davelin315 October 1, 2008 Share October 1, 2008 Hey everyone, the reefs are making their way back to Floris this year again and this is the 3rd to reappear at school this year. This tank went through a massive die off last year after a top off mishap over Thanksgiving with the only survivors being a purple reef lobster, some snails, and a few zoanthids and mushrooms. Anyway, the tank was broken down over the summer and stored in my classroom with the rock going back to my house along with the few corals that survived. Fortunately, I have always believed in keeping "spare" corals at my house to grow them out and move them to school, so much of what was lost still had some surviving pieces at my home, kind of a school/home SWAP. Back to the tank, it's a 5' 75 gallon acrylic tank that was donated several years back by Tim Stone (extreme tooth decay). It made its way in and out of school without ever being filled and then was used to store rock at my house for a few months. Last year I drilled it in the bottom, changed the stand, and added a sump and some miscellaneous plumbing. I also took a 150HQI light from my house and added it to one side of the tank to give it a sunny reef/open water feel. I plumbed the return with an old Little Giant 4MDQX I had been using on and off and installed a skimmer that was donated years back by Erik Sundstrom that I popped one of my old maxi-jet 1200s onto. The tank went through some changes this year as I moved from a more reef oriented tank to an aggressive reef. I attached some acrylic strips to cover the old HOB filter openings in the bracing, drilled some holes in the top to insert nylon screws into, and added egg crating to the top that is removable by removing some wing nuts on the nylon screws. All of this was done to eliminate holes in the top of the tank as the plans for an aggressive reef necessitated this. Anyway, I replaced the bulb on the tank (thanks to Sean at Aquarium Company for giving me a great deal on a new bulb!). I also received a new RO/DI filter, a refurbished Typhoon 75gpd 5 stage, from Air Water & Ice which allowed me to replace the old unit that I was using - basically a ghetto set up that was thrown together from multiple parts that I have collected over the years. So, back to the tank, it's now up and running as we filled it with RO/DI last Monday after I finished working on the tank, added the salt on Tuesday, brought in the rock on Wednesday, and then brought the fish in on Thursday, just in time for Back to School Night! Funny enough, during the evening session the light broke and fell onto the tank as I had cracked it somehow when I was moving it. I had epoxied it to no avail, so I used some epoxy putty to surround the entire break and it's working like a champ now! Our stocking list is slightly overloaded, especially given the nature and feeding habits of the fish, but with us planning for between 6-10 tanks this year, I figure live stock can be shuffled if necessary. We have: 2.5' Zebra Moray Eel that I bought from the Aquarium Company during the summer after a customer tank breakdown 5" Pacific Blue Tang donated by Ethan (ethandvm) 4.5" Porcupine Puffer donated by Ethan 2" Male Goldbar Maroon Clown donated by Chris Thomas (aka 143gadgets) 3.5" Female Goldbar Maroon Clown donated by Khanh Do (aka bendalat) 2" Picasso Trigger donated by Ethan - this little guy started at less than an inch this summer but was a pig and grew 5" Cortez Rainbow Wrasse donated by Ethan 4" One Eyed Yellow Tang donated by Ethan OK, so I know that a thread is useless without pictures, so... This is a picture of the first feeding that we did on Monday before school ended. Charlie brought in some shrimp so we thawed it out and he fed the fish. The puffer was the one who got the most active and then everyone else got to take part in the feeding after he ate a whole shrimp by himself. Here's a close up of the puffer as he is wolfing down his food. As you can see, the tank is not at all popular... how do you make a 5' tank disappear from a room? Surround it with 5th graders... The rest are some of our livestock shots. Most of the corals have a WAMAS lineage in there. The red mushrooms were donated a few years ago by Paul (aka Jarosh), the green mushrooms are offspring of a single mushroom I bought from Tim Stone a few years back when stocking up on rock, the green bubble tip anemone is a clone of an anemone I bought from Mike Ling (aka mling) a year or two ago, the encrusting gorgonian was donated by Khanh, and the metallic elephant ear was from... I think Adrienne Stanton (aka adrienne)? If you donated it, let me know, it's been around for a few years now. Anyway, I plan on sticking some of the Montipora digitata that was donated by Dave Sandstrom (aka mogurnda) last year into the tank as well, possibly also some lps, although I'm not sure how the trigger and puffer will do with these. Back to the pictures... Sorry about the blurry pictures, I used our grade level camera and have yet to explore how to change some of the settings. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zoozilla October 1, 2008 Share October 1, 2008 Very nice, Dave. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MLazar October 1, 2008 Share October 1, 2008 Dave, Love what you're doing for the kids. Do you have a wish list of items you'd like for the tank? It would be neat if you would post.................... Maureen Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jason the filter freak October 1, 2008 Share October 1, 2008 looks great, where did you get the one eyed tang? also the GSM clowns look great! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sugar Magnolia October 1, 2008 Share October 1, 2008 (edited) Dave, Love what you're doing for the kids. Do you have a wish list of items you'd like for the tank? It would be neat if you would post.................... Maureen I agree with Maureen. A wish list posted in this forum for your school and Doug's would be great. Dave, I have something you might be interested in trying in one of the tanks. I picked up a bleached BTA over a year ago. It was doing really well, but never colored up. A couple of months ago it began trying to split. After a month it had split it's foot, but just struggled to finish the split, so I helped it along with a razor. I now have two small bleached anems. The smaller of the two will not come out from under an overhang in the rocks. Would you be interested in taking it and trying to help it recover and possibly see if it'lll color up for you? I'm going to keep the larger one for my perc and plan on bumping up the feeding schedule to see if it'll color up. I"ve heard it can take up to two years for color to return. You might have better luck than me. I also have a large mat of tan star polyps I can bring along. Let me know! Edited October 1, 2008 by Sugar Magnolia Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davelin315 October 1, 2008 Author Share October 1, 2008 Hey Adrienne, that would be great! It might be quite the experiment as I was thinking of injecting an anemone as well! I would have to figure out which tank to put it into, but there's a 30L with two clowns that is about to be set up and it might be a great place for it. It's a bonded pair of ocellaris clowns, but that's for another thread! I'll coordinate with Doug and see if the "wish list" would work out, otherwise I know that Cedar Lane has posted some requests within the thread. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davelin315 October 8, 2008 Author Share October 8, 2008 I took the opportunity today to introduce a class full of kindergartners to the marine world and the inhabitants of my tank. First, I had them come in and sit on the floor where I showed them a coral skeleton and some barnacle shells. We passed these around and I explained to them how a coral skeleton is like an apartment for tiny coral polyps, each hole being an apartment that houses an individual animal. I also explained that a barnacle is like a clam with a net that it uses to scoop food out of the water. I then broke into the living organisms. This morning before school I grabbed 4 hermit crabs from one of my home sumps, some bristle worms, and some asterina stars. I passed around each of these, once again using the apartment analogy with the hermit crabs, explaining that not all starfish have 5 legs when I passed the asterina stars around, and then passed the bristleworms along in a container and compared them to porcupines with their spines. After this, we then all gathered around the tank for a feeding! Since my daughter Preston, who has attended meetings before and loves to pick up anything that is from the water, is in that class, she naturally got to do the feeding. I introduced each fish in the tank along with the corals and then she fed them some pieces of shrimp. One interesting thing that happened as she fed them was that after I explained that the anemeone and the clowns work together, the large female gold bar maroon grabbed a whole shrimp and swam over and deposited it in her anemone. Anyway, they were able to see the eel eat a small chunk of shrimp, the puffer ate a larger chunk, and the rest of the fish helped to dismantle another piece of shrimp between them. There were lots of smiling faces and excited voices in the room and so this will be repeated with the other 4 kindergarten classes over the next few weeks (another one is coming on Thursday) as well as other classes in the school (my other daughter who is at the school is bringing her 2nd grade class a week from tomorrow). Here are some pictures from the big event! Here are some shots of the tank inhabitants as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sugar Magnolia October 14, 2008 Share October 14, 2008 Dave, neither one of the anemones are responding very well after the split. Not sure why, since everything is in line with my water params. I'm going to pull the rock next week to chunk off the rock around the anemones so I don't disturb them too much by trying to loosen their feet. I'll send you a PM regarding what day I can swing by the school to drop one off. Let me know what time is best for you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
extreme_tooth_decay October 20, 2008 Share October 20, 2008 Hey! I had that same type of wrasse and also a zebra moray in that tank when I had it. Funny! I eventually had to trade the wrasse in because it attacked EVERYTHING. No snail could get more than 2" up the side of the tank, etc. Funny to watch though. tim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davelin315 October 21, 2008 Author Share October 21, 2008 Yeah, we have a difficult time with keeping hermit crabs alive in the tank... they keep on getting eaten by the fish... you can see how strong their jaws are as the snail shells are getting really battered at the lips as they try and get the crabs out. The puffer, trigger, and eel all pick on the hermit crabs, I haven't even attempted to put a snail in there other than the colonistas (they also like to feast on the asterinas). Anyway, I had my daughter's 2nd grade class come in today to learn about the inhabitants and then we did a feeding for the fish. They really had a great time, although they didn't see the eel eat as he was too clumsy to find the food in the time they had. We started out with handling some dead coral and barnacles, then passed around some hermit crabs and some new chocolate chip stars before moving on to feeding. Here are the few pictures I was able to take. