I have not posted on aquaDRAMA in a long time! Here are some of the things that have changes over the last couple months:

• Some kind of strange slime as growing on the back of the tank, and when I tried to remove it there was a serious decline in oxygen levels in the tank. This resulted in the death of a wrasse.
• In order to combat this problem, I changed 50% of the water over 2 days by syphoning out the slime as I scraped it.
• About 50% of the live rock was removed, shaken out in bucket of salt water and scrubbed lightly. This was to remove a lot of gunk that seems to be building up.
• I noticed a mantis shrimp living in my tank, I think t is a smashing kind, about 3/4 of an inch. A trap is on the way to help remove it.
• I am still having issues with large day-night pH cycles and this will be my next area of attack.
• Species list needs to be updated

I have 2 clams in my tank, don’t ask me to get into detailed binomial nomenclature, one is blue and one is gold. The gold one hasnt been doing so well lately and I wondered what might be causing it stress. 4 days ago I picked it up and many little white snails fell into the water column. This clam has been in my tank for over a year and somewhere along the way I must have introduced a species specific pyramidellid smail. It would seem these snails simple suck the life juices out of large clams and other snails.

I followed the advice of several other hobbyists and removed the clam, scrubbed it carefully to remove the snails. I did this every day for a week and the clam is now fully extended. I assume I will have to keep this up for some time until the snails reproductive cycle is interrupted. I hope I can manage this because this clam is turning out to be pretty high acquaintance. But I did manage to keep it alive!

Recently I added a Tamaria starfish to my tank and it seems to have suffered a bit of acclimation stress, from which it seems to be healing. It is very active often crossing the tank and back in a few minutes until it seems to find something it likes to eat. It has many orange tipped feet that are easily sean when it is on the glass.

Read around about fish. It seems as if one of the largest reasons for death is jumping out of the tank. I have had several fish jump out, even a couple get caught and put back in. Wrasses are especially prone to this form of piscean suicide. I have constructed a wooden frame with a screen attached to it with velcro. This way I can open parts of it to feed them. It also holds the complicated lighting system in place. There is only a small sliver of an opening around some of the plumbing. Somehow one of my gobies jumped out thought this little opening. I found it dessicated on the floor this morning.

The good news is the harem is still going great.

I do not want to celbrate too soon, but I have acclimated and introduced into aquaDRAMA 2 new Paracheilinus wrasses. A very colorful mccoskeri and a darker filamentosus to accompany the male, another filamentosus. I am trying to take photos but they swim around too quickly and I always forget to save the photos from Live Aquaria before they are taken down. The photos at the right are generic, but close.

In any event, the three of them are tumbling, twisting, and swimming around the tank together. It is quit entertaining to watch. Slowly they are becoming more and more acclimated to the geography of the tank.

So far so good!

Followers of aquaDRAMA will recall I have been trying to establish a harem of Red Sea wrasses. I am sad to say that my burgeoning harem was decimated due to a power outage this pat week. I am left with the male only. I will attempt to rebuild the harem as special become available at my local shops and online. I also am looking into a generator to keep the pumps running if this ever happens again. I lost my Paracheilinus lineopunctatus with the Paracheilinus octotaenia passing this morning. I am nearly certain this is related to the outage, as more difficult species in my tank continue to thrive.

The never ending saga of a tank lost in specific gravity! A 50gal Oceanic saltwater fish tank is located in my living room.

This camera is pointing into the tank from the side into the center of the live rock pile. It is an older Axis network webcam. I chose this spot because the fish and shrimp seem to move through there frequently. For the time being I have set the camera up to be one all the time. However, the image may not be viewable because of the tank’s lighting schedule which is set to start sunrise at 11:30am with full sun at 11:45am then sunset at 11:15pm with dusk at 11:30 with moonlight from 11:30pm until 9am. Also, to allow the tank to have a proper dark cycle, I frequently cover it with black cover. When it is in this state it is know as Special Project F.

