Sunday, July 01, 2007
Tank UpdatesI was going to the tour agency yesterday, and figured that I may just as well spend 15 more minutes travelling to coral farm - and the trip did pay off! Bought more marine algae, and 2 huge cuttlefish. Unfortunately, while I was out trying to shop with Monty, one of them decided to ink inside its own baggie and died from suffocation =(
Went to the fish market to buy live shrimp this morning to feed the cuttle, it initially was frightened but has attacked and caught one, yay!
Feeder shrimp
The protein skimmer hard at work skimming the ink out
New cuttlefish with bright blue spots, chewing on the shrimp it has caught
Labels: fish
Wenky
1:56 PM
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Sunday, June 17, 2007
Went nuts over doing up the tank today, and I went with Option 3!! Yes, it's all very exciting. But when I say nuts, I really mean it - I now have 2 sharks in my house. Don't get excited yet.
Kicked off the day spectacularly by doing an 80% water change. This alone should be good evidence of the state of the tank before this. Nitrates were sky-high, and I didn't even dare to measure phosphate. So that was 3 hours of back-breaking work, transferring a total of almost 700 litres of water pail by pail. Freaking sick.
Finally with that done, it was time for the fun part. Rearranged the rockwork somewhat - it used to be 2 islands of rocks, but now I've filled in the middle portion so it's more or less a continuous wall instead. And went shopping for stuff to fill it up with. I came home with 4 different kinds of seaweed, 2 soft corals (1 of which was a bloody steal!!), 3 cuttlefish and 2 banded shark eggs. The developing sharks can be seen through the eggs, it's pretty cool actually. A really, really good excuse for me to get a bigger tank once they start growing a little! The cuttlefish are really something, the colour changing is worth an entire afternoon's watching. But one of them died for unknown reasons, I'm hoping the other 2 survive. Having some trouble thinking of what to feed them - I could do freshwater feeder guppies which they may or may not eat, or I could somehow go beachcombing and catch those crabs that hide under rocks.
Too tired to post up pics tonight, I'll update again in the morning.
The things I do to fill up voids in life.
Labels: fish
Wenky
11:48 PM
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Saturday, May 26, 2007
Woke with a crick in the neck this morning - this is awful.
Just a little update about the tank. The primary pump has failed, and the tank was running on only 2 Seio internal circulation pumps for the last couple of days ... yours truly has cleanly forgotten that he actually has a standby pump on hand. One that's even plumbed up and connected to the system, thank you, and needs but a flick of the switch to get going. SO. Almost all my fish perished from hypoxia, and so did my precious sand dollar. All due to some fricking stupidity on my part. The water became cloudy, and I dumped a load of carbon in, plus got the circulation going. One of the most unprecedented disasters so far, in terms of livestock mortality. Will update on the status again soon, I may have to spend what's left of the weekend doing a massive water change.
Not really looking forward to today. Or the rest of my life, for that matter. Reminds me of Shit. Everything's bleak, albeit in a less intense way than during Shit. At least, once in a long while, something motivational comes my way. But those are rare.
Had another sad night.
Labels: fish, rants
Wenky
6:22 AM
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Tuesday, March 06, 2007
On this new blog, anyway. Essay paper was mercifully OK, except for the strange question on what to do with a patient that has both rheumatoid arthritis and ischaemic heart disease. That, I totally bluffed my way through. But it was otherwise ok, and my wrist is feeling extremely sore right now, somewhat like post-econs paper.
Feeling slightly upset right now. I sneaked off for a snack of retail therapy today (meaning fish) and bought 2 GORGEOUS fish. One's a flying gurnard (YX, you're going to adore this guy!!) and the other - ALAS - a leopard blenny. I don't have pix right now, but here are some from the net:
Leopard blenny
Flying gurnard
I come home, search my trusty Reef Central and OMG. The leopard blenny eats exclusively small polyped corals!! I'm really shocked (and so were the people on RC actually), since blennies are mostly considered reef-safe and are in fact great at munching up nuisance algae. Fack. Now I have a coral-eating fish in my tank. He's still not out of the bag yet, I really should've asked about its diet first but I doubt I'd get a correct answer anyway. If it were Henry, then yes. But not where I bought these fish.
How?!? I only have one small polyped stony coral in my tank, and that's the beautiful yellow Porites that I love so much. There's no way I'm going to let that fish eat that coral, then die from starvation after he's killed it. =(
Plan now, is to put him in the sump I guess. Will try to acclimatize him to eating normal food like shrimp and teach him that there are tastier things to eat other than corals. This is bad. I'm going to stave off buying any more fish for now (not until something truly delightful pops up, anyway) - I'm very shaken by this coral-eating fish episode.
Labels: fish
Wenky
4:15 PM
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