gastone September 30, 2024 Author #26 September 30, 2024 Available that Saturday? Could swing by before or after. No worries if you can't. Another time.
YHSublime October 1, 2024 #27 October 1, 2024 On 9/30/2024 at 5:35 PM, gastone said: Available that Saturday? Could swing by before or after. No worries if you can't. Another time. Expand Unfortunately not, but send me a PM and maybe we can work something out!
ReefdUp October 26, 2024 #28 October 26, 2024 What a fantastic build!! And what an amazing opportunity for those kids. Thank you for all of your dedication - and then sharing it with us! Please keep it coming!
gastone October 29, 2024 Author #29 October 29, 2024 On 10/26/2024 at 1:31 AM, ReefdUp said: What a fantastic build!! And what an amazing opportunity for those kids. Thank you for all of your dedication - and then sharing it with us! Please keep it coming! Expand Thanks, Nikki! Ok, so back at it. We had 4 toadstool frags. One was given to new member @achansek (how's it doing Aravind?), one melted (boo), and two have survived, have attached themselves to their plugs, and are putting on growth. The two frags are kept in different tank systems so it's a fun way to see if we can identify differences. Flow is fairly similar, but one of them gets a heavy dose of intense lighting, while the other is under much more moderate lighting conditions. Growth (measured by weight), was similar for both. We saw a 238% in one and a 214% increase in the other. One of the young men was able to deduce that some of the weight difference may be water weight from the plug itself as they originally attached them to dry plugs and now the plugs are saturated. Fast forward to last week... BTA splitting time. Where's Chip @flowerseller? Watching Chip cut an anemone in half circa 2006 or so was the first time I saw it done. Entacmaea quadricolor split regularly in home aquaria. This also makes them good candidates for propagation. @dfos00 provided me with 4 nice green bta's at the last meeting and @howaboutme kindly donated a good amount of stuff when he broke down his system, to included a haul of RBTA's. The RBTA's have split some and moved a bit. I think I currently have 11 or so from him originally. I've isolated the green btas and one of Jack's splits of the rose anemone in a small box. Of course, two of the green guys snuck out and have now attached to rockwork....grrrr. Alt Ed programs are very transient in nature, with a constant influx and efflux of students. Also, absenteeism. Mr. Werner, our resident Biology teacher, brought up two young men for the festivities. One was a returnee and one was a new student. We picked out to candidates for propagation, one green and one red bta. As we had a new student (he's been up a few times to my room for exposure purposes and to talk about reefs, aquaria, and propagation) we started by identifying anemone anatomy. Pedal disc (foot), column (body), and oral disc (mouth and...). Next up safety, followed up with a YouTube video on manual propagation of nems, and a thorough hand washing. The focus was on cutting through the mouth with one motion (if possible). We had a few different scalpel blades available and eventually a utility blade that I was able to located hidden in the confines of my desk. Identifying and removing nems to be split. We settled on a scalpel with a #23 blade. It is nice and long with a bit of a curve. Time to practice one nice, consistent slice with good pressure. All hands on deck. We gave up on the scalpel as we felt it wasn't working well. I found a snap off Olfa blade in my desk from my college years. Sharp and long. Perfect. Into the NSW with the two newly sliced green btas. The individual nems were starting to reform into nems just minutes after being split. Moving on to the rose. We had some issues with the cut and I don't believe he got it though the mouth. No bueno. It looked rough immediately after going back into the water. We didn't quite have two halves... more like a 60-40 split. And the 40 side seems to be missing it's part of the mouth. Here you can clearly see the obvious difference in size. Not ideal. Good news first. We can say that we have clearly have 3 formed nems. The smaller slice of the rbta still appears to have live tissue. But I'm still not convinced that it has much of an oral disc with a mouth. I am fairly certain it's a goner, but not just yet. Tissue is still hanging on. The three definite (for now) survivors are doing great. They've reformed themselves and would be hard to differentiate between them and an anemone that hadn't been split recently. This was done on 10/21 so 8 days ago. I'll probably offer them so food here in the next few days to see if they are able to eat. We discussed exponential growth, given 100% survivability and one divide per month. After 12 cycles, we'd have 4096 clones of each. The students were quite impressed by that number. Our hope is to start passing around the Phoenix anemones at WAMAS meetings and for WAMAS members. More to come. 1
ReefdUp October 30, 2024 #30 October 30, 2024 This is so fantastic!! Oh, I'm so excited for the students! Thank you for all of your efforts! (And, if any K-12 students are interested, we still offer free memberships for them!)
