LEDs take 1

When the fourth of my eight Coralife 50/50 compact lamps burned ~:-( in January (4 months of use) I decided to experiment with LEDs.  These Coralife lights are expensive in Brazil, R$120 each (~US$65), and were supposed to last around 9 months.... one burned after 2 months, two others after 3 months, and now this one after 4 months.... not sure why so many burned at home, probably due to inconsistent voltage, who knows....

There are many threads out there of people experimenting with LEDs, some making lamps using a few powerful 1W or 3W LEDs, others using many lower powered 5mm LEDs, most of them experimental.  Here are some that inspired me:
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1587273
http://reefcorner.org/forum/luminaria_led-105761

After checking possible LED sources, I found a supplier at Mercado Livre selling 5mm LEDs of 20cd with lens and resistor at a reasonably good price.  Twenty candelas is very little, but I figured out that a lamp made out of 20 LEDs in a fairly compact configuration, totaling something close to 400cd, could probably substitute my Coralife 50/50s.  My idea was to make a 50/50 lamp too, with 10 white LEDs and 10 blue LEDs.  Unfortunately I made a mistake and ordered 20 blue LEDs, so the first prototype was completely blue.  The cost would be R$75 per lamp (~US$42) considering the LEDs and a plastic box to serve as lamp case, still expensive but less than the R$120 and with the potential to last 5 to 10 times longer...

I didn't know I was in for a very nice surprise.

Enough talking, let's see some pictures.... here are the LEDs and lens the way they arrived from the supplier

Here is the plastic case after drilling.  I made the 20 holes in a 5x4 rectangular grid, with 20mm horizontal spacing (row of 5) and 15mm vertical spacing (row of 4). The plasticbox didn't permit 20mm x 20mm.

Here are the LEDs installed in the box:

Here is half the lamp lit up (I wired it as if it were half white, half blue):

Here is a picture of my aquarium hood removed and upside down, and another of the tank without the hood:

Here is a picture of the light installed in the aquarium:

Now, what a surprise when during initial tests I pointed the lamp towards the corals.... incredible fluorescent colors.... the hammer's green tips lit up beautifully, the green star polyps' grass-like arms lit up, the acan had a bright orange color, the zoas' tips lit up orange and green, and the palithoa's green middle also lit up beautifully.  The pictures below give you just a very rough idea... the real thing looks muuuuch better/brighter (and isn't blurred :-) ):

I ordered 20 more white LEDs, and 6 red LEDs to see what their effect would be (thinking about a 21 or 22 LED lamp setup with 10 whites, 10 blues, and 1 or 2 reds in the middle). Why red?  Because scuba diving lights are normally reddish.

One day before I built this LED lamp (27/Jan) the fifth Coralife burned.... my plan is not to swap everything for LED lamps right away, but rather build new ones as the Coralife lamps burn or reach end of life.  Kind of like a more cost effective lamp change, with the benefit of higher light quality.

And these LEDs lamps won't only cost less and look better, they also won't burn with inconsistent voltage because their power source will take care of providing a stable 5V DC to them, and they'll last a lot longer than a fluorescent lamp. :-)

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.