Category: fishtank

I happened to be standing next to the tank with the camera in my hand just in time to catch the cleaner shrimp cleaning Clack.

He cleans the tang daily, and Clack often, though Click seems more skittish. You can see he actually climbs on while Clack stays close to the rock, and then goes back and forth. He jumps on and off a few times, the whole thing is such a dance and both the shrimp and the fish seem ready to bolt at the slightest provocation.

Back in January, we bought a peppermint shrimp. They’re supposed to be good aiptasia-eaters (which we certainly need), so in addition to the nudibranchs, we brought him home. Well, we put him into the tank, he zipped into a rock immediately, and that was the last time we saw him. A few days later, I found a shrimp exoskeleton, but it was pretty old by that point and hard to tell if the shrimp had molted (a healthy reaction to the new water and new tank after the stress of transport) or perished. As days turned to weeks, and then months, we eventually stopped looking and just assumed that he had died, victim to stress or one of our crabs.

Well! In mid-May, late at night, I was peering around the tank, and nearly four months after we last saw him, I saw him again. At first, I couldn’t figure out what had happened to the cleaner shrimp, it took many, many seconds for me to figure out what I was looking at. He only stayed out for another minute or so after that, then ducked back into the rock we’d seen him vanish into in January. He’d grown a lot, easily double in size, and looked quite fit and healthy. So that’s good. It’s sort of alarming to have a creature that’s as big as he is (close to three inches long, and his antennae spread out around him) and have no idea he’s even in the tank for a third of a year. It once again gives me pause and I have to wonder what else is in there.

Well, three nights ago, we saw him again! He came out and did a long loop around the tank, before re-vanishing. Here’s the peppermint shrimp on the left, low down, and the cleaner shrimp on the upper right.

The cleaner shrimp has fine red lines down his body, and the rest is yellow and pretty translucent. His antennas are red and much smaller than the cleaner shrimp’s.

One last shot of his face before he disappeared again.

I would love if we saw him more, he’s very pretty.

I just realized it’s been a zillion years since I posted pictures of the tank. I was blowing off the rocks and the sand, and everyone was swimming around looking so bright in the gloom, so it seemed like a good day for photos.

Clack had a major adventure last night — Kevin heard an odd slapping sound and went into the fish room to find Clack on the floor! YIKES! We were both amazed that he survived the fall, and also weren’t sure how long he was out of the tank. He swam erratically the first few minutes back in the tank, but seemed okay after that, and was starving the next day. So I guess he’s alright? He’s eight years old, I wonder if this is like octogenarians who take up skydiving? Hopefully it’s an isolated experience.

The cleaner shrimp was doing his dance at me, “Hello, I’m a lovely shrimp, let me clean you, it will be nice.”

Our purple pocillopora is growing beautifully, it’s amazing how much bigger it is compared to when we got it at the end of January!

The blue staghorn acro was growing, too, but when we got back from PA, things had shorted out, the circulation pump had stopped, and the tank was about 20 degrees colder than it should have been. We got it warmed back up, and everything else seemed fine, but the acro bleached. I’m hoping it will come back.

The creepy, creepy crab was out last night, so I grabbed the camera to try to snap a photo of him. He’s one of the biggest “surprise” hitchhiker crabs we’ve seen in one of our tanks, and he gives me goosebumps and shudders, especially when he moves. I am not a crab person.

Can you see him, munching away on algae in the top-left? You can see the sandy top of his body, the dark brown underside, two lavender-ish eyes, and brown/maroon front claws. His back right legs are also visible, very hairy. (The blurry triangle in the foreground on the right is a hermit crab, much more acceptable.) However, in the next shot on the right side, suddenly there was an extra pair of even larger, even hairier legs and a pair of huge black claws.

Ugh, even the pictures make me shiver. On the other side of the rock, I was able to see his face (grumpy thing) – black carapace, and the curve of his right foreclaw – that is WAY too big for my comfort level.

We’re probably going to have to figure out how to trap him, something recently ate our brand new peppermint shrimp (although the cleaner shrimp is still fine, and still setting up cleaning stations for the fish each afternoon) and my money is on this guy. The line on crabs is that they’re opportunistic scavengers. In an ideal world, they just eat algae (a good thing). But if they can get big enough to catch fish or eat corals, they will. The other line on crabs is that some stay small, and some grow to be a foot or more across, so if you don’t know that it’s a small species, you might as well assume it will get big enough to shift your rockwork and cause huge problems. Ugh. I hate trapping crabs. I spent a while watching these ones with the flashlight, and then went to bed and every time I closed my eyes my brain just replayed the way their legs move.

We’d barely even gotten home with our Berghia Nudibranch last week before we realized that we should have gotten two instead of one. Their lifetimes aren’t that long (and we have SO much aiptasia), but if there are two and they lay eggs, then you have a self-perpetuating community of aiptasia eaters for as long as there’s any in the tank. So back we went, and home again with two more nudibranchs.

I got pictures of one of them settling in, here on the lower left of the photo – it took him about 15 minutes but then he nosed around and found an aiptasia to eat. You can’t really see his head here since it’s down in a crevice of the rock consuming the base of the aiptasia. The dark pigment in the white fronds is the poison from the aiptasia – he can’t digest it, so he stores it there. It’s thought to be a defense mechanism, too. You can see he gets very flat while he eats – he looked much fluffier before he started. His body is about ¾” long.

Very fun that on the upper right, you can see more white – our original nudibranch is still there and has really grown!! Here’s another shot with the new one, busy eating, on the left, and the older one in his crevice at center.

And a lighter one where you can see some of the aiptasia they eat – look on the right edge of the rock for the brown things with stalks, brown/grey circular faces, and long brown fringe/rays around the face.

Ugly, pervasive, stinging nuisances. It’s hard to be patient while the nudibranchs do their work.

Also, I finally got a better photo of the fizzy mushrooms – it’s blurry, but the green is realistic. So pretty!!