The Ocean over at Floris Elementary School

[davelin315]

From what I understand it's a supply and demand relationship, the higher the aiptasia population, the more berghias there are, the more berghias there are, the lower the aiptasia population gets. They tend to "outproduce" the aiptasia and then die off or shrink back in population. They supposedly will survive long term as long as they don't get all of the aiptasia, but it's looking like they'll get all of them sooner rather than later!

[Guest mikesroth]

:( I haven't seen mine since I put them in... Jen seems to think that they are at work... but I am not sure... LOL

[emissary]

That's just fantastic. I have a plentiful supply of aptasia that I could put them at work on in a holding tank

[Lee Stearns]

That is really quite some picture taking- thanks so much for sharing this with us- hope to see what happens when their eggs hatch and how long that takes for them to get through plantonic stage till you notice the young crawling around-

Great job Dave!

[davelin315]

Well, we went back to school today after a nice three day break but I decided that I'll stage the berghias at home for the short week and instead, move egg strands into the berghia tank. I am also thinking that I'll run out of aiptasia sooner than I anticipated, but it remains to be seen if this will be the case or not. The rock I took home over the weekend is completely devoid of aiptasia and it's ready to go back to school. I brought home another rock today as well as introducing a large piece of montipora digitata that I got from Nathan into a holding tank. The m. digitata has a lot of aiptasia on it that are slowly killing off the bases of it (there was already an entire dead side to it when I got it). I thought that I'd rid it of aiptasia and let it grow a bit in my home tank and then move it into the school tanks when it's set to go, but now I'll use it to feed the berghias, hope that they lay egg strands on it, and then move frags of it into school instead of keeping it as one large piece. Anyway, the original berghias are still going strong (they actually sent me 2 freebies and I noticed that the trio that the school purchased actually had 4 in it, so we've got a total of 6) and laying eggs like there's no tomorrow. The other egg sacs which I have removed are also doing well and continue to look healthy. From what I understand at about 10-12 days (we're on either day 6 or 7 since they've laid eggs) the strands become milky and this is a sign that the berghias are about to hatch.

 

I'll try and take a picture of the next rock before I add it to the berghia system to show how well they fight aiptasia. I've got a few different tanks I can remove rock from for this purpose, including the holding tank.

[davelin315]

OK, the rock with all of the pictures went back into the tank today. I figure that I've got enough egg cases isolated (I've got one rock that has one that hatched today - more later in this post) so that I can let the berghias try and raise themselves. Also, I've already taken three decent sized rocks and made them aiptasia free in 10 days of having these guys, so it's been very effective. I am sticking with the new revised plan of keeping the breeding set at my house so that they don't have any problems on weekends, at least until I run out of things to feed them in my tank (really only have 3 or 4 larger aiptasia in my home system, but I still have 1 m. digitata that has a few left on it after being covered before).

 

Anyway, back to the first egg strand I found. According to different resources, the egg strand will get milky white and then hatch, and this evening when I looked it was milky white and many of the eggs were gone. If I look closely at the water I can see tiny things swimming around, smaller than naupli (baby brine shrimp), but I'm not sure if those are baby berghias or if they are some sort of pod. I'm guessing they are berghias and I am going to continue to watch them. I'll wait a day before adding an aiptasia as I want them to be crawling around instead of swimming around so that they don't fall prey to aiptasia. I'll monitor the first aiptasia I put in and see if it slowly disappears. Anyway, as soon as the first ones are of discernible size, I'll be getting rid of these to club members who have helped me out in the past with stocking up the school. I also still have some egg strands for a few people that wanted to try it. When I checked on the berghias tonight, they were surfing on the underside of the water surface and had laid 4 egg strands on that very surface! Kind of weird to see, but I did read that they love to slide across the bottom of the surface all of the time.

 

If I can, I'll try and isolate one on the digital microscope tonight and post some pictures. By my count, they are 10.5 days old after being laid, and most likely a few hours old after hatching. Again, time will tell, but I have heard that they leave the planktonic state in a day or less when they are in stagnant water, which is what they are in. I'll keep a close eye and if I see tiny white spots crawling around, I'll add the first aiptasia tomorrow.

[Guest mikesroth]

Ack... I am jealous, I think mine have died off... :bigcry:

I haven't seen one, and the aptasia farm still seems to be going strong

 

I am hoping that they are just hiding, or <ack> I had more than I thought and they are just starting on the hidden side first... LOL

[davelin315]

Hey Mike, from what I have researched, often when you add them to a large system you will think you have none for a long time and then all of a sudden you'll see multiple ones. My guess is that you'll start to see some babies in another few weeks as the egg strands that they most likely have laid (where you can't find them) will probably be hatching tonight or tomorrow given the time frame mine are on. They should be out of the planktonic stage within 2 days or so and then they should be large enough to see within a couple more weeks. If you don't see any by then, let me know and I'll hopefully be able to hook you up with some of the babies (keeping my fingers crossed!).

