davelin315
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Posts posted by davelin315
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Hey everyone, if you have any Montipora Eating Nudibranchs in your tank one of our members would love to hear from you - Brittany Grouge, formerly Brittany Shemanek. Brittany used to work for Reef eScape and if memory serves correctly she presented at a meeting years ago. She and some of her colleagues are currently doing research on these and would like to have the opportunity to photograph and collect some specimens. If you happen to be unlucky enough to have these, let me know what your email address is and I'll put you in touch with her!
Thanks in advance!
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Be careful, weldon is a known carcinogen and you should avoid skin contact.
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I always kept my old sand but gave it a thorough rinse. Basically stirred it around and siphoned water off until it was clean.
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Water changes are really the only way unless you have something in there that will accomplish denitrification through anaerobic ways or adding on a refugium. If you have no means of exporting these currently (none of the typical mechanical or chemical means really do much for removal of nitrates) then water changes are the only thing that will get them down. This is natural as our tanks are set up to remove ammonia and nitrite through biological processes but having anaerobic zones for denitrification isn't really that easy to accomplish in a typical tank. Deep sand beds or denitrators will work as will a refugium with lots of macroalgae or some sort of carbon dosing but in your average reef aquarium you probably won't find all of these in play.
If you need some powerful skimmers and can handle some noise, let me know, I've got a storage unit full of equipment that I would be willing to donate to your school as I was one of the first in WAMAS to start tanks in schools and even created our school tank program along with the grant program years back. Best to reach out directly if you want any equipment rather than listing it here and I can see what I've got that might fit your needs. Not a huge selection but I do have a decent amount of stuff.
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I would apply weldon #4 first and let it seep into the crack through capillary action and then apply a bead of weldon #16 along the gap. I did this to an acrylic tank that had a concussion crack in the bottom and pressed it together with #4 first and then when that dried to the touch I added a bead of #16 on all of the seams and along the edges of the crack (I only waited about 10 minutes as my goal was that if it separated at all the gap would draw in the #16 and provide a better overall seal). Worked great and I would recommend the same to you (clamping is always good as you mentioned but I would think that clamping might pose some issues for the seam at the top and bottom of the cylinder as well so am thinking that you should just leave it be.
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If it's not far and you can get into it before hand I'd arrange to make some water there and then just transport your rock under wet paper towels to ease the inevitable back pain from moving and only keep sps and lps corals (softies should be OK in a towel for a short period of time - 30 minutes or so) in water, more to prevent damage than anything else. Many corals get exposed to the air at some point in time during the tidal sequence and although soft corals don't often get exposed, I feel like they can handle it better for short periods of time due to the slime they put out. If you can transport in water then do it, but again, might make life easier to not do so. I would do completely new water for the tank if you have the means to have it ready at the new place and remove the corals and then clean your substrate with the existing water as you drain to remove as much detritus as you can and give your tank a nice reboot. I used to move multiple tanks back and forth every single year when I was teaching and I used a combination of Brute garbage cans (I could fit them standing up in my SUV), random tubs, buckets, and styros. Since it wasn't ever more than about a 15 minute trip for me I seldom packed in water and would simply pull the rock and corals and then head over to the new place and add water when there. Once I got the tank set up again and halfway full I would add the rock and corals along with the water I had poured into whatever container they were in and then top off whatever else was needed.
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Angle makes it tough to tell. Definitely an Acropra but hard to tell what species. Can you get a shot of a branch with a profile of the corallites? This is the most telling as each species tends to have a u ique corallite structure amd then you can attempt to distinguihs between similar soecies by growth pattern and coloration.
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The winter season could be a contributing factor as DFR said above. Saltwater causes contact dermatitis for me at times (oddly enough, only synthetic saltwater, not NSW so it must be something in the formulas that does it as it has happened with 2 Little Fishies salt and also Instant Ocean which are pretty much the only two I've ever used with any sort of consistency). It is far worse in the winter than in the summer months for me and I typically can expect my skin to crack and bleed if I'm messing around in tanks with any regularity. Dermatitis can manifest itself in many different ways on different people so the red spots to me would suggest a slight allergic reaction or contact dermatitis (which I think is the same thing?).