howaboutme October 30, 2024 #31 October 30, 2024 Love what you're doing, Garrett! Keep up the great work teaching the next generation. Did the basslet ever come out?
gastone October 30, 2024 Author #32 October 30, 2024 On 10/30/2024 at 12:50 PM, howaboutme said: Love what you're doing, Garrett! Keep up the great work teaching the next generation. Did the basslet ever come out? Expand Jack! I've seen him 3 times now... in 5 weeks! He's in a 30g tank fwiw. It's not like he's got 180g and 200# of lr to hide in. First thing in the morning each time that I've seen him. He'll randomly appear, gobble down some breakfast and then disappear again. Tankmates are a pair of non-aggressive Ocellaris (the male can get a bit chippy with me, but the female is a sweetheart), a Salarias fasciatus (lawnmower blenny), another pig, but again, not aggressive, and a Synchiropus splendidus (mandarin dragonet). Plenty of fish in there, but I don't find it to be overcrowded. The male has taken up residence in one of your rbtas, though the female is indifferent. They still stick to that corner of the tank outside of feeding time (which is often). The blenny perches most of the day and the mandarin cruises for pods. The Sphaeramia nematoptera (pajama cardinal) is in the 20g cube with another pair of Ocellaris and Synchiropus picturatus (target mandarin). That pair of clowns aren't quite as sweet, though they really stay confined to their corner and the cardinal only gets chased by the female when being fed. Again, plenty of fish for a 20 but I am thinking about getting him (or her... haven't sexed it yet) a mate. The pair of Ocellaris that you gave me are at home in one of my nanos. I'm up to five pairs of clowns. Another pair of Ocellaris and a pair of Amphiron biaculeatus (gold stripe maroon and formerly classified premnas biaculeatus which I still can't get used to). Outside of the maroons which have always been my favorite, I'm not even a huge clown fan. Yet here I am with ten of the darn things. On a side note, just before (make that during...literally during) my appendectomy, I participated in a group buy with plans to finish stocking my mangrove Caribbean biotope tank. I ordered three fish, a centropyge argi (pygmy cherub angel), and two Opistognathus aurifrons (yellowheaded jawfish). Well, the angel looked really bad upon arrival and passed within a few hours. One of the jawfish was shortly behind. Ugg. The other made it through quarantine and is now in the forever home with two others (one of which I haven't seen). KPaquatics has offered to comp me the things that passed so I'll get another angel and I think I'll shoot for a Gobiosoma oceanops (neon goby) for a small, 4g nano that I've set up in my son's room. That or a pair of Priolepis hipoliti (rusty gobies). I can't say thank you enough to the WAMAS members that have contributed to our little part of the reef. The students are really enjoying the opportunity to learn and engage with the aquariums.
howaboutme October 31, 2024 #33 October 31, 2024 Glad the basslet made it! What it's doing is very typical. They need a long time before being comfortable and out and about. Thanks for the update.