[BeltwayBandit]

Dave,

 

How are the 'bergs' doing? I recently picked up some rock from an lfs that has some aiptasia on it, it is in my fuge right now so I figure it is fine in there. If you start running low on aiptasia let me know and I can spot you some. :D

 

Question, how are you "growing" more aiptasia to keep a sustainable colony of the berghias. Won't you eventually run out? Don't they leave eggs all over the rocks they have been on so you can't even cycle them back into the aiptasia farm tanks?

 

 

BB

[davelin315]

It's been very busy of late, but the berghias are still doing fine, but I haven't been able to successfully hatch any of the egg strands yet. I have had them hatch in smaller containers that I monitor, but I add tiny aiptasia to them and they never seem to disappear. I have also been taking rock and moving it back and forth, but again, I haven't seen any signs of baby berghias yet. The egg strands are hatching, but I'm not sure if any are making it out of the planktonic stage. The original 6 are still doing great and are really eliminating the aiptasia, but again, I'm not seeing evidence of babies yet. Hopefully, this will change, and I'm contemplating having desktop cultures for the kids to raise and study. I'll probably begin it next week and have the kids post on their projects.

 

So far, the aiptasia farm is also being used as a staging area for fish so it's getting heavily fed and the aiptasia are multiplying like mad. That said, I do picture running out at some point in time, so if you'd like some rock cleaned, let me know. I can return it to you cleaned off with some egg strands attached as long as it's fairly small. If it's too big, I can't fit it into the holding container and also won't be able to reclaim the berghias afterwards. So far nothing much larger than a softball has been used.

[Guest samc99us]

I've got PLENTY of aiptasia I can lend you (no corals on the rocks). Some of them are huge (2"+) and would require multiple berghia to bring them down. If you are succesful in raising some of the larvae, I would be willing to buy them from you! I live in southern md. so transporting rock might not be the most effiecient!

 

Sam

[davelin315]

Unfortunately, I think I have found out that these guys do not do well when mixed with leather coral. I have been keeping them separated and doing twice daily water changes, but they seem to have disappeared after I put some leather coral in there for them to de-aiptasia. It's either that, or asterina stars ate them. I'm very disappointed that they did not make it, and I haven't had any luck in raising any of the eggs, but I am going to order again, so if anyone is interested, let me know. I'll be trying it two ways this time, one way is isolated in containers, the other way is going to be simply releasing some into a 10 gallon that is set up specifically for them. We'll see which way works better.

[davelin315]

OK, so this tank is now on summer vacation and has been once again reaquascaped. In any case, I decided that I'm going to simply post things here for the school tanks instead of trying to keep up as many threads as I have tried in the past. This tank, as I said, is on vacation, but some of the other ones were broken down for the summer to troubleshoot problems such as noisy overflows and aiptasia!

 

The extra rock from all of the tanks that were taken down is now in a sump in my basement ready to be aiptasia-eradicated. I bought a copperband butterfly the other day at BRK and 4 peppermint shrimp in the hopes that they start eating and decimating these awful anemones. Eventually the copperband will go into my tank at home, but here's some shots of some of the rock and the copperband.

 

Aiptasia - it's huge! This one is about the size of a quarter and since the kids like to feed so much at school it's gotten even bigger. This is from the 37 that's in 6th grade. My plans for this tank are to drill it with a Grey Seas Aquatic internal overflow box (dropped the tank off with Dan at the Symposium) and then fit the huge skimmer donated by Tim (extreme tooth decay) onto the side. I need to troubleshoot the skimmer as it's been leaking, but once I get it up and running at home then it'll help to clean the rock out for the summer and then move in with the newely revamped and drilled tank in the fall.

 

Speaking of which, here's the other sump set which has the rock from school, corals, and also the giant skimmer.

 

Another shot of the aiptasia, you can see some things mixed in with them.

 

The overflow from the tray to the large sump where there's only aiptasia and base rock.

 

Some interesting zoanthids, maybe palyothoas, that sprouted in the tank this past year. They were there last year, too, but they really took off and the colors are kind of interesting in a dull sort of way. As you can see, there's aiptasia in them, too, so hopefully the peps and the copperband will take care of business.

 

Here's the copperband hanging out over one of the many trays of live sand that I took from the school tanks that were broken down. They are all getting mixed up to free the detritus from them so that they are essentially new live sand.

 

Copperband again.