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Careful, a receded foot is not a great sign. They can pull their foot back into their body but if there is a gaping hole, it's kind of similar to gaping in the mantle and is never a good sign. The mantle coming back out is a good sign but keep a close eye on the snail, are you sure you have no predators in there? Seems kind of bad that the byssal threads tore to me, tridacnids to the best of my knowledge don't often do this and it's more of a factor of something else doing it to them (or at the very least causing them to do it which I would not think a simple snail on the shell would do).
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Agree with Treesprite, some sort of limpet. Hard to tell without seeing the shell and the foot which is very clear in the picture. Next time give it a tap and see what the shell looks like when it pulls its foot back under.
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I have been kind of sort of out of the hobby since I lost my fish years ago due to velvet (except for collection animals for various projects and tanks at work) but recently picked up a few new fish. Very rare and unusual specimens, not often seen in the marine hobby. What do you think?
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Guys, this is an ages old discussion/debate on what is appropriate. From a purist perspective, QT is NOT treatment, it is simply observing for an extended period of time to see what comes out. Hospital tanks are then used to treat. Prophylactic treatment is not always good for animals but if you don't treat, you must understand that you are risking some common ailments coming out in your system. Even if you do treat, the ability to get everything out of the fish is slim to none as treatments to remove every single pathogen are non-existent and you have to use a cocktail to get the most of them out of there. As Rob and others mentioned, 2 weeks is not enough time to properly QT, let alone treat, a fish, but you get what you pay for. Even 2 weeks in copper as people have suggested is insufficient for all ailments and for some fish, is not possible to do as heavy metals do more harm than good for some.
In the end, your best bet is to QT for observation and see if anything comes out. If you QT for 6-8 weeks you in theory should see most pathogens surface and if you QT in hyposalinity, even better. In the public aquarium realm there are many protocols that call for 90 days of QT for EVERYTHING including rock, clean up crew, etc. If it's biological, it needs to go through QT, even some feeders, although that is skipped in some cases since their life cycle is not even 90 days long.
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I bought some of the plastic hangers with clips on them and then glued them to an old mag float. Works great and if you need to retrieve the magnet, it floats up to the top. You can also slide it wherever you want it in the tank so I used to use it to feed my conchs, too. I stripped the scraper portion off of it to make it move more smoothly along the glass. I still have a couple of these at the house, I think I made them 10 years ago and they are still working today.
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RO would definitely filter all of that out as the pores in the various filters are absolutely tiny. You should not be getting much above .0001 micron particulate matter unless it is from the DI resin itself as the RO membrane filters to .0001 micron.
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Think of it as fiber in their diet. OK, Maybe not
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Actually, Paul, I brought up the microplastics because lately I have seen studies that show fish dying off because of impaction in their digestive systems that is almost wholely plastic. It's a gradual buildup and seems to be similar to what is experienced with heavy metals like mercury. Not sure how accurate these studies are but they are out there.
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Thanks everyone, ReefAddict (who I found out I played against in hockey about 12 hours before I picked up the light and who scored the winning goal against my team!) lent me his lights.
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I have been thinking a lot about filtration lately and there were some topics I wanted to bring up for thoughtful discussion.
First, an interesting side note to the carbon discussion in another post, I recently toured a metropolitan water facility for producing drinking water and in their sand filters the industry standard seems to be to use activated carbon as the top layer and then to leave it in place for 10-15 years with constant backwashing. I asked about the useful life for the carbon as I knew it would be exhausted very quickly and they said that its abilities to remove impurities was not the driving factor behind its use but that its porosity and micro structure allowed for it to be a superior source of biological filtration over just about anything else. They felt that it would not release anything once it was tapped out in terms of removal of impurities and that this would instead allow for it to be a far more effective filter overall. By the way, this is apparently how all of the drinking water for Fairfax and Loudoun Counties is produced, including at the new Loudoun facility being built right now. This has made me curious as to whether very gently tumbled carbon (or at least carbon that is receiving mechanically "pure" water exposure) could be a great biological filter even after its useful life as a chemical filter is exhausted.