gastone November 8, 2024 Author #34 November 8, 2024 (edited) More fun from today (11/7/24). Added a new student. Lost a few. We started by measuring our two remaining cabbage frags. They are in separate closed systems. One of them wasn't looking hot, the other has put on obvious growth. Both are attached to their plugs. Much to my chagrin, one actually lost mass, and the other was the exact same weight. Impossible! At least visually. We didn't break out the calipers as it's encrusting over the edge of the plug and even underneath. We used the same scale, tared twice to verify. The anemones we sliced continue to do well. I fully expected that only 1 half of the RBTA would make it as I was sure we didn't get a piece of the mouth. Both halves of the GBTA are doing well. They've attached (one of them on my lr as it has escaped containment.... grrrrr) and are both showing good feeding response. On to today's festivities. In my previous reef keeping life, mushrooms were the bane of my existence. Some 15 years later there are some beautiful shrooms out there. In fact, I recently started a 4g pico in my son's room that is going to be a shroom tank. So I figured, let's get going on fragging these things so I can practice on some el cheapos before I look at attempting to slice up my jawbreakers. When I purchased the initial 5 tanks, to include the IM 30L, it came with a few softies. Among them was a small colony of pale green rhodactis. These things survived my overdosing event as I forgot about them when I was on my rescue mission. They were in water with a pH well north of 9 (as high as 9.6), for about 36 hours. So what harm could a razor blade do? Talked it over with the candidates as always. Safety first. We spoke primarily of the difference between splitting anemones, where you have to include a portion of the mouth (we had evidence of what happens when you don't). With rhodactis, who most commonly multiply in our tanks via pedal laceration, which is to say they move and leave behind part of their foot. This foot develops into a new shroom. So today's goal was going to make sure we included both foot and whatever it was attached to. Tools would be scalpels and bone cutters. The students were tasked with making the slices with the scalpels before I stepped in with the bonecutters. If the shrooms were mounted to a disc it would have been fine for them to mash through them. But they were attached to a piece of thick, solid, lr, so I figured I'd take on that task myself. This discussion of where we'd slice and why we'd slice there. Our new contributor. First timer. Nice, bright young man. Said, "Man, we never got to do anything like this at our base school. I might have paid attention more." Don't be fooled, he's very bright and clearly paid attention in school, but Mr. Werner (my cohort), and I love getting positive (and not so positive at times) feedback. Next up... This is our anemone killer. Of course we don't refer to him as the Anemone Killer, but his was the imperfect slice. It's okay. They are learning and though we certainly don't wish to lose any of our livestock, it's part of the process and ultimately the rbta did survive. It just lost some weight in the process. He genuinely felt bad about the anemone and was hesitant to get back in there and cut again, but we spoke of success and failure and learning. Good stuff. And he did it. And did great. My turn to hack away. It's 11/8 now. Didn't finish the post yesterday. The little shrooms look fine. Tissue is still viable. They are under fairly indirect lighting and not getting too much flow. We'll monitor them to see how they progress. Here is the smallest frag. About 3/8" square or so. So what's next? If we can isolate some more BTAs, we can get to work on propagating more so I can pass them out at the next WAMAS event, along with the cabbage frags and when they are ready, the shrooms as well. I've got copepod and phyto cultures that needs upkeep and maintenance. Not as sexy as the aquariums, but necessary components none-the-less. Edited November 8, 2024 by gastone
gastone November 17, 2024 Author #35 November 17, 2024 No real updates. I picked up some mushrooms for my son's shroom tank in his bedroom. OG Bounce, St. Thomas and a magic carpet. I brought them to school to settle in. His tank is fairly new and though I expect it to be stable as it was started with TBS live rock and sand from my school sump, I don't want to chance it as this was a significant financial outlay for me. The dual tank setup has a Trigger Emerald 39g sump, which I think is a nice piece of kit. One of the issues is that in in lieu of a standard 4" media cup holder, the sump comes with this: Little weird to be sure. I reached out on their website and they do offer a circular 4" basket holder for the sapphire sumps which they've told me will work on the emerald sump. But I just didn't feel like spending more money. So off to school to see what I could come up with using the 3D printer we have at our disposal. I haven't used CAD software in well over 20 years so I'm sure I spend too much time on Fusion 360 designing the media baskets. It's got some issues. I didn't lay it out before slicing so the holes overlap at the long axis. Shame on me. But overall they work. I ran into the building today to add water to my ATO reservoirs and que up another print. Two more and I'll be in business.
gastone November 26, 2024 Author #36 November 26, 2024 On 10/31/2024 at 1:18 AM, howaboutme said: Glad the basslet made it! What it's doing is very typical. They need a long time before being comfortable and out and about. Thanks for the update. Expand Jack, came in this morning and the basslet was out. Fourth time I've seen him in over two months. I keep thinking he's got to be dead for sure. My room is very quiet. We are a small program with small class sizes (for a multitude of reasons). And even when the students are in here they are quiet and stationary. I was able to swing by Isaac's place this weekend @YHSublime, and through his unbelievable generosity we have some more fragging to do. Won't be until after Thanksgiving break and we do jump into SOL season here in VA (yay standardized testing!), but we'll find time to get together at least once if not twice before winter break. I'll make sure to update with a complete account of what we are doing and what Isaac supplied us with. Thanks again, Isaac! And if Tiny (and Sandwiches) ever need a babysitter, I'm your guy. 3
YHSublime November 29, 2024 #37 November 29, 2024 Love to hear the fragging, have nightmares about SOLs! Cheers!
