Started dosing Vodka into the tank's water

Yes, that is correct, you read the title correctly.  I have started adding Vodka to the aquarium's water.

If you are into reef keeping you know why.

If you are not, let me explain: ethanol (which is what Vodka is made of) feeds bateria in salt water who in turn feed on the nutrients that pollute saltwater aquariums and which we can remove through the skimmer (an equipment that produces dirty foam in order to remove organic substances that pollute the water).

It makes the water very low in nutrients, which simulates well the water in an offshore reef (also called an ultra-low nutrient environment, ULN).

Some people discovered this about ten years ago, others were bold enough to test seriously about 5 years ago, and now it is becoming an accepted and mainstream technique of reef keeping.

I learned about it from reading Melev's testimony, and I am following the instructions from the article written by Nathaniel A. Walton (Genetics) and Matt Bjornson (Stony_Corals) in August 2008's ReefKeeping magazine.

The fish don't seem to mind :-)
(no, they are not acting funny).

Dotty on camera

Got some better pictures of Dotty today. He wasn't so shy, was swimming quite a lot around the rocks and I was lucky to catch him on camera.  Had to use manual focus as he moves too fast for the autofocus to lock on him.

Here he was peeking out from behing the Trumpet coral:

Better pictures of the corals

One day later the corals start to look healthier, plump:

Hammer:

Trumpet:

Acan:

New fish, new corals

Went to the LFS today afternoon to get a new fish (gift from my wife) and some new corals (gift from my grandmother) and replace the hammer the shrimp had eaten.  Also got some more cleaning crew becasue many died since mid-December.

Se let's start with "Dotty" our new Pseudochromis fridmani, popularly called "Orchid Dottyback".  He is very colorful, but quite shy (at least in his first day in the tank).  Most of the time he is hidden in the "caves" created by the rocks.  Here he is peeking out of the rocks, in a lucky shot where I got him and all the other fish together:

I was a little concerned about the shrimp attacking gung-ho style the hammer again, so I gave him abundant food before and while I was acclimating the fish and corals.  So far so good, the shrimp did not attack it... I hope that doesn't happen at night when I'm not here to watch it and scare the shrimp so he stops. So, here is the new hammer (Euphyllia ancora), the thing on the top of the picture is fish food that got held by the polyp as it was floating around.

Here is a new Acanthastrea cora (popularly called "acan"), of red color and grey highlights.  It is shrunk in this picture, because it has just been moved around.  It will look a lot better in a few days as it expands to full size:

And finally, we got a Caulastrea coral, known as Trumpet coral, of green color. It looks much better live than in the picture below:

I already saw the shrimp hovering on top of the acan, but apparently he didn't try to eat any of it's tissue.... let's see, let's see....

Notice we bought a very small number of polyps of each coral.  We're not confident of our husbandry skills yet, so we'd rather risk loosing just a few corals in a mistake than killing a lot of them.  As time goes by I hope to bring in more polyps at once (or it will take forever to populate this tank, as the corals grow very slowly, at least they have done that so far).

Shrimp 2 x 0 Fabio (aka Snorkeler)

I took the day off today (my birthday) to try to catch the shrimp and add some new fish and corals to the aqurium.  So I built a new shrimp trap in the morning and tried to capture the shrimp a second time....

He won.  My trap is too easy to get out of, and he moves backwards lightning fast....

Here was the new trap:

Here he is starting to like it:

Here he entered it (did that 3 times before I tried to "fish" him out):

After the first time I tried pulling the trap out he stopped going into it... smart shrimp, isn't he?

So I decided to take the risk and bring a new hammer coral in the afternoon.  My LFS gurus tell me it is extremely unlikely the shrimp will attack another one, so, here we go....

The tank has isopods!

A sign that a tank is maturing is the presence of pods... copepods, isopods, amphipods, etc....  they are small creatures that become food for the larger creatures, complementing the diet of prepared foods we feed the fish with.

We had already seen copepods in the tank (very very tiny, in the crushed coral substrate), and last weekend we saw isopods in the tank, in the internal scraper of our Mag-Float glass cleaner:

Note that the real size of this picture is approximately 1cm across, so these guys are visible but quite small.  Picture taken with a macro lens.

After seeing them on the cleaner I noticed some of them crawling on the live rock, so it seems like we have a nice population, even though our aquarium doesn't have a refugium.

What the shrimp did to the Hammer coral....

Back in December 12th I mentioned that the peppermint shrimp had attacked the hammer.  Well, time to give an update with pictures.  He ate the hammer coral completely, then the next day he ate his shrimp friend.

Here is a short video of him attacking the hammer coral, this was shortly after adding the hammer.  Notice how there are a lot of polyps/hammer bubbles:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv5N-e6YDD4

This is a picture taken on Dec the 15th, you can see there is very little of the hammer left:

This another picture taken on Dec 20th, almost nothing left:

A few days later everything was gone, with only the skeleton remaining.... he was eating the remaining coral tissue at night, probably.


Last Saturday Jan 9th I tried to capture him with a plastic bottle trap, with food pellets inside, which didn't work.... might try again tomorrow, as I want to get him out of the tank and changed for another calmer shrimp before trying to add a hammer coral in there again.

In fact I'm going to make a better trap, with a larger plastic bottle, a thinner bottleneck and put better food inside.