Kathryn Lawson

I had a good experience with a group order from Reefcleaners. I know others here have done group orders from them also, to save on shipping! If you're considering an order, I'd suggest posting to see if anyone else wants to jump in and split shipping (or add up enough purchases to get free shipping!)

I actually just saw these videos a few days ago - I don't know about their long-term success but something like this might be an option

I've done an old 20 long for freshwater that has been fine for 2+ years now, but I don't know that I'd go bigger than that. My 29 tall (rims still intact) sprung a leak on its own a few weeks ago, and cleanup was a huge headache

That is really interesting! The internet has it that they are one of the best black-box options, but it's cool to see an actual store owner relying on them also.

I recently acquired two black mollies from a freshwater hobbyist who was moving, and acclimated them over to saltwater. The mollies have been in my display tank for about a week now, and I'm noticing some small white spots on them (and one possible white-ish projection near the gills). From what I read, very few freshwater diseases can survive in saltwater except maybe some internal parasites. All the other fish in my display tank are looking fine (except for a blenny who has shown some flashing/rubbing and I plan to treat for parasites soon). Is this a dead ringer that my display tank is infected with ich or velvet, and I need to remove/treat the fish and let the display tank go fallow? Or is it possible that there could be another cause for the white spots on the mollies that I haven't considered? I tried to get some photos of them, shown below. Apologies for the photo quality - these little guys are active! A few streaks and maybe some spots are due to stuff on the glass, but certainly not all.

I'm excited to check it out, thanks for sharing!

As a newb who doesn't really know anyone yet but am going to be picking up some pre-sold items at the coming meeting, I think this would be super helpful!

Super interesting, thanks for sharing! Hopefully this will become more widely available soon!

Thanks! Might bite the bullet and just get one... unless anyone has one they're looking to rehome for less?

I recently picked up a 29 gallon tank from a fellow WAMAS member, with the idea of replacing/upgrading my 10 gallon tank that sits on my desk (I work from home). It's a standard rimmed tank (right down to the fake wood grain on the plastic trim, lol), and the label in the bottom suggests it's from 1998. After testing to make sure it held water and giving it a bit of a cleaning, I partially drained my 10 gallon and moved it over on my desk, so I could see how the 29 gallon tank looked in the spot where I need it to be (peninsula style, flush with the right-hand edge of my desk). The problem is, the 29 gallon tank isn't sitting flat - it rocks slightly on the diagonal, such that the raised corner is a hair over 1/16 of an inch off the desk surface. I can't shift it forward or backwards because it would hang off the desk. I have a 20 long tank (freshwater, also rimmed) peninsula-style on the left side of my desk, and have had no issues with it rocking, so I'm guessing that it's the 29 gallon tank's bottom rim that's warped, rather than the desk surface. Exactly how bad of an idea is it to ignore the wobble and move ahead with filling this tank in this spot? Is it possible that the rim and silicone holding the glass will compress to flatten out as the tank fills, like a foam mat would do for a rimless tank? I did the leak test in a rounded-ish bottom bathtub, so maybe it wasn't set flat there and the frame warped to fit the bathtub bottom, and it'll warp back when filled on a flat surface? Or is this a disaster just waiting to happen?

Good idea, I'll have to find mine - I used it a lot when I started out in freshwater, but I think I misplaced it when moving here... Then again, I might just get another, given the low prices of the ones you linked!

Honestly, I hope they're lightning doves - that would be pretty awesome! They're supposed to reproduce in the aquarium, though apparently much more slowly than regular dove snails. I haven't seen any eggs, though. I think the tiny snails go down into my sand bed during the day, which the lightning doves have not done at all - they're visible 24/7, mainly on the tank glass and rocks. So as cool as it would be for them to be lightning doves, I'm kinda doubting they are. I don't have any nassarius snails - just the lightning doves, some stomatellas, and formerly two ceriths (shells are empty now). The shells on these tiny guys looks more defined than the shells of stomatellas, so I don't think it's them.

Their shells seem to come to a bit more of a blunt point than the collonista snail pictures I found on Google. But maybe a different/closely related species? I'm pretty confident they're not Pyramidellid snails, at least - definitely not pointy enough, and not grouped near/associated with my lightning dove snails.

Hey everyone, it's me again! This time I've discovered 50+ itty bitty nocturnal snails (I think, anyway, they look and move like snails and have two little antennae) on my tank's glass walls. Is this anything I should be concerned about, or can I leave them be? I tried to get some reasonable clear pictures of them with my forefinger and a standard squeeze pipette tip for scale. I do have lightning dove snails which are known to reproduce in the aquarium (which I'm hoping for, honestly), but I haven't seen any eggs that they supposedly lay on the glass, and my snails have been active during the day, whereas I've never seen these tiny ones before tonight (I try to check in on my tank at night after the lights go out but maybe I've missed them in the past? I'm certain I've never seen them during the day). Given there's so many of them all at once (they are tiny, but I do only have a 10 gallon tank(, I'm wondering if there's anything I should be concerned about. Thanks in advance! The two snails in the photos are the biggest I saw. Please ignore the messy desk in the background! Also, I have no idea why these photos keep posting upside down...

