New Coral

Phollower and I got 2 new coral for the tank this weekend. One is a second sea whip. We got one in July. Here is a picture of the two of them together. The first one looked just like the new one when we got it. It is amazing all the little tentacles it has grown. There is a picture here of the first one when we got it.


We also got a fragment of Ricordia mushroom coral. It is really beautiful. They had a second fragment, and I am so tempted to go and get it.

For Tysgirl

Tysgirl has been asking for an update on the tank, so here it is. Notice all the purple coraline algea growing on the back of the tank. That has really taken off in the last 2 months.

Our anemone split in half about a month or month and 1/2 ago. It is natural for it to reproduce in that fashion. However, we are not sure if the new anemone will make it. The "fish guy" at our local aquarium said sometimes when they split, each side doesn't get 1/2 of the important internal organs. So we'll have to see. It just moved to the front so I could get a picture of it. Here it is with Zeus:Everyone else is doing well I think. We have new snails and hermit crabs. Here is a nasarrius snail and a blue-legged hermit crab:


Both shrimp are carrying eggs. I couldn't get a picture that showed them. They carry them near their belly in their swimmers. Here is a picture of one of the shrimp (bit of the second below it):


Hera (pictured below in Rose with a turbo snail in the shot too) is doing fine too, as is the Midas Blenny, Squiggy. No picture of him though. He swims so fast. I swear he knows what a camera is.


And my pretty little Marty is still cute, cute, cute. I know this is a little blurry, but it was the closest shot of him I got.


I wanted to get a picture or video of this worm that grew, but I can't get it to show up. Maybe Phollower or Nate can do better. It grew out of the sand a few months ago and continues to get bigger. It has two openings in the sand, and it sends out these long, thin arms to find food. The worms are actually some of the neatest, most beautiful organisms in the tank - and they came "free" (imputed) on the live rock.

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:

To be said in the cadence of Jeff Foxworthy...

"If you piss with a turbo snail just to get his shell, you might be a red-leg."

....brought you by our friend, Knitts, who cracks us all up regularly.

Definitions for the aquatic novices:
turbo snail: big snail in our tank which can be seen here.
red leg: red-legged hermit crab, also can be seen in our tank (and in the picture below).


Why would she say this? Who know. Maybe it is partly because one of our red-legged crabs (the one in the picture in fact), named "Pinch," attacked the turbo snails when we added them to the tank. The story is related in the link above ("here").

Now that is what I call multi-tasking!

Biology lesson for today: Cleaner shrimp (the kind we have in our tank) are hermaphrodites.

Both of our cleaner shrimp are now carrying eggs. Even better than just the inherent biological advantages of being a hermaphrodites, it seems that even though one is carrying eggs, it can still provide sperm to the other one. Isn't nature excellent?!?

Must Be Something in the Water

The anemone has grown a ton. Here is a pic of her from a similar viewpoint around the time we got her. This is a pic taken this week.


Hopefully she is not going to keep growing at this clip, or we will need a MUCH larger tank!

Look Ma! It's a Reef!

We got our first two corals - "beginner corals" (meaning we can not kill them easily). This one, a daisy polyp coral, was the coral I wanted from the first time we went to the aquarium store. It is so gorgeous.


And the rock came with 3-4 fan worms on it! You can't see them in the pic, but I posted a pic of other ones which came on some of our live rock here. Phollower pointed out this coral is very similar to the fan worms. Needless to say, I love our fan worms - and my new coral.

The second one is a candy coral. Phollower picked it out. It adds so much beauty to the tank. I don't know how well it shows in the pic, but it has beautiful brown and green colors. Great choice!

The Midas Touch

Meet our newest fish, a Midas Blenny named Squiggy. Get it?


No? Say it aloud - "the blenny squiggy." Still nothing?


Think of Laverne and Shirley. Got it now?


Hopefully you got Phollower's and my stupid sense of humor before the sitcom reference. He is a neat fish. He is mostly yellow with blue eyes and blue stripe along his back fin. He hides in a rock with just his head sticking out and then darts out to eat and swim. I have been wanting one since I first saw him in the aquarium store. I am so excited!

Ahhhh....Dominance

The clownfish are cute together. Zeus (the male clown) won't stray more than a few inches from Rose (the anemone) without Hera (the female clown) with him. He spends most of his day rubbing against the anemone, enclosed between her little arms, like this:


But Hera goes all over the tank on her own. But sometimes, it seems to us that Hera takes up the entire anemone, not allowing Zeus in. When that happens, Zeus just flutters around the outside of the anemone, rubbing against the outside of the anemone, kind of waiting for a chance to get in again. It is kind of sad since Zeus is the one who feeds Rose, not Hera. Zeus brings little pieces of shrimp in his mouth to Rose and spits it at her mouth - very cute. He is much more of a "caretaker" than she is. I mentioned this to Phollower who responded "huh." I wonder if he is trying to say something.

Now turbo-charged!

We added 2 turbo snails to our tank this week. They are huge and quite beautiful. Here are two pictures of them.
When we added them, Ichabod Pinch, our red-legged hermit crab, went right after them. He kept knocking them onto the ground, flipping them over, and prodding them to get them to leave the shell. Turbo snails can not turn themselves over from their back well. Isn't it amazing the crab knows that?? Anyway, we kept pulling I-Pinch off and putting the snails up on the rocks. He kept going back. We had a some friends over the night after we got them. They kept watching and yelling if he got after them. Thanks to Knitts and Tracks for their vigilant watch! Luckily, everyone made it through and the snails have moved to the tank back wall to eat like maniacs. We thought I-Pinch wanted a bigger shell, but why the addition of the snails would suddenly cause him to want one right away, we didn't know. We got him some larger shells the next day as soon as the aquarium store opened, including some former turbo snails' shells. He has completely ignored them. So I guess he just hates turbo snails. One of the guys at the store said red-legged hermits can sometimes get as big as softballs. Phollower is excited about the prospect. Me, not so much! He will have to move if he is going to be that big and aggressive. For those of you who are dying to see how things are going in the tank, here are some updated pictures of (in this order) 1) Marty and 2) Hera, Zeus, and Rose. We think Rose is bigger already, but maybe she is just spreading out.