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davelin315 December 19, 2008 Author Share December 19, 2008 It's been awhile since an update, so I'll update now! Tried to get some pictures but the camera is lousy and the battery is gone so it's charging and I hope to have pictures tomorrow. Anyway, awhile back we lost our puffer to a naming incident (anytime a fish has been named before it has been in the school for 2 months, it dies) and recently replaced it with a new one, quite a bit smaller. We have also received donations from Sugar Magnolia (Adrienne) of an anemone, some star polyps or encrusting polyps of some sort, a small leather, and some zoanthids, as well as a donation from DaisyDo (Karen) of a large rock of anthelia. It's interesting to experiment in this tank with what we can put together as there is a puffer and a small trigger as well as a large zebra moray eel and a large wrasse. Luan also donated a big eye squirrelfish and this one ended up going into one of the other tanks in the school to add a splash of color. This tank is currently a bit overcrowded as a problem in another tank in the school resulted in the fish dying off and fouling the water (oddly enough, it was right after the kids named the fish in that system) so all of the rock from that tank ended up in this one temporarily as we get it ready to house some seahorses that the kids wanted to purchase after one did a lot of research on them and presented to her class. We'll have to see what the tank looks like once it's emptied of its extras, but the fish are all happy and the corals that are in there (mostly softies) are doing well. I'll update more later once I get decent pictures. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davelin315 January 7, 2009 Author Share January 7, 2009 OK, the tank did well over break, although some of the new corals (specifically the star polyp mat that was donated by Adrienne Stanton) got eaten while the fish were left alone - note to those looking to remove these from their systems - Picasso Triggers and Small Porcupine Puffers will munch on them! Other than that, the tank is doing well and I'll post up some more pictures next time I bring in my camera. We did pull a few things out of the tank the other day and have been looking at them under the microscope in class and I took some pictures. Not all of these are from this tank, but they're all reef related so I'll post them here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davelin315 January 7, 2009 Author Share January 7, 2009 OK, the tank did well over break, although some of the new corals (specifically the star polyp mat that was donated by Adrienne Stanton) got eaten while the fish were left alone - note to those looking to remove these from their systems - Picasso Triggers and Small Porcupine Puffers will munch on them! Other than that, the tank is doing well and I'll post up some more pictures next time I bring in my camera. We did pull a few things out of the tank the other day and have been looking at them under the microscope in class and I took some pictures. Not all of these are from this tank, but they're all reef related so I'll post them here. This is a piece of a shortspine urchin that didn't survive a tank crash in another class. You can see the grooving along the spine itself. I believe magnification is around 40x. This is some fish food that some of the kids wanted to see. Pellets that look like dog food on the microscope! This is some hair algae or turf algae from another tank. It's about a day old and dead now, but you can still make out some of the chlorophyll in it. Yesterday there were lots of things moving around in it. Here's a shot of a dead Table Acropora Skeleton. This is not a corallite, it's simply the skeleton itself. Lots of ridges and protrusions on the skeleton. Here's a closeup of the skeleton itself. Here's a close up of the rim of an axial corallite. It's amazing how porous the coral skeleton actually is. Here's the actual corallite above. You can see that there are tons of these tiny holes and ridges on each and every surface of the skeleton. Here's some aiptasia under the scope. Here's some anthelia polyp. The tiny tentacles are actually the individual "feathers" that filter out food from the water. Last, here's a shot of some slime from the bottom of one of the tanks in a 2nd grade classroom. One of the kids decided to feed it something before break and when we got back, the entire tank was green... greenest tank I've ever seen. We pulled this biological mass off the bottom and there are tons of little protists and worms crawling through it. For some reason, I was unable to upload videos to photobucket so I'll try again later and add those. It shows aiptasia, anthelia, and the slime from the different tanks moving around. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davelin315 October 23, 2009 Author Share October 23, 2009 Just wanted to update - this tank has returned to school but we suffered some die off as it moved back in (the tank was brought back and the water and rock was incredibly dirty so I had to separate the rock and the tank and house everything in a garbage can while I washed the tank out overnight. When the rock was washed off it had an ammonia spike due to the amount of dead algae and detritus present (the family that hosted it really enjoyed feeding over the summer). We ended up losing the little puffer, the yellow tang, the rainbow wrasse, and the Pacific Blue (lost over the summer). The Picasso made it through the spike, as did the pair of gold bar maroons and the zebra moray, though. I allowed the tank to settle down, and then added a small snowflake that I've had in my home sump for awhile to the tank and will be restocking with some other stuff soon. The corals also suffered but what remains is slowly coming back. I've been slowly restocking with softies from my home tank. Unfortunately, the boards are once again blocked at school so I cannot post anything up from school and this would be the ideal year to have the kids post as I have an advanced academics class this year and they tend to finish things quicker so they can get to more things. When I get the opportunity I'll snap some new pictures and post them up here. On a fun note, though, the education process never stops! I have hosted a 1st grade class and a 3rd grade class (I always start with my own kids' classes first) and will open up feedings to other classes as well. I do a brief education piece that mostly goes through behavioral and structural adaptations as well as some basics of marine ecosystems and then let them feed the tank - I've already had a couple of parents from these classes drop by to ask if they can see the tanks, too! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Origami October 23, 2009 Share October 23, 2009 Dave, if you ever need help to temporarily QT some fish in a situation like this where stability may be an issue, give me a call and I'll give you a hand. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Floris 5th Grader December 15, 2009 Share December 15, 2009 This is Randy from Floris Elementary School. In these videos, the clownfish are hosting in the moray eel. Clownfish normally would hide in coral reefs and anemones. The clownfish probably think the moray eel is an anemone. When the clownfish are hosting in the moray eel, the female clownfish will chase the triggerfish away if it gets close. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Origami December 15, 2009 Share December 15, 2009 Hi Randy. Welcome to the WAMAS forums! Great video you have there. Thank you. I'm not so sure that the clown actually "thinks" the eel is an anemone. Rather, its instinct to host in something is so strong that, lacking a suitable "normal" host, it's settled on hosting next to the eel. Clowns have hosted many different things: Various corals, rocks, and even coffee mugs. I've never seen one host an eel, though! Keep that eel well fed, OK? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davelin315 December 16, 2009 Author Share December 16, 2009 Tom, funny you should mention that... (Michele, lost the post, you'll have to repost tomorrow!) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Origami December 16, 2009 Share December 16, 2009 So, students, do you ever notice your eels begging when feeding time comes? My fish "beg" when they see me. They'll follow me from one end of the tank to the other, just waiting for me to put some food in. Also, do the eels and fish have names? What interesting behaviors have you seen? Do you keep a record of your observations? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Floris 5th Grader December 16, 2009 Share December 16, 2009 So, students, do you ever notice your eels begging when feeding time comes? My fish "beg" when they see me. They'll follow me from one end of the tank to the other, just waiting for me to put some food in. Also, do the eels and fish have names? What interesting behaviors have you seen? Do you keep a record of your observations? Hi. I am Sarah. The eels don't beg, but they come out when they are hungry. The zebra moray eel has very bad eyesight so he can't see anybody. Our fish and eels don't have names because if we name them , then they will die. (That is a hypothesis ) Hi this is Subul! The Triggerfish tries to chase the bubbles when it's hungry. The Snowflake Moray eel once bit the Triggerfish right in the mouth! We don't keep a record of our observations, we just watch them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Origami December 16, 2009 Share December 16, 2009 Hi. I am Sarah. The eels don't beg, but they come out when they are hungry. The zebra moray eel has very bad eyesight so he can't see anybody. Our fish and eels don't have names because if we name them , then they will die. (That is a hypothesis ) Hi this is Subul! The Triggerfish tries to chase the bubbles when it's hungry. The Snowflake Moray eel once bit the Triggerfish right in the mouth! We don't keep a record of our observations, we just watch them. Hi Sarah & Subul! I see that Mr. Lin has introduced you to his theory linking naming livestock and mortality. Perhaps, with sufficient data collection, you can use this hypothesis as the basis for your next Science Fair project. Keeping records of observations and conditions is a good way to begin to look for patterns, cause-and-effect relationships, and to begin to understand what's going on in a tank, or in any system for that matter. I completely understand the joy and excitement that comes with just watching, though! I'm glad that you're having a good time. Keep up the good work and keep posting! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dandy7200 December 17, 2009 Share December 17, 2009 This is Randy from Floris Elementary School. In these videos, the clownfish are hosting in the moray eel. Clownfish normally would hide in coral reefs and anemones. The clownfish probably think the moray eel is an anemone. When the clownfish are hosting in the moray eel, the female clownfish will chase the triggerfish away if it gets close. Thats pretty cool the fish host on the eel. You guys should all write a story about it one day. I think it would be funny if you wrote it from the eels perspective, I would love to hear what the eel has to say about his living situation Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
extreme_tooth_decay March 19, 2012 Share March 19, 2012 Long time no update! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davelin315 April 13, 2012 Author Share April 13, 2012 Sorry, the school system has introduced a lot of things that have reduced our ability to find time for pictures and various other activities with the tanks. We still have a number of tanks over at Floris and the tank in my room has 2 triggers, 2 eels, and a couple of "reject" fish because of their aggression. It has morphed a lot over the years into the current tank where there is no artificial light since the fish create such a mess with extra nutrients. I'll try and update soon! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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