Category: fishtank

Plumbing

Here’s Kevin during naptime on Saturday, “playing” with the fish tank plumbing.

He’s missing a few pieces but they’re ordered and on their way. It’s been too cold to do much out in the garage for the last week, but he’s still been making progress here and there on the cabinetry in the garage. He also installed magnetic baby locks on all five cabinet doors for the fish tank in the house, after the kiddo finally realized there were doors there and spent a delighted 25 minutes walking through the fish tank stand, closing himself in, and slamming the doors. Awesome toy plus all of the satisfaction of closing yourself in the bathroom, and yet it did not meet the parental activity approval bar. He’s been so disappointed to find himself locked out since then – hopefully he’ll forget quickly…

Fishtank update

Kevin made a ton of progress out in the garage over the weekend on the new systems for the new tank. First of all, the new sink is installed in its new location (against the laundry room wall instead of the back wall).


I can’t even tell you how happy I am to have the old one gone and a shiny one with nice knobs in its place. He also made major progress on the new counters/furniture that will hold the pumps, skimmer, sump, etc. Lots of cutting and gluing — a few pieces clamped and drying shown here:


The weekends keep galloping by, but there’s been good, steady progress.

Meanwhile, our current tank is still trucking along. We’ve been putting off replacing any of the live rock or sand until the new tank is ready, and have been paying for it with some very high nitrates. So, stepping up the water changes, and Monday two weeks ago, Henry and I took a trip down to the fish store right after work to buy some new live rock for the refugium. It’s a huge piece, about 20 pounds, and will hopefully help stabilize things a bit.

It came with the neatest little white thick-bodied starfish (not sure if they’re friends or foe, but there are certainly a zillion of them, and we have enough experience with how irrepressible starfish are to just shrug and enjoy watching them on the glass). And here’s a shot of the tank mid-cleaning after blowing detritus out from under the rocks.

An hour after this activity once the sponges and filters have had a chance to remove the murk, the water always looks gorgeous and so clear.

Tank!

Our gorgeous new tank arrived tonight!!

It’s way too heavy for us to lift, so the guys will come back out with their special tools and extra manpower once we’re ready to put it in the house. Next step is getting an electrician out.

Not quite swim-in size, but Kevin could totally fit in it. 🙂

Stand! (plus sump! and refugium!)

This post is a few weeks overdue, but the stand for our new tank arrived in late March!!

It’s so pretty. There are five doors (two along each long edge, and one at one end) so that we’ll have lots of easy access to the refugium that will be inside. The sump and all of the pumps (and therefore most of the noise) will all be plumbed out to the garage. Kevin’s been slowly collecting bits and pieces of what we’ll need, but this is the first thing that feels real to me, since everything else so far could have been used to update our existing tank.

Another view, plus the custom plexiglass refugium and sump, still all in their shrink wrap:

Saturday fun

Shawn and Sanna came over on Saturday so that Shawn could help Kevin reinforce the floor from the crawlspace for our new fishtank! I was so appreciative – I continue to hope I will never have to go down there. Here they are suiting up with goggles and masks:

Poor little William the cockapoo was sort of freaked by the bright white suits and had to retreat between Sanna’s legs:

(He also wasn’t such a fan of the sound of drilling beneath the floor. Poor puppy.) I definitely feel like I got the best end of the deal – got to hang out with Sanna and hear how their wedding planning is going! Meanwhile, Shawn and Kevin finished up in about three hours – pretty impressive (speed and stamina). Shawn was also remarkably cheerful about the chance to do real physical labour – talk about putting the bright spin on things.

Encroachment

I haven’t posted about the fishtank in ages. All the dudes seem to be hanging out and doing well. Over the winter the tang had been acting increasingly neurotic, and was having scale issues, but we moved his food clip a few months ago and it seems to have helped a lot – he’s much more social and is looking and acting like a completely different fish. Kevin’s also been quite disciplined about filtering the water that goes in the tank and about nightly kalkwasser supplementation, and that seems to be having a noticeable impact as well. We’re still talking about a bigger, quieter, automated tank but we’re still probably a ways away from installing it.

I wanted to post, though, about the leather. Since I last posted in February, it’s grown another few inches up and out – truly a monster. I’ve been very worried about the Ricordia below it (the pretty green and blue corals), since it’s increasingly blocking their light. However, apparently the ricordia decided to take matters into their own hands, and have started climbing to a better location. Unfortunately, they chose to move up (instead of over), which means they are now slowly marching up the trunk of the leather!

Here’s a close-up:

This is less than ideal. First, they won’t get any more light because they’ll still be under the lip of the leather. But more importantly, soft corals have limited defences – they move very slowly and don’t have rigid structures to retreat into. Their only real defence mechanism is chemical warfare – trying to sting or annoy away anything that encroaches on their turf. You can see that both the leather and the ricordias look a bit the worse for wear – the ricordias aren’t fully out (they pull their little nubs in at night or when they’re feeling attacked), and the leather is pulling away from the rock and is susceptible to a reddish algae around its base. We’re probably going to have to intervene by both paring back the leather and removing some of the now-embedded ricordias, but I need to gear up a bit more before undertaking that high a level of coral surgery.

Exciting Fish News

We had a huge tank event tonight! The clownfish spawned!! Kevin was starting a water change and saw the eggs!!

We’ve had the clowns for more than four years, and kept hoping they’d mate. Clownfish are hermaphrodites: they start out male, pair off, and then one fish becomes dominant, quite a bit larger, and female. Clack has been the bigger fish for years, and they’ve displayed lots of the typical clownfish pairing behaviour, but no spawning until now!

I need to read up on more about exactly what happens (since clownfish are one of the most successfully captive-bred fish, there’s a lot of information out there), but Click (male) and Clack (female) did alternating passes of circling around the eggs. They bind them to the rock (I think that’s Click’s job?), lay eggs (Clack) and fertilize them (Click). They chose a spot right behind the leather, which makes sense as usually Clowns lay eggs on rock near the base of their anemone.

There are many steps, special food, and extra tanks involved in raising fish fry into baby clowns, so we’ll probably let things take their course (ie, either the eggs or fry will be eaten by other creatures in the tank), but Kevin was having fun brainstorming baby clownfish names: Clickety, Clackety, Yakkity, and Yak were leading contenders. 🙂

I got a few videos of them as they spawned. We were so captivated and delighted. The first has reflections from the kitchen light (oops! sorry!) but you can see well how first one circles, then the other. They repeated this for ages (We watched for well over a half hour, and only saw a portion.)

At first I was disappointed by the second video because Click stopped mid-circle and seemed to lunge at Clack. I wasn’t paying enough attention to the other creatures in the tank though, since the shrimp had decided to come check things out. I might not have noticed him, but the Clowns definitely did and they chased him off.