought adding no other fish was best. I think if it was a single clown you'd be okay, but a pair of clowns in such a small tank will probably be too aggressive for any other fish.

love your rock work, very cool

Wow, I totally forgot about this thread. I guess it's time for a little update. So, within a couple days of my original post, the big winter storm rolled through and caused the substation near our house to explode (which was actually pretty awesome, it was brighter than daylight outside even though it was night. The sky kept changing from blue, to green, to red, to white...crazy). So, our power ended up being out for ~3 whole days. Thankfully when the power went out last summer I decided to buy a little generator to keep us warm. It's not much, but enough to power a space heater, a few lights, and some heaters for my tank. My wife, daughter, dog, and I were all holed up in a tiny room with the heat, and my tank was stranded out in the living room where the temperature got down to the 30's! I don't think the temp in the tank ever went below 60 though, which still seems pretty chilly. During this time I grabbed the goby (who was still looking pretty awful), threw it in a bag, and tossed it into my main tank. The goby didn't make it through the first night unfortunately. I think the original stress of getting captured, shipped, purchased, starved, overtaken by ich, netted and moved to a new tank, then netted again and going into a bag, then less than optimal temperatures was just too much. The other fish basically hunkered down for the power outage and waited it out. When the power came back on both fish seemed happy and healthy. I was pretty sure a lot of stuff would be sick in my tank (and a number of things did seem less healthy) but for the most part everything pulled through okay. The fire shrimp, sea star, crabs, and basically all corals pulled through great much to my delight. SO, long story short, the ich was never really an issue for any of the fish in my tank except for the new guy. I really should have made sure he was eating happily before releasing him into the tank, so if I ever get another tiny-mouth fish again (which is doubtful), I'll give that a shot. Thanks for the info everyone, hopefully this thread will be useful to other people worried about how to avoid/deal with ich. For me it really wasn't a big deal in the end.

Wow, bump for some good deals. I wish I had room for that tank, good luck with the sales/move!

Thanks for all the replies everyone. I think my current plan is to take the 6-line back to the store and trade it for...a new six-line that won't be territorial. The reason I got the 6-line in the first place is because I think they're awesome and I really like them. I would love to keep this one since it's been happy and healthy, but I can't really rearrange anything in a significant way, and I really don't feel like setting up another tank for X months to try and let the clowns settle before reintroducing the 6-line, especially since that may not work anyway. The clowns have been free in the tank for ~3 days now and still haven't really checked much of anything out. Is it normal for them to swim around a lot before settling? They stay right in the front pretty much the whole time, which is cool to see them. Is it possible that the 6-line still being in the tank, although sequestered, is stressing them? At night they're actually cozying right up to the breeder net that the 6-line is staying in, kinda cute in a weird way. I do think the falco hawkfish is cool, but I like my crabs and shrimp, so I think I'll probably steer clear. Please let me know if you have any other thoughts or ideas, or if you have a healthy smaller 6-line you're interested in trading.

Try the food in the net trick, it worked great for catching my six-line. All you do is leave the net in the tank for a few days so the fish gets used to it. Then after not feeding for those couple days, put some food in the net. Do that for a day or two so the fish is used to eating in the net. Eventually you can grab the net, put food in it, and the fish should swim right in. It took a little patience, but I really don't think I could have gotten it any other way.

I thought that could work, but I really have no idea how I could rearrange the rocks in my tank, it's pretty packed (which in hindsight wasn't very bright either). I'm also pretty terrified of putting the 6-line back in the tank in case I just need to catch it again. I have to admit that I'm still fairly new to the fish part of the hobby, and I've always heard that clowns are pretty territorial/aggressive. Do you think they would attack any other fish in my tank? Even something like a goby? I'm okay with only having 2 fish in there as long as their happy. I was kinda thinking if I could trade the 6-line for something else relatively quickly that territoriality wouldn't be an issue. I know, everything should be quarantined...but I don't do that.

So, I tried letting the clowns back in the tank the other day, and the 6-line would not stop harassing them. The 6-line is such a smart fish, it would seriously wait until I was at least 5-6 feet away from the tank before going after the clowns. I tried to see if things would die down after a couple hours, but nothing seemed to change. I ended up putting the clowns back in the breeder net and then beginning the plans to catch the 6-line... I left a net in the tank and didn't touch it for a while. The next day (Wednesday) I put some food in the tank, but I only put the food IN the net. The 6-line eventually came to pick at the net, but I didn't try to catch it yet. Then I put a big chunk of shrimp in the net and left the net in the tank again overnight. Yesterday when I got home from work I put food in the net again and the 6-line swam right in! I grabbed it out of the tank real quick, put the clowns in the tank, and put the 6-line in the breeder net. So, now I've got a 6-line I want to trade for something a little more tame. I'm sure the 6-line would get along with other fish in a bigger tank, I think my set-up is just a little too small for so many "semi-aggressive" fish. I'll start another post for trading.

