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47 year old tank


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Most tanks will see calcium and probably mag and alk will drop over time but, yes, there is a such thing as tinkering too much with the tank and the water

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So I went to the surgeon today who did my hand and knee surgery a few weeks ago. My right hand is not healing because I am using it to much. Like Duh, it is my right hand.

So I am not allowed to use it "especially" with tools. On the way to the Doctor's office I noticed a loud screech coming from my front right wheel. When I got out I checked it out through the wheel and I can see a big groove in the rotor.

So now I need to jack up the car, remove the wheel, take off the rotor to have it cut and change the front brake pads. Simple, but not by using only my left hand. I used to be a mechanic and can normally do this in 15 minutes, but without using my right hand, this is going to be an interesting repair. Oh, I forgot, he also operated on my left knee at the same time so I can't kneel down on it. I am going to see if I can do this using osmosis.

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I recently acquired this beauty, the coral, not the fish. It's a blue "something" I don't normally remember names and was married to my wife for about 6 years before I stopped calling her "Hey".

I know by the color that it is not photosynthetic so it needs to be fed. Most tanks are far to clean to keep something like this (mine probably is also) so a couple of times a day I take one of these squeeze things and stir up a nice place in the gravel that I have not touched for a while and make a storm. The coral seems to enjoy this and I am hoping it is getting some nutrition out of this along with the clams with their juice I feed daily.

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I use one of these to do the stirring.

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Today I had to replace my brakes because of a horrible grinding noise. I was very surprised because I just replaced them last year. The problem was on disc brakes the calipers which hold the brake pads "float" back and forth on the rotor. When you step on the brake, the pads squeeze the rotor stopping the car. One of the pistons that is supposed to slide freely in the caliper rusted tight so only one of the pads would contact the disc causing the other one to do most of the stopping. Also, maybe because of that, but maybe not, the disc cracked. But it was an easy repair and even with replacing both rotors and installing new pads it was less than $100.00. I had to have my Son n Law help me because my Dr who did my hand and knee operation said I wasn't supposed to use any tools. Good thing I don't have any hair because if I did, I would have to comb it with an egg beater.

I like working on my car but it could have been a bit warmer.

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Today I added 2 Luft pumps to my skimmer which has been working very anemically for quite some time. Luft pumps put out 7lbs of air pressure compared to most pumps which run about 2 Psi. Even though I built this 5' tall skimmer to run on a homemade venture valve it still requires an air pump because it is so large. The skimmer is going nuts and doesn't know what to do with all the skimate. It drains into a five gallon bucket which has an automatic, DIY shut off switch in it so it doesn't overflow and screw up my floor as it did once when 24 local New York urchins decided they all needed to spawn on the same night. I think I had the Miss Universe pageant on the TV but I can't remember.

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My mandarins spawned again last night. I was going to film them, but I was watching TV and was to lazy to get up. This was from a spawning a few years ago so just make believe it was from last night because they do it the same every time.

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Like most people on the east coast, we got a little snow last night. About 27" I think. This is 2 hours after I cleared the sidewalk with my snow blower.

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In the summer my reef is a planted tank. I collect these codium seaweeds in the Atlantic as well as other algae's and stick them in my tank. They live for a few months then I throw them out. They are very common on the eastern part of Long Island New York and I think they look very cool.

 

I know many people are looking in horror thinking about bacteria, parasites, red tide, mononucleosis and global warming but there is a name for those people, that name is Sissies. Our fish came from the sea and the sea is not sterile. An operating room is sterile and how many times have you seen a reef tank in an operating room?

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I was just looking at my tank and Wow, I have way to many fish. A couple jumped out in the last few months but the rest of them just keep growing. They are all exuding health which is what they are supposed to do but the amount of food they need is really messing up my water. I don't know what the nitrates read because it is off the chart. I really don't care as I like healthy, spawning fish. I am going to try to count them.............

I came up with 20 but I am sure I missed some.

I also put a weird pipefish in there last week that I haven't seen but he is the type that crawls around the bottom so he is probably in the back someplace.

Yesterday I got a bunch of chowder clams so with those and quite a lot of live blackworms I am good with food for a couple of weeks. The bluestripe pipefish are spawning as is the bangai's, mandarins and fireclowns. The yellow wrasses look like they are trying to spawn and maybe they are when I am not looking.

I am very happy with my water cooled LED light and my water cooled lighted algae scrubber. Not that water cooled fixtures are any better, just cooler, in more ways than one. I never liked having the same lighting as everyone else.

I have been gradually through attrition changing the tank over from corals to more sponges and gorgonians. I just like them better and think you can get more interesting stuff than the run of the mill corals. I still have a lot of corals and won't be throwing any out but I want to see how many sponges and gorgs I can fit in there.

I got this beautiful blueberry gorg a few weeks ago and although I doubt it will live long, it is still extending.

 

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These red things are sponges and there is a large blue sponge over that along with a bunch of gorgonians.

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Just got back from key Largo, it was a little to cold to swim but we did go boating in our friends boat. 2 of my old girlfriends came by to meet us. I wanted to hire one for my clean up crew.