gastone March 1 Author #38 March 1 Been slow going at school. Had a sand bed that I believe was leaching phosphates in the IM30. Part of the issue with purchasing a used system and not being aware of its history and care. Took me awhile to get it mostly under wraps. I removed 80% or so of the sand bed. Added a hob refugium that I've seeded with some caulerpa (any got any chaeto?). Running some GFO. PO4 is stable at about .098ppm. a wee bit higher than I'd like, but trending well from stupid levels. Started two new nanos. Both 8g aio setups. One has a maxima and not much else and the other is supposed to become a shrooms tank, but I've got some rearranging to do to get there. I'll get pics up soon. The maxima came out of the 30 and has some algae growth on its scutes. Grrr. I'm sure the white light I'm running isn't helping with algae. On to fun stuff. I picked up a few things from @reef_jon to include some gsp. Figured that would be easy for the kids to frag. I've got a new student that is very interested in the tanks and we talk daily about them. I pulled a few of them, including him, to frag up the gsp. They did awesome. Yesterday, the science teacher showed up out of nowhere with a group of kids. I was totally unprepared for them, but we had an awesome chat. There were 7 of them and 5 of them were very much interested and engaged. Two of them weren't, but that's okay. It was mostly conversation and q&a. Maybe when we get to cutting stuff they'll come around. One of the young ladies was adamant that we set a date to come back up and do some fragging, so we are looking at March 14th as our next get together. I'll have to figure out what to do, but I do have 3 rbtas in isolation that we can split, so that's a start.
epleeds March 2 #39 March 2 You looking for a 34 gallon Red Sea. I would donate it if your interested needs some work. But its free
gastone March 2 Author #40 March 2 On 3/2/2025 at 2:18 AM, epleeds said: You looking for a 34 gallon Red Sea. I would donate it if your interested needs some work. But its free Expand Eric, thank you for the offer. The truth is that I just a snuck another nano tank into the building that I didn't tell my better half about. I end up purchasing about half of the equipment I need for each tank out of pocket (WAMAS members and even a few vendors have been extremely supportive). Hmmm..... I wonder if I could set it up as fw. That'd be less expensive at least. Let me look into it and I'll get back to you. 1
gastone March 14 Author #41 March 14 Back to the fun stuff. Mr. Werner (the resident Bio teacher) brought up a group two weeks ago. I wasn't prepared for them and didn't have anything set up to do. Fridays are best for me currently as I don't have students on Fridays after 11:00 so we agreed to meet up in two weeks time. I'd isolated a few RBTAs (Entacmaea quadricolor) and had the cabbage (Sinularia brassica) that we'd fragged originally last fall which had grown back and was ready to be cut on again. He returned today with the students. We always start off by talking about safety. Washing hands, wearing eye and hand protection. Being careful with scalpels (!!!!). Next we talked about the reefs, conservation through propagation, what they've seen, what they know. Some of them will surprise you with the knowledge, and some of them have never been exposed to anything of this ilk. They were all into it and excited to cut stuff up. First a video: We started with the cabbage. I cut off a generous strip for them to slice up. We labeled our ceramic frag plates with their names on the bottom in sharpie, and then weighed the corals. Every two weeks we'll pull them out and weigh them again to see how they are progressing. Using the grid lines, we also took two measurements of each plate with calipers. We'll also document growth that way. Four students cut up the cabbage. Of course we forgot to start taking pictures as the first two were were slicing. One of the young ladies was excited to return them to the tank. Nem time: Cutting through tissue is not something that is intuitive or easy. There's a certain "grainy" sound from the cabbage, and the BTAs are tougher than you think. They are also small and slimy and not easy to hold down. The second young man had a tough time, but I'm hoping that both halves will be okay. After slicing they were dropped in some iodine to help disinfect for a nice recovery bath. We chatted some more, talked a bit more about the brine shrimp hatchery, the freshwater shrimp breeding station that we are setting up, and a bit about the Redsea tank that @epleeds donated to us last week. Our plan is to set it up as a paludarium. I'm not necessarily a fw guy, though I'm willing to learn. Mr. Werner and I are designing it out and then we'll have the students start to work on the build out. Realistically, given the timing, I don't expect it to contain whatever fun crustaceans we are aiming for until it's stabilized... I expect next school year. 1