So, I got 2 cool clowns from Doug at the meeting, and I was really excited to trade for a red firefish that I only saw during feeding times. My tank is 24 gallons and I had 1 firefish and 1 six-line wrasse that always seemed to get along really well...they even seemed pretty friendly at times. So, I thought my 6-line wasn't very aggressive. Well, after the lights went out, I got the clowns in the tank last night. I thought everything would be peachy, but almost immediately the 6-line came charging out and was really trying to pick on both clowns. The clowns didn't really seem scared, but they were obviously stressed. I probably waited ~40 minutes to see if things would calm down, but they didn't, so I netted the clowns and put them into a breeder net until I could figure out what to do. The 6-line is probably being a jerk since he was there first, but I thought they would get along. Is my tank too small for these 3 fish? Are there any options besides these: 1) find a new home for the clownfish 2) find a new home for the 6-line 3) take the 6-line out, rearrange all rocks, put it back (which I can't do) I'd like to try releasing the clowns again to see if things are better (maybe after keeping them partitioned for a couple days), but I'd like to stress them as little as possible. If I managed to catch the 6-line and sequester it while the clowns settled, do you think the 6-line would be get less aggressive? I really didn't think this was such a bad idea, but clearly it was...boo. Any thoughts would be appreciated, Thanks! Nick

So, first I took off the HOB skimmer, than I took out all the LR I've shoved into the rear-chamber (probably 4-5lbs). Then I took out my return pump, and lastly the circulation pump...there's kind of a lot of stuff back there. After that there was no place for the firefish to hide. It ended up moving to one corner, and I just put the net in on the opposite side of that chamber, and slowly moved it from the bottom up. I think the fish realized there was no place to go and it didn't really try to jet away too fast. So, lots of "prep time" but not much actual catching time.

Anyone have a nice frogspawn they could bring a frag of...and sell to me? I'd be interested in the kind that are purple with green tips, a small frag would be awesome. Please let me know what you've got and how much (by PM). Thanks, Nick

Got'em! Thanks for the suggestions!

Awesome, thanks for the ideas guys. I'll try taking everything out AND doing a big-ish water change to get the water as low as possible before trying to bend a big net Thanks!

So, my firefish finally decided to jump into the back chamber in my aquapod-24. Any ideas on how to get it out of there? The chamber(s) are pretty much full of live rock and various pumps. I'd prefer not to take everything out, but is that the only way? To be honest I'm not sure I could catch it even if I take everything out, it's just so fast and there's not a lot of room to work back there. Any easy homemade fish trap ideas that are small enough to fit back there? The space is about 4" at it's widest part, more like 2" and the most narrow. I've tried leaving a net in there for a couple days and baiting the net, but I failed to catch the fish the other day and I haven't seen it pop back up... Thanks! Nick

There's no way this is an April Fool's day joke. I know the development of a mini-whale is really the holy grail of all research. This is truly a great day to be alive...

I have some kind of "common gulf seastar" that eats the pink sponges from my tank, but not the yellow ones, or the red tree sponge I have. So...my guess is you'd have to get pretty lucky to find something that would work

They're all black plastic, red knob, may be partially melted:

I had a good sized female green mandarin take a bite out of a tiny male green mandarin in my tank before...sometimes fish just go wild I guess...

Yeah, I just went to the petsmart in Rockville and they were really nice about taking the old ones back. They also gave me store credit for the prices of the current stealth pro equivalents (even though I only had the older stealth models). Did they really give you cash? Cash or credit, I'm pretty stoked!

I just called my local petsmart and they said they would only take the 100, 200, and 250W models, not the 150. At least that's what one guy said. I've got an old 150 and an old 250. I'm planning on stopping by tonight with both to see what happens, I'll post again after I give it a shot. Thanks for starting this thread and bringing this to everyones attention!

I think black sand looks awesome, really makes the colors pop. Do you think it would make fish colors more intense too? I think I've read that for freshwater tanks, but I'm not sure about how marine fish feel about it.

So, I guess most people have to deal with this at some point, and now its my turn to do a little battle with ich. It's a bit of a long story, but the gist is I got a new fish (green clown goby) that I did NOT quarantine/dip and it brought some ich into my tank. I moved the new fish to a hospital tank where I'll be trying to do large water changes and keep it well fed for a month or so. I was thinking of trying to keep it in hyposalinity, but I haven't tried that yet. The day after I removed the sick fish, I noticed my other 2 fish (a red firefish and a six-line wrasse) also now have a little ich on them...boo. I'm trying to do a lot more water changes (~20% every other day or so, it's a 24g tank) and also trying to feed them as much as possible to keep their immune systems up. I read a little about treating the food with garlic oil, but haven't tried that yet either. Oh, I also put a little nori in the tank (read something about how some fish like that), but neither fish seems interested. Any other ideas? I'd like to take all fish out of the main tank for 6-8 weeks, but I just don't have the set-up to make that work unfortunately. The 2 fish still in the main tank don't really seem sick, and they're eating really well, they do have a few white spots though. I hope they can just get well enough to not get reinfected and the parasites in the tank will die out. Hopefully the fish in quarantine will pull through and stop getting infected too, but it looks a little rough at the moment. Any other thoughts/comments? I haven't really kept a lot of marine fish before, so now I appreciate the importance of quarantine and a quick freshwater dip...too bad it's a little late. Anyone have a good way of getting garlic in the fish food? Anyone think it actually helps with ich? Anyone have experience with hyposalinity treatment? Thanks for any help! Nick

I could give you a handful, but I'm not that close to you. Let me know if you'd want to pick it up.