 

It is eating, which is great. Besides hitting the worms on the rocks, it's also eating mysis. I am doing my best to wean it off of my foods by dumping some into aiptasia and seeing if it'll go after it. I have yet to see it eat an aiptasia, but I'm only down there 10-15 minutes a day right now so it could be eating all day long and I wouldn't notice until the aiptasia go missing...

[Guest NSC]

Hey Dave,

 

I have just started to check out the thread. great work by the way! Did you ever get some confirmation on these "star polyps/gorgonians"? I have these on one of my rocks and have always assumed that they were stars..please correct me if I am wrong...thanks.

 

 

Here's a shot of the brown star polyps (?). They definitely have a different pattern than the other star polyps in the school and seem to be much frillier on the edges of each polyp.

 

Here's the royal gramma - head shot - as he swims in for a closer look at the camera through the glass.

 

Here's a shot of the blenny as he hides in his hole. The royal gramma is swimming by him and there's no aggression or territorialness between them.

 

Here's a closeup of the bicolor blenny. He survived his "vinegar dip" from the other day when I was trying to treat some aiptasia and he wriggled out of a rock into the pool of salty vinegar underneath it. None the worse for the wear.

[jason the filter freak]

How do you get those microscope pics?

[davelin315]

Hey Jason, those pictures were taken with a Digital Blue QX3 or QX5 microscope, can't remember which one we used. These run between $50-$100 and are low quality digital microscopes. They work pretty well, though, except they are not very good at 200x magnification.

 

An update, by the way, on the effectiveness of the threefold attack. The combination of using Joe's Juice to feed and B-Ionic Part 1 to inject along with the biological attack of peppermint shrimp and a copperband has resulted in... almost no aiptasia! I still see a few here and there, but they are few and far between. The rock seems to be aiptasia free and is ready to go into the school tanks again. This will be a big change from last year when we really fought the aiptasia all the time. There are still a couple of tanks with a problem, but the problem is more manageable than these were. We'll continue to attack during the school year and hopefully end up with aiptasia free tanks!

 

Now that these are relatively aiptasia free, by the way, I'm going to plumb all of the systems together and run them as one giant system. They were being kept separate from the other system because of the aiptasia, but now they're ready to be combined.

[hbh]

Hi Dave,

Could you use a waterfall type black plastic tub? It's a large one with a hole at one end, 3 descending chambers and a lip for the water to fall out. Did know if this would help aerate the sump or rocks in your holding tank? See you.

[davelin315]

Hi Holly, thanks for the offer, but that would generate too much evaporation and too much salt creep in a setting like school (and also be pretty noisy!). Thanks for thinking of us!

 

By the way, the tanks are slowly making their way back into school. One of the eel tanks came back on Friday and the plan is to move the other eel tank in this week as well as replace my 33 hex with a 75 and sell the hex to Doug for his wife's school. I'll then move in the 26 bowfront although I'm not sure where that's going and try and make the trip out to see Dan to pick up the 37 and move that back in.

[dbartco]

how is the merging going? I picked up some fishes at MACNA I am going to donate.

[davelin315]

Hey Dougie (and everyone else), I finished plumbing the tank that will replace the 33 in my room this year (well, one trip to Lowes before school today and it'll be done). I'll snap a couple of pictures at school today and get them loaded up. With a small class this year I'm finally able to put Tim Stone's (extreme_tooth_decay) tank to good use! For those of you who don't know, he donated a 75 gallon tank a couple of years ago that made it's way into and out of school on a couple of times. It never got filled because of space and size issues, but I've finally put it together in a way that is very workable. I've also used a sump that was donated by dchild after having it in my garage being stored for the past couple of years. Putting this together with some pieces from this and that (mostly spare parts from my 300 build) I've got what I think will be a great tank. It's drilled from the bottom for the overflow and return and the overflow will be hidden as much as possible in a rock tower. The return might stick out a bit, but I'm going to see what I can do to hide it from sight with rocks and a large masonry bit. I still might drill it for a closed loop on top of that, but for the time being I think it's going to be as is. Will be a neat one to watch develop!

[davelin315]

OK, at last, here's some pictures of the new tank. This one is put together from a few different donations and it took a few years to actually find the proper space (this year thanks to low class numbers I was able to put it into my classroom). The tank is from extreme_tooth_decay (thanks Tim!) as well as the stand and the sump is from dchild (thanks Steven!). The two clowns are from two different sources and they actually might get mixed and matched again as they are not the same species and I now have two others that match these.

 

I took the stand over the past week and routed out a rim in which I could put a piece of plywood since this is an acrylic tank. I then drilled two 1" bulkheads in the bottom. One is plumbed directly into the sump where it goes into a drip plate and runs over a carbon pad. The other is plumbed into the pump and I have 1" pipe getting reduced to 3/4" locline fittings. There's a rock pile on one end and the return is in an open area of the tank. I think it looks pretty good and I have just one light, a 20,000K 150W DE bulb which sits over the rock pile.