 

 

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Lately my tank has been evolving by attrition to more sponges and gorgonians. I just like them better and it is one thing I have not done yet. The tank went from fish only to fish and crustaceans to anemones to leathers to LPS then LPS and seaweeds to SPS and LPS to now. I have been finding colorful, odd looking sponges and gorgs and I find them fascinating. I don't think I have seen a tank full of them yet but it is what I am going for now. I still have some SPS and quite a few LPS but my main goal is to keep my fish spawning and I have way to many fish. They have also gotten to large, and large spawning fish require an enormous amount of food to keep spawning and healthy. Of course that pushes up the nitrates. I think mine are around 90 which is to high for most SPS.

 

This is an old picture, I don't remember how old but I can see my 24 year old fireclown on the left and he looks young there. I used to collect these codium seaweeds on the east end of Long Island and put them in. They live a few months then get ratty. I also add to many other things from the sea but to me, it makes the hobby interesting. My tank is and always has been an experiment or something I find interesting and never meant to be the nicest tank around, which it certainly is not. It is also just one of my hobbies.

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This is an older picture and I can see I always liked gorgonians (and copperbands)

 

 

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I used to be into these. Then I went to Germany and my tank sitter let the water fall by about a third and these were out in the air, so now they are reduced to a few smaller pieces.

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You could see some of them here.

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Ive seen a few sea horse tanks be primarily gorgs and sponges. Are your gorgs just getting left over food?

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I feed the tank clams every day which I buy live and freeze. The gorgs get left over clam juice which is composed to tiny particles of clam. The gorg on the extream left is the oldest thing in the tank except for the fireclown. It may be as old, I can't remember but I know it is very old. I think it is the same one from the second picture I posted behind the copperband.

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Last night I collected some scurvy seaweeds, algae and muck from the side of a wooden dock on the south side of Long Island.  It is now suspended in a net in my tank as I just want the bacteria and amphipods but not the slimy looking algae.  This is another one of my methods that purists will say is going to crash my tank due to parasites,  anthrax, Godzilla fry, invasive algae, etc.  My tank depends on these infusions as I think bacteria is necessary and I also feel that it gets stagnant if you just have bacteria from a LFS.  Of course this is also just something that bounces around in my head and may be completely wrong.

 

 

I know many people are looking in horror thinking about bacteria, parasites, red tide, mononucleosis and global warming but there is a name for those people, that name is Sissies. Our fish came from the sea and the sea is not sterile. An operating room is sterile and how many times have you seen a reef tank in an operating room?

 

Hi Paul,

 

I'm relatively new here and trying to read through old posts as I get ready to set up a 6' tank after my home renovation is done (ETA about a month on the renovation).  Enough about me though.

 

The couple of posts quoted from above struck a chord, and not just because of the colorful imagery.  I think everyone agrees that bacteria in the aquarium are helpful for denitrification/nitrification, but in nature they have many other beneficial roles as well that scientists are still figuring out.  One fascinating role of bacteria is to help feed and replenish a defensive layer of bacteriophages that live in mucus (e.g., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23690590).  Mucus contains glycoproteins that are adapted to hold onto bacteriophages, but since mucus is always being shed (ewww) we need regular contact with (nonpathogenic) bacteria to keep up the phage population, since phages can only reproduce by infecting target bacteria.  Then when pathogenic bacteria show up, the phages can kill them.  Since any given phage can only infect specific bacterial species, more bacterial diversity leads to more phage diversity, giving a stronger defense.  This was something that wasn't at all appreciated back when I was in school, but the evidence seems pretty compelling now (http://www.nature.com/news/viruses-in-the-gut-protect-from-infection-1.13023; https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marion_Leclerc/publication/261738260_Bacteriophages_An_underestimated_role_in_human_and_animal_health/links/0a85e533d49b04b483000000.pdf).  Maybe important for fish immunity too?  But I digress.

 

Skimming turns out to have pretty severe impact on bacterial counts and probably diversity too.  A recent article looked at bacterial counts in reef tank water and saw that skimmed tanks have about 10x lower bacteria counts (source: http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2011/3/aafeature).  Non-skimmed tanks had bacterial counts similar to samples from natural reefs.  There was reason to believe that skimming also cuts down the bacterial diversity.    From the article:

 

Aquaria subjected to active filtration via skimming present water column bacteria populations that are approximately 1/10 of those observed on natural reefs. The consequences of this disparity on the long-term health of the tank's livestock are not known. . . . It appears likely that some types of bacteria are indeed "skimmable", but others are not. Thus, skimming inadvertently provides severe (?) evolutionary pressure to skew the tank's resident water column bacteria population to favor the "non-skimmable" cohort.

 

If this is true, should we try to get away from skimming?  Maybe our skimmers should be normally off but available for emergency use, like a bad bacterial bloom?  One fantastic example of tanks running well without skimming is this one from James Fatherree: http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2014/9/aquarium (who was going to be the speaker at the winter WAMAS meeting before it was postponed by the snow).

 

I see that you use a skimmer now Paul, but you haven't always.  I'd really like to know what you think about this, since I've got to decide whether to use a skimmer in the new setup.

 

Thanks for reading.

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Anemone, first of all, thank you for responding. While it is true that some bacteria are removed through skimming bacteria multiply so fast that it will make no difference in a reef tank. The benefits far outweigh the negatives. I have always used a skimmer from when they were first invented for tanks in the 70s. I also use Ozone which would also oxidize bacteria. The vast majority of bacteria are in the substrait and rocks as bacteria don't swim and don't multiply much in water alone.

I wrote this as well as other articles on there. http://www.saltwatersmarts.com/marine-fish-heal-through-slime-3962/

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