The second one is on mechanical filtration of water in our systems and how it affects longevity of our animals. I was following a FB post by someone using the the new CoralVue (I think) Klir filter system and the use of fleece or whatever material it incorporates on its rolls to replace filter socks and it got me thinking - do we introduce a lot of microplastics into our systems through the use of various filter materials? If we do, and a brief analysis of what can produce microplastics against what we use in our tanks leads me to assume that we do, how does this affect the life in our tanks? There are obvious things that do not occur in our systems that would reduce the ingestion of these plastics by our animals such as a lack of predation up to an apex predator and the lack of floating plastic garbage in our tanks, but if we are possibly introducing microplastics into our systems through the use of plastic equipment in circulation and filtration are we shortening the lives of our animals? Could it be that some of the mysterious deaths of what appear to be healthy animals over time might be attributed to ingestion of microplastics? Curious about this one and don't feel that I have a ready assumption as to whether this is actually a problem or not. Wondering if anyone has the ability to microanalyze tank water for the presence of microplastics across a large sample...
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ReefAddict, can you send me an email with details on your lights? I put out some feelers on donations from some of the bigger companies but that typically ends up with just that, feelers.
If you are willing to loan out your lights that would be fantastic!
davelin@childsci.org or info@novaquarium.org would be the best emails to send info to.
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I actually have a bunch of bulbs for these I think, just looking for something that they don't need to put together themselves at the school. She said she's got some friends who are into woodworking and they have a shop there but it's not open until school is open.
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Just not sure which ones actually work well. We are currently going to use the T5s as long as they still work - I think I have some new bulbs that we can add to it and it can give consistent lighting across two 20 gallon tanks so that we remove some of the inconsistencies but might be easier in the end to use 2 ready made LEDs versus retrofitting these. Eric, any chance you have 2 of the same fixtures to avoid any inconsistencies between the two tanks?
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Hey Guys, what's the latest and greatest cheap LED reef lighting available? I'm working with a high school student on a research project on ocean acidification and we're looking for lighting. I've got some T5 lights that we might use but thought I'd look around and see what else is out there. In the alternative, anyone have a set of 2 that they'd be willing to loan out for the next 3-6 months? We're setting up 2 side by side systems in order to keep everything as close to the same as possible.
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I would say that most reef tanks have ich unless you have run hyposalinity for 3 months and then not add anything which is enough to kill off any ich in your system (note that if you have corals, this is not an option). It is much easier to assert that you have an ich free tank if you do not have any corals because then it's easy to treat with copper and hyposalinity to eliminate ich.
My tanks always had ich in them but the fish had built up immunity of sorts. They would on occasion exhibit tiny outbreaks but they were so used to this that eventually, it simply stopped being visible in the system. That said, when I added anything new to the tank it would resurface.
You can liken this to disease in people - ich may be in remission but that does not mean that it's not present, it's simply dormant and the body is able to fight it off. Take something like shingles which is derived from chicken pox. The virus is always in your body but it typically only resurfaces if your body is under a lot of stress or your immunity goes down. This is why in a tank most people preach water quality and healthy diet for your fish, this keeps their immunity up. Most consider QT to be treatment of all ailments, but truly a lot of QT is simply observing and being reactive to anything you see. Most don't do a full blown hospital system to treat for that which is undiscovered because it's costly and also stresses the animals out, not to mention it takes a long time to complete - looking at 90 days of hospital tanks to be truly free and clear in my opinion.
So, no, not all tanks have ich, but I would say that I have probably never seen a reef tank that did not have ich in my lifetime and probably won't because I know that most of us don't have the patience to wait ich out under appropriate conditions.
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It looks like a tiny kind of beneficial snail that I used to have - think I got them from Tom Land, perhaps he can weigh in. If I recall correctly, they were some sort of dwarf conch.
Hello again. Back, well never really left
in General Discussion
Hey Evan, you aren't kidding, this thread is responses from some of the "old guard" members.