Send in the Clowns!

We got our clownfish today. They are maroon clownfish. There are two of them. The smaller one will be male We are not sure if he is yet, but they change when two are put together. The big one becomes female, and the little one becomes male. In the wild, they are born male. As larva, they float along in the sea feeding off plankton. When they turn into fish, the clownfish have to join a family living with an anemone. But there is only one mating pair in each anemone. When the female dies, the oldest male becomes female and one of the other males becomes the mate for the new female. Pretty cool, huh!

Anyway, enough biology. We are naming them Hera and Zeus. And they are really cute already!

We also got a Rose Anemone, which we are cleverly calling "Rose." She (we'll go with the female sex since she has a female name) was born right here in an aquarium in our home town! Clownfish live with Anemones in the wild. They actually bring food to the Anemone. We are really excited to feed them and watch the relationship. Hera and Zeus took to her immediately, playing and swimming in the Anemone right away! Here are two pictures, the first is one of Zeus in the Anemone, Rose. The second is of Hera swimming along.

I think I heard a crab say, "Remember when this place used to be secluded???"

More new creatures in the tank! One is a lettuce sea slug (sometimes called a nudibranch, but it is not really a nudibranch). And no Limpy, Phollower, and Zoe - a nudibranch has nothing to do with anything being nude. Here it is on our dirty back tank wall:


We also got two cleaner shrimp. One is called a Scarlet Lady Shrimp. Here it is on a rock in the tank:

Another is called a Blood Red Fire Shrimp. This one is still being a bit shy so I included a hyperlink to a picture on the web.

And one more bit of good news - the blue-legged crab we had not seen since Saturday showed up today. Who knows where he went. Maybe he was on vacation in Hawaii? Maybe he went to visit his aunt Zoe (who is terrified of fish)!

But what if he does something cute while the battery is charging???

While the battery to the camera is charging, here is a better picture of the new fish, named Marty (for my favorite goaltender), along with a couple of snails.

Marty:
Astrea Snail:


Nassarius Snail:

We got a fish!!!

So we finally got a fish. And we got 2 emerald crabs and 4 more little nassarius snails. To be honest, I was not psyched about the emerald crabs at first since they look a little like spiders, but they are growing on me as they mow down the algae in the tank. Here are some pics of the new creatures. We will try to get a better one of the fish. He is still being shy.




On a negative note, we have not seen one of the blue-legged crabs in about 2 days. I am starting to be concerned he has met with an untimely end.

Who lives here?

So tons of organisms have come out of our live rock. The first inhabitant we noticed was a fan worm. Now we have 14 fan worms growing on one of the rocks (see the picture above).

We have lots of little organisms, like water bugs. Some are little dot-like creatures with little legs on all sides which cling to the glass. They were our first little water bug like creatures. You can see some of them in the first picture under the "Aquarium Started" post. There were tons of them until the water bug which eats them began to multiply. It is a little larger and looks like a see-through potato bug. Now we have tons of them running around on the rocks and tank floor. The fish will eat them, hungrily.

We have little slug-like creatures. The fold over on themselves and pump to swim around the tank. They eat off of the tank wall and the rocks. We are not sure what they are, but they are neat!

We think we saw 3 bristle worms, but have not seem them in about 1 month. We are hoping they are not multiplying!

One of the coolest organism (and the newest find) was a brittle star. It is a tiny little starfish like animal and has only been out about 2 times. We are hoping it will multiply!

Aquarium Started

So we started a salt water aquarium - 55 gallon. We got it in late November. I'd like to catalog a bit about how the aquarium is going so the purpose of this post is to catch you up a bit.

We added some live rock. Live rock is rock which has come from the sea and has little organisms "hidden" in it which release into the tank over the years to come. Some of our friends have called these organisms "free," but for the cost of live rock, these organisms are more "imputed" than "free."

Everything started out swimmingly. There was a small fan worm on one of the rocks. Very beautiful! There were some colors starting to come out on the rocks. Suddenly, about 2 weeks into the project, we had a brown algae explosion. It was disgusting. Long brown algae on all the rocks. This was easily the most disgusting part of the project so far. You can see a bit of it in the picture below. That lasted about 2-3 weeks, truthfully 2-3 long weeks!


Because the brown algae did not seem to be abating, we decided to get something which would eat the algae. So about 1 month after getting the tank, we added 2 Astraea snails, 2 Nassarius snails, 3 blue-legged hermit crabs, and 1 red-legged hermit crab. We named the red-legged crab Ichabod pinch ("I-pinch"). This is what s/he (how do you know the sex of a hermit crab anyway??) looked like in his/her old shell.


About a week and a half ago, we had a green algae bloom. This did not last nearly as long, only about 1 week. And it was way less disgusting than the brown algae.

The back wall of the tank is now getting full of algae which is what we wanted. We have not been cleaning it off. We want it to have it become algae covered, so it can blend into the rocks. And the rocks are growing some nice little plants.

Two more weeks and we are getting our first fish!! Here is a more recent look at the same rock set as above. Thanks to Nate for all the professional photography!