Category: fishtank

I’ve long learned not to put my hand in the tank after the lights go out, but every now and then I deal with things in the “twilight” (blue lights on, as in “daylight”, but white lights off) and get totally rebuked for it.

Here’s my effort to right coral that was tumbled by too many hermit crabs:

A few seconds, 7 stings from some tank-dwelling creature (my bets are on the web-spinning snails), and it’s all benadryl and ice. Nice. Thanks, fishtank.

The night before we left for the airport, we found an enormous, hairy crab in the refugium. Kevin called me downstairs, and we took photos with a finger for focus and scale. Woah.

We’d caught a crab about a year ago and let him loose in the refugium, and then he disappeared. I’m guessing that this is the guy — he’s huge. He was really speedy once he got spooked, but amazing that it took a year before we found him. I still can’t guess how he made it up the 21″ wall of the baffles. Crazy!

Here’s a shot with his eyes.

Creepy, no? 🙂

I should have posted this two weeks ago. After about five months of a clown-only tank, we finally went to the fish store to pick up a new dude. We got him home and he hid behind the torch coral for the first four days. We finally stopped coddling him by feeding him where he was and started luring him out, and now he’s taken up residence on the underside of the overflow box.

Every now and then he swings around and I can get a better shot. He’s still a bit freaked by the flash, so I haven’t persisted, even though these are still only moderate.

The clowns are intrigued. The old shrimp used to hang out with them, and this one is much smaller, which they seem to appreciate. However, he stays near the top of the tank, and they don’t spend too much time at the surface unless they’re eating. They’ve mustered the courage to get close enough for the shrimp to do a quick cleaning a few times. We ought to start feeding him lower and then maybe he’d start hanging out on the rocks where the fish could reach him?

He’s almost impossible to photograph from this vantage point, because he finds the camera fascinating. Nonetheless, when I try to photograph his face, he obliges with his tail.

Something has been irritating our purple zoos for about two months now. They haven’t opened at all since then, and I have no idea what might be wrong. It doesn’t look like anything’s eating them, and they’re getting good current and light. So, chemical warfare with another coral? (Like maybe the amazing blue acro right up top? It’s been growing like mad recently. Or maybe the torch coral? We moved the leather away, but that didn’t seem to make any difference.) It’s so frustrating not to have the slightest idea what the problem is, especially where all of the other zoos are all happy and open.

In other tank mysteries, we’ve been finding bits of mystery crabs in our tank all week. The tally had been two pincers and a leg, and then I found a whole crab! Geez!

The last time anything new was added to our tank was over a year ago — the ricordia was a “new job” purchase in January 2006, but it didn’t come on a rock. Best guess, this crab has been in our tank for at least a year and a half. How crazy.

The front view is even more ridiculous. How enormous is that claw?

My question is how many more of these guys we have in there. Given the multiple claws pulled out in the last week, it seems like we’re not in the clear.

The red-speckled leg is another mystery, as it doesn’t match any of the known inhabitants. I’m hoping that maybe it was a blue hermit crab, and all of the blue faded? If not, we have another huge dude in there somewhere, running around on seven legs.

It must be the pressure of demonstrating that the clowns are happy and healthy, but I’ve been completely incapable of taking a good picture of the dudes since the storm. I’m officially throwing in the towel. If you can’t see that they’re wriggly and charismatic from this, I have nothing helpful to add other than a reminder that my photography *truly* is not representative.

The tank really has bloomed since the storm. Part of my brain wonders if the difference is the tang — they’re known to be time- and resource-intensive fish, and 55 gallons is the bare minimum for keeping one. I wonder if the water quality is so much better without him? It’s also possible that we’ve been more attentive since the averted disaster, and that’s made the difference. The tank really is preoccupying.

In that vein, here’s a great picture of one of the two turbo snails.

Isn’t he neat? I know he’s a snail, but really, he’s captivating. I ought to try to bend youtube to my advantage, and then maybe some of the tank-doubters out there would understand? You just have to see him in (surprisingly fast) motion, and delight in the suspense of whether he’ll eat the nearby annoying algae or take a different route… you’d understand, in person.

In other snail news, we’re seeing a lot more “naked” snails, again. When we first saw these guys, we almost wondered if we’d managed to develop a new species of unpreyed-upon shell-less snails. The moniker “naked snails” stuck long after we learned that they already existed, were named, and were commonplace besides. They’re exactly like snails, except that they only have a backplate (my term) instead of a shell. But they come in a beautiful, velvety black as well as the less exciting snail-color, and they’re interesting. However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one as big as I did last night.

To the left, you can see a turbo snail on the back wall. And to the right: do you see that naked snail? Enormous! In other interesting news, the blue SPS coral in the mid-foreground has completely recovered from the storm, and can be seen growing like mad between the two. Neat.