gastone March 26 Author #43 March 26 What we need is more stuff... more projects. IOAOI is a manufacturer that supplies reef items, mostly skimmers, though they have a sweet little DC nano pump that I'm in love with. They offer new products for free on R2R on occasion, they just ask that you provide objective, detailed feedback. I've received 3 skimmers and a nano pump from them. I still use two of the skimmers and passed the 3rd along to another WAMAS member. I've purchased more of their nano pumps as they are cost competitive and work really well. Anyway, Tom (IOAOI employee and poster on R2R) reached out to me and asked if I'd like to try out a new nano AIO in that they are just releasing. Without asking my wife I of course said yes. The tank arrived and was unbelievably well packed. There were 3 shipping boxes, all that fit very tight, rigid foam corners and a foam enclosure. I think I could have dropped it off of a 3 story building and nothing would have happened. The glass is crystal clear, the corners are mitered at 45 degrees which is very slick. The tank arrived with a 2.75" filter sock and a return nozzle. I went ahead and ordered another IOAOI nano pump (it really is a sweet little DC pump). The tank is setup up as a mushroom tank. Here's where I have two nits with the tank. The rear chamber is divided into 4 sections, and the middle divider is just that...right smack in the middle, which means mounting a light is tricky as most of them have mounts that are best geared to be centered on the glass frame. I had two Kessil A80 Tuna Blues (and an extra Spectral X Controller) laying around so I used the opportunity to mount both of them. My other gripe is that the filter sock holder is siliconed into place so there's no option to use the first chamber for anything other than a filter sock. Not a huge nit as I could probably cut it out if I decided to move off of the sock and go with a media basket or the like, just something to consider. I went with a 50w Hygger heater and an optical ATO hooked up to a 1g mason jar. There's also a cheap little ph/temp/salinity monitor hooked up. Here's the rub. I'm on a budget as these are classroom tanks and I mostly use stuff that's been donated or I have laying around. To include live rock. I've probably been gifted about 50lbs of lr from various breakdowns. And that's awesome. There's also often a reason for a breakdown that involves some not so good. The rock (and sand) that I used for this build has a bit of algae. There's some bubble algae, some nasty bryopsis, and some really, really cool scroll algae, Padina pavonica. These tanks are maintained as fairly low nutrient systems. Currently each one houses an Azure damselfish (Chrysiptera parasema). I received 3 of them from a recent local tank breakdown. I wouldn't buy one, but they were free and I had to put them somewhere so one was assigned to each tank. That's it for fish. I feed them a few pellets a few times per day. They don't go hungry, but not are they overfed. I'm hoping that the algae issue will rectify itself with time and without too much intervention on my part. I do pick out some daily with tweezers, but that's about the extent of it so far. As far as corals go, I picked up a fairly large mushroom recently. If anyone is able to identify it, that'd be awesome. It was about 8" in the display tank I purchased if from, about 7" when it settled into my 20G cube, and so far about 5.5" across in this tank. I'm hop been fragging and gluing to the back wall, and a few different zoanthinds. Well, that was fun I thought. But the desk looks unbalanced. So I decided I should add another Coralland IOAOI tank on the other side. For this one I wanted to do a clam tank. I had a Dalua Pixel Reefer that I'd won in a raffle and is quite white. I was having a hard time figuring out what to do with such a white spectrum, but I thought a little clam tank would be perfect for it. I had a maxima that I'd picked up some time last spring and had survived some silly mishaps, to include an alk overdose that saw the pH spike to about 9.6. Ouchies! I've recently picked up a nice, small derasa from the Reefing USA show that I'm hoping will be fine in the nano for a year or two before it needs to be upgraded. There's also what is supposed to be a Fiji yellow leather (we'll see... still not convinced) that I thought would benefit from a nice white spectrum, as well as a Koji wada that I just received yesterday. I'm hoping to add another clam or two. For a little bit of blue, I had a Pawfly 15w led that was previously being used on another 3g mushroom tank (since switched over to Hygger kit). Another IOAOI nano pump, cheap 50 watt heater hooked up to a Willhi temp controller, optical ATO supplying kalkwasser from a 1g mason jar. That's about it I think. Circulation is light on both tanks which might be contributing to my algae issues. I know the rocks and sand I reused are leaching phosphates, but I'm also not helping as my circulation isn't high enough to keep detritus in suspension which means it's all settling. The white spectrum from the Pixel is also a contributing factor. Baby steps. Oh, that algae looks awful! I'm going to have to pick up a few small power heads to keep stuff in suspension. A view from the front of the room and view from my desk:
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