 

I'm going to be adding some nice sps colonies from Caribbean Jake as well as a chunk of a leather coral, too. Because much of the rock is from my summer project of aiptasia eradication there is very little in the way of aiptasia, but there were a couple of pieces I saved from the old tank that I took a needle and hot kalk water to today. For the remaining ones I have been stockpiling peppermint shrimp which will be added to the tank.

 

The corals in the tank currently consist of some calustrea and zoanthids donated by members (gadgets143... who else gave things at the summer meeting/symposium?) as well as some other various softies that have been accumulated over the years.

 

I'm using a Little Giant 4MDQSX that's dialed back a little bit to keep it quieter and other than a heater, there's not much else. The sump is plumbed for an auto top off (there's a float valve) so I'll probably rig something up for a kalk stirrer if I can find one cheap enough. Other than that, the tank is what you see, not much to it, but it's pretty nice in its simplicity.

 

OK, enough typing, here's some pictures (by the way, the kids can't wait to get their hands dirty and in the tnak so hopefully I'll begin using it soon for educating them - will probably start with the lighting and how the water and tank itself refract light since we're studying light right now).

 

The full tank, end to end. The bulb is quite blue, but I also didn't adjust the white balance so it's not as blue as the pictures suggest.

 

Here's the right side of the tank where the rock pile is and the light. There's some nice places for the coral colonies from Jake to go.

 

Here's the other side of the tank. You can see the return piping that rises straight out of the bottom of the tank. You can also see in this shot that there's only a dusting of oolitic sand on the bottom. The kids were amazed when I dumped it in there and they saw one of the famed BRK giant nassarious snails crawl out of the cloudy water.

 

Here's the sump side of the stand. You can see the carbon pad that's under the drip plate. This helps to filter the tank and also helps to reduce the splashing noise from the drip plate as the carbon pad floats.

 

You can see the return pump there that's plumbed with spaflex. It runs right into the bottom of the tank.

 

Here's the middle of the stand. You can see the side of the sump that has the float valve in it. As soon as I free up one of my maxijet 1200s I will put the AquaC Remora that was donated by ErikS years ago into this sump. It was the skimmer for the aiptasia eradication tubs this summer and is now kind of just sitting in there as I return rock to tanks at school.

 

Here's the edge of the rock pile closest to the return.

 

Here's a shot from the corner of the tank closest to where the kids sit (there are actually three desks that back up to this tank and the tank is also a look through tank because of how I set it up.

 

Here's a shot from the end of the tank. You can see the return pipe there. I've got one of the returns pointing at the front corner from the previous picture and the other return goes along the "front" side of the tank and runs down past the rock wall. This will help the water swirl a bit around the rock formation while at the same time the water drains down from the end where the water is being blown to.

 

Here's the "back" of the tank. I haven't figured out yet how to hide the cords safely but I'm guessing I'm simply going to run them along the top of the tank and then drop them down the side where the wall is.

 

Here's the rock pile from the front at an angle. It really is like an island in the middle of the tank and I will be able to put corals on all sides of it.

 

Here's one top down shot. Again, I need to adjust the white balance next time I shoot a picture, but I had limited time today so I just set it on auto and shot away. The nice thing about this tank is that it's really low so everything is very close to the surface no matter where it's put. This allows the low wattage DE bulb to provide enough light for all corals.

 

I'll snap some more shots as I add more corals and fish. It should get easier to take the pictures as I work on this as the water should clear up a bit (it's still got some stuff floating around from me blowing off the rock and getting the silt off of the walls of the tank from when I dumped in the sand).

[Sugar Magnolia]

That looks great Dave!

[davelin315]

Thanks, one of the questions in class today was whether we would do more with the tank and that's the intention sooner rather than later! I'm going to finish stocking it (I'm going to add a small pacific blue tang and corals donated by Caribbean Jake) and then we'll begin experimenting on it and using it more as a learning tool.

 

The stock list will end up being:

 

assorted snails and hermits (need to get more in there)

orange shoulder tang (already there)

female cinammon clown (already there)

male clown (not sure what species, similar to a cinammon just no stripe, he lost it last year, already there)

royal gramma (already there)

pacific blue tang (coming)

yellow tail blue damsel (coming)

coral banded shrimp (already there)

3 peppermint shrimp (already there)

purple lobster (already there)

 

I'll list the specific corals later on and try and snap pictures of everything now that the water has completely cleared up.

[Connor]

what school do you teach at?

[davelin315]

what school do you teach at?

 

Hi Connor, Floris Elementary in Herndon, VA.