Friday, July 18, 2008

Feather Star

We added to the aquarium this week. This is a movie I took of our new feather star. Hopefully it is not too "Cloverfield"-ish. We named her Fern. She is in the starfish family but clearly a different kind of animal. I hope she lives. I have read that they are hard to care for. I am not sure if it comes across in the video, but she is a really beautiful animal.



We also got a new coral. I think it is a sea whip. It is in the gorgonian family of coral. It is really neat. It has lots of little feathery polyps along its sides (which you can not see in the picture). We'd like to get a few more to add to it so we have a gorgonian forest (kind of), but we want to make sure it will do well in the tank first. Here is a picture:



Here is a picture of fern in case you can't see her well in the video:

5 comments:

MrsOz said...

We love the feather star. She's beautiful. And the whip will look cool as a forest.

mama biscuit said...

Thank you so much for posting a video!!!! I love the feather star. I don't know how I'd ever get anything done if I had a tank like that!

I have an odd question. Do you have to have someone come in and care for the tank when you and Phollower go to NY? It seems like it would need daily attention.

Sylvia said...

MrsOz: We love it too.

Tysgirl: Yes, we do have someone come in. Actually the fish could go 1 week without food if we were gone. But I like to feed them a little bit everyday. What the tank really needs every day is someone to check the salinity and add water. When we are gone, usually one of our friends (Lucy or Zoe) come in and feed the fish, check the water, and add water every day. Then we have one of the guys from the Aquarium store in town come in and check the water readings, feed the corals, make sure the tank is ok from a more experienced point of view. Not to say Lucy and Zoe don't do an awesome job taking care of the tank, but I think they like that someone else is checking too. Really all in all, the tank is not a lot of work. We change about 10 gallons of water each week and some of the filtration media. I think a little attention every day goes a long way to reducing big problems. We spend a LOT of time staring at it ourselves, very stress reducing.

limpy99 said...

We added two fish to our freshwater aquarium on Sunday. Then on Monday Neptune subtracted one.

Sylvia said...

Limpy: Sorry Neptune sought to punish your tank and remove a member. What kind of fish do you have?