Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Shrimp molted/Large aiptasia's gone


Today morning my wife found this "transparent shrimp" motionless hanging off the central column.... after the initial shock we realized it was the outer shell of one of the shrimp, who apparently molted at night.


(click to enlarge)

Also, it seems like this new shrimp pair means business about aiptasia eating. The large aiptasias are already gone, the shrimp probably ate them, I still see some minuscle ones here and there but I'm confident they'll be kept under control by this shrimp pair. Hope they survive a loooong time in the tank :-) .


Saturday, November 21, 2009

New shrimp

Got two new shrimp. Apparently the reason for the first shrimp's demise was improper/fast adaptation to tank water. So my LFS asked me to do very slow adaptation with this pair...

Wife named them Jean Paul and Maurice. It's going to be rather difficult to distinghuish them, as they are very very similar.... names are just for fun anyway, so....

Here they are adapting to the tank water:

And here is Jean Paul already in the tank:

And his friend Maurice:


They are both larger than Pierre was, about 1 cm larger. I hope that means they're stronger and enjoy eating aiptasia more than Pierre did ;-) . Those aiptasias are growing, and we need to get rid of them....

Monday, November 16, 2009

Yellow blob is a Spaghetti worm

After some help from the ReefCentral "new to the hobby" forum folk, the yellow blob has been identified as a Spaghetti Worm.  Harmless so it seems.... good.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Update: shrimp gone, algae increase

Pierre the shrimp didn't live long.  One week after arrival he seemed pretty slow, very dirty (like if the filamentous algae in the tank were covering his antennae) and he disappeared that night, never to be seen again.  A water test one week later gave Amonia one point above zero, so I guess he was/is decomposing somewhere....  he never ate any of the aiptasias while he was in the tank.

Somewhat disappointing....

In the meantime algae, filamentous, green sponge-like, green and purple film-like, bubble and hair like have appeared in large quantities.  Decided to add some cleaning crew, for many of the original crew perished in tank fights.  Added 4 hermit crabs and 2 snails.

Have some valonia bubble algae that are starting to worry me.... since almost nothing eats them and they are a plague... seems like only Yellow tangs eat valonia, so I am seriously considering getting one.

Also started using GAC (granulated active carbon) shortly after Pierre disappeared.  Water has been slightly clearer after that, but not super different.

Have new some strange stuff in the tank like this "yellow blog with tentacles" pictured below:

(click to enlarge)

I should post sometime about the multiple "fail-safe and backup" mechanisms of this tank (I work as a country CIO so I'm somewhat paranoid with backups and high-availability mechanisms).  One of them, having two return pumps of which one is fed by a UPS (no-break) worked great when we had a major power outage in Brazil last week.  Kept the tank running for more than 4 hours, and still had battery to keep it running for more.  The UPS is 1400 VA and the pump is ~30W, so....

Our zoanthus colonies seem to be OK, they are opening more now, but they haven't grown and some polyps died, probably during the adaptation phase.  Might be because of too much nutrients in the water (which is why I believe we have so much algae).  I'm considering Vodka dosing, but an trying to resist doing it in these initial tank months.