I have had this tank setup for over 3 years and it is my third tank - each one increasing in size. You will read people suggesting to “go big” when you start. I can agree with this from personal experience, I wasted a lot of time and money trying to keep it small. Now I am eyeing the ability of a 150 gallong tank to fit into my home! It is simple chemisty: larger water volumes are more stable. Corals like stability!

The tank is a 50 gallon Oceanic with an upgraded lighting system consisting of a 400 watt 20,000K MH, 2 PC actinics, and LED moon lights on 3 separate timers for dawn/dusk simulation and separate moonlight cycle. Water quality is maintained by a RemoraPRO skimmer, CPR Sump, PolyFilter, Algone, and an Aqua UV sterilizer. Circulation is though a Blueline 800 pump circulating water through an Arctica chiller and a separate Mag 9 for the sump.

Livestock: various snails, hermits, urchin, blue maxima and gold teardrop clams, coco tube worm, tiger stripe starfish and tamaria starfish, tiger pistol shrimp, red fire shrimp and skunk cleaner shrimp, various zoanthus polyps, mushrooms, green waving coral, SPS colonies (most with Acro. Crab), Cyloseris tenuis, pair clown fish in a LTA, Centropyge potteri, Plectranthias inermis, Amblyeleotris spp. prawn goby, Macropharyngodon meleagris, Labout’s fairy wrasse, Flame Wrasse

My normal maintenance activities: change about 5 gallons of salt water every 5 days, this is done by keeping the main pump running, siphoning out the water and pouring back in pH, temp and salinity adjusted replacement water. “Top off” water is regulated into the sump by a float switch connected to a small pump in a freshwater reservoir slightly laced with kalk. I find this is a great way to keep pH and calcium up. Every other water change, I replace or wash the various filters to keep the sump flowing properly and remove waste products. About every other day I put in 5 ml of a two part alkalinity/calcium product and about every 10 days dose in a few drops of trace elements. These doses maybe unnecessary, but I have always done it, so I continue to!

View not so complete album of aquaDRAMA!

I love citrus and on my last trip to Israel you could hardly ever find me without some form of it in my hands. I got a little sick once, because, I think, I drank about 4 gallons of orange juice wandering around Tel-Aviv in a few hours. Because of this love, I bought this first day issue. I also have some stamps that I bought which display fish that I live in aquaDrama. I have been trying to create a Red Sea biotope, including Red Sea Wrasses, Corals, and Shrimp.

The family of fish (technically, the genus, not the family) that this beauty belongs to like to form harems. I have attributed this to them all being from the Red Sea area - you know they are Arabs and Arabs have harems! Ok, it is a stupid joke. But, really, they do form harems. My new fishy is from Israel, and this makes 3 fish from this region in my tank. I have been watching them carefully to see if they form a harem, but when I commented to my sister that it didn’?t look like they were, she asked “would you know what a fish harem looked like if you saw one?”. Hmmm, no. But they are getting along swimmingly. I was googling for information on harem formation and came across a scholarly article looking into the performance of labriform locomotion - swimming with the pectoral fins. If you have ever had the pleasure of looking at these fish in motion, the way they move is just as spectacular as they coloration. They seem to hover in place with the slightest movements of their fins. Or more scientifically:

We found significant differences in fin planform, fin kinematics and swimming performance between the two species in each comparison. The major trend in our data is that labriform swimmers with more elongate, wing-like fins and with a steeper (more dorso-ventral) stroke plane can achieve and maintain higher swimming speeds than can labriform swimmers with lower-aspect-ratio paddle-like fins and shallower stroke planes.

New addition to the tank. Yes he is very pretty and has these neat changing bands of colors. A member of the flasher wrasse family he is kind of timid, pretty, and almost bird like in the way he moves. I even constructed a cool new cover for my tank to prevent the eventual escape - yes these guys jump out of tanks.