Sorry to hear about your loss, but I'm glad that you're going to continuing trying! Somewhat relatedly, I work for a major university and have access to most academic papers. I went down a rabbit hole the other day finding a bunch of journal articles on raising marine species including mandarins! I also pulled some on copepod and phytoplankton cultures and methods. If you (or anyone else) is interested, I can send you the PDFs!

Awesome, thanks for the links/references!

Thank you all! This is fantastic information, and I third(?) the call for DaJMasta to present at a WAMAS meeting - super cool setup to support your other awesome projects!! DaJMasta, are the bioluminescent dinos for "fun", or are they good feed organisms also?? I did reach out to Alyssa at Seahorse Savvy, and her response is posted below, for anyone in the future who might have a similar question: "Thank you for reaching out. You can feed them copepods. Some of our customers are culturing the Apocyclops panamensis pods for them. We are just using enriched Artemia nauplii here. They need to eat a lot and it is easier in our experience to feed them enriched baby brine shrimp in the numbers we need and even a herd of 10-12+ seahorses. You might find doing the pods for you easier with your experience though. We are using the enriched Artemia nauplii with all of our Dwarf seahorses and seahorse fry and it is plenty nutritious for them when properly enriched. Please let us know if you have any other questions. We look forward to hearing from you."

That does make sense, thanks! I have a background in microbiology, both in sterile and open/mixed cultures (grew chlorella sp. on landfill leachate and cow manure in a research lab at one point), so I guess I'm a bit more casual when it comes to setting up culture systems. Maybe I'm underestimating the amount of work to keep open cultures of copepods and phyto going without crashing, but to me it seems like it'll be way, way easier to spend some time planning and setting up one/multiple phyto cultures with a doser/drip feed into a copepod culture (with sponge filter for ammonia control), that in turn feeds into the dwarf seahorse tank (and thus doesn't require daily maintenance), rather than hatching and rinsing and enriching brine shrimp on a daily basis!

Hi! I've been trying to research dwarf seahorses, and have consistently read that the #1 reason people don't keep them long-term is because they need live baby brine shrimp, and they get tired of daily hatches and the need to enrich them. However, I've also been looking into mandarin dragonets, and have seen that some folks culture their own copepods to keep them fed. Is there any reason this wouldn't work for dwarf seahorses? From what I've found, copepods are more nutritious than baby brine shrimp, and are the seahorses' natural food. So why is it not common to culture copepods to feed them? The only explanation I've found thus far was on a forum where someone suggested that they might need to eat more copepods than can be easily cultured at a home scale, but this sounds off to me - mandarin dragonets are way bigger, and it sounds relatively common to culture copepods to feed them. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance!

That's super helpful, thank you!! How often do you feed them? I've seen a lot of people saying they need to be fed multiple times daily or have tons of pods always available because their digestive tract is small, but obviously whatever you're doing is working super well, since they're spawning!

This is so cool!! Do you mind sharing some info on how you trained your initial pair and now your new male to eat frozen food? Maybe a lot of the info I'm finding online is outdated, but it sounds like most folks have had issues getting them to eat anything but live foods, especially if wild caught. Also, your baby nearing the 100 day milestone is fantastic!!!

Thank you both for the help! Super glad these guys are harmless

Anyone know what this might be? I noticed a bunch of what looked like long, thin worms crawling around one piece of coral. Upon investigation, they all seemed to be coming out of the (formerly?) empty snail of a lightning dove snail. When I moved the shell, they retracted inside almost like tentacles. After a little while, they re-emerged, and the longest ones stretched up to ~1.5 inches from the opening of the shell! I tried to get some photos and videos of it (due to size restrictions, I could only post one short clip and I'm not sure it's going to show correctly). Has anyone seen something like this before? Should I be concerned? 20221120_213212_1.mp4

Thank you all! To clarify, on top of the green filamentous algae, there's a bit of brown snot-like goo. I removed most of it with a pipette - it's not filamentous, but truly like slime, and it seems to come away from substrate fairly cleanly. I haven't found bubbles in it yet, but I have found gobs of it spread across the other rocks and sand in my tank (I suspect they pulled off of the streamers and were carried by the water flow), and have done my best to remove those also. They've come back a bit over the last few days, but I seem to be able to keep up with it for now. I'll also try to feed the tank a bit to raise the nutrient level a bit - I've also been seeing some cyanobacteria (red stringy algae-like stuff), which from what I've read can also be due to low nutrients. I don't have any livestock that require regular feeding yet, but maybe I can try to give the feather dusters and brittle stars a little bit of powdered fish flake.

Newbie here, I've noticed some brown slime growing on a few rocks that I got with frags on them from FragFest. The frags came off while I was dipping them (Coral Rx), but I had relatively little live rock in my tank (10 gallon), so decided to add them anyway, which may have been a huge mistake. Are these the dreaded dinoflagellates? There was a long string of brown slime coming off of the left rock, but I removed it from the tank (wrapped it up in toothbrush bristles and rinsed vigorously in freshwater) before I thought about taking a picture. Will any of my current livestock eat whatever this is? I have 5 lightning dove snails (one is checking it out in the photo, so I'm hopeful), two Florida cerith snails (I think that's what they are), and a stomatella snail, plus three micro brittle stars and some tiny mysis shrimps. Should I remove the effected rocks to help limit the spread? Or is that like shutting the barn door after the horse has run off? Thanks in advance for your help!!