You can see two bubbles very clearly in this shot. There is a third behind the skeleton, as well.

A while back, our favourite reef tank supplier, Caribbean Forest, had an anniversary sale where they were giving stuff away for 20% off.  We looked around and found a bubble coral which had seen better days, but still looked viable.  It was recessed a bit and was exposing a little bit of the skeleton, but it was a good price and Sarah and I love a challenge.

Unfortunately, the coral eventually ejected and disappeared.  This, we are told, happens when the coral is either getting starved of nutrients or when it’s getting pestered by some other animal and the other animal is winning.  We thought we would be without bubbles entirely.

That was, until we noticed little bubbles, no wider than three pins bundled together, growing all over the skeleton that our original bubble exited.  Wow!  Were we excited to see the new growth.  And four months later, they continue to grow and to our surprise, get redder and redder!

We’ve talked to our friends at the Forest, and no one has ever seen a red bubble coral, nor have any of them seen tank-raised bubble corals that they know of.  So, there is a possibility that these truly are red bubble corals, and there’s a possiblity that they are the regular pink bubble corals, but small enough that they have a deep red appearance.  We’re not sure, but they seem healthy and with luck, we shall find out the truth!

Most anyone who starts out with marine aquariums gets a bit overwhelmed by the costs of all the doo-dads that go along with maintaining a proper tank.  That being the case, we wait to buy the nifty things until we’ve gotten the hang of the basics.

Ordinarily, I would agree with this concept, but I must tell you that the refractometer is an absolute must-have.  We’d been using a hydrometer which, like most hydrometers, was made out of plastic and hence not the most reliable of measurement systems.  In fact, we’d been running the tank about .003 high on the specific gravity scale without realizing it.  Once we realized that, we resolved to find ourselves an affordable option.

We ended up getting a refractometer on eBay for 20 bucks.  That’s dirt cheap, but it’s the exact same refractometer used at our local reef shop, and more than adequate to the task of testing reef water.  Generally, they cost about $100 or so, so while there’s no guarantee you’ll get the deal we did, you’ll probably want to do some research and have a look around if you’re interested in being relatively frugal.

Once you have one of these little babies in your hand, your life becomes instantly easier, where water changes are concerned.  Hydrometers are, under the best of circumstances, less than exact.  The refractometer does not change its reading based on how you hold the instrument and is not affected by bubbles hanging on the needle.  The gauge is easy to read and unambiguous.

We use the refractometer downstairs in our little marine lab to test our reserve water, then we double check the water upstairs to see if there is any change to the salinity in the tank.

Water Changes

Which brings up an interesting point you may want to consider: you should regard your water changes as an opportunity to refresh the water chemistry of your tank, not simply in terms of waste from the fishes, but in general.  Over time, the water in the tank may evaporate, leaving you with slightly higher salinity than is healthy.  Take the opportunity to introduce water with a lower salinity in a water change to help balance out the loss.

For example, if in a 24-gallon tank, you’re running at 1.027, that’s right at the edge of safe water for marine tanks.  When doing your 10% water change (we do ours weekly), it might be advisable to introduce water which is at, say, 1.020.  (We measure in specific gravity, not PPM.  Consider PPM in terms of its upper and lower ranges, which I don’t know)   1.020 is just slightly below the acceptable limit for the tank, but since it’s only 10% of the total water mass, the net effect should be a slight change to the salinity, probably around 1.025, which is optimal.

You could also mix in things like Alkalinity buffers if the tank needs them, but be sure to mix that into only the water you plan on putting in the tank that change!  Otherwise, you’ll end up with reserve water that will do your tank more harm than good.  On the up side, introducing chemicals that are already somewhat dilute will be less harsh on your tank than dumping things in directly.

OK, so apparently, it’s wishlist day here at the Accidental Aquarist blog!  I’m seeing mixed reviews of the Flame Scallop as a reef tank animal.  It seems like a lot of fish have a tendency to pick on the Flame Scallop’s delicate tendrils, and that can cause the poor little shellfish to expire.  But these things are just amazing to watch light up and very, very cheap (around $10 here in Rochester, NY), so I’ve been more than a little tempted:

Flame Scallop – Lima scabra

A beautiful and usually readily available mollusc for the reef tank. However, I have noticed that some are very vulnerable to fish that nip on their mantles and can be harrassed to death. Normally, it will try to nest in a live rock crevice, but when it feels it is in danger, can shoot out water to quickly scoot to a different spot and elude predators. Needs good protected anchor area and very clean water.

I’ve talked about our Black Ocellaris quite a bit, but haven’t given any information about this rare, tank-raised beauty that we have.  So, here’s a bit of info from another website:

Ocellaris Clown: Black & White AUSTRALIAN Tank Raised

The beautiful coloration and endearing personality of this fish has made it a favorite of the neophyte and experienced aquarist alike. The Australian black & White color variant is rarely available to the trade, and is available in tank raised only, wild collected specimens are not available to the trade. Being a passive species, do not keep them with larger, more aggressive clownfishes. Naturally occurs in Magnificent and Carpet Anemones.

I haven’t posted anything here in a while, so I wanted to pop my head in and say how we’re doing with our tank. Things are coming along nicely, as a rule, though we are mourning the loss of a particularly entertaining Ocelaris Clown by the name of Monty. Unfortunately, Monty was succumbing to the affects of what we believe to have been some sort of infection in his gills. He’d all but stopped eating in the last week and a half, and we finally decided that nothing further could be done, so the task fell on me to take him out of the tank and give him a proper burial in the garden.

Poor little guy, he barely moved when I grabbed him out of the tank.

But the tank itself is doing beautifully. It seems that, once a certain level of stability is reached, careful attention to detail is all that is required to maintain the tank. The wild swings in water chemistry seem to have stopped for now, and weekly water changes seem to suffice to keep things balanced. We’ve currently got a Black Ocelaris, a Red Ocelaris, a Scooter Blenny, a Diamond Goby and a Cleaner Shrimp in the tank, along with our selection of hermit crabs and snails, so feeding is regular and safe. There’s more than enough life in the tank to sustain the feed we put in.

We’ve also switched from a frozen-only diet to a mix of frozen veggie/meat mix, live brine shrimp and copipods. The live food is great because it doesn’t sit at the bottom of the tank and rot, plus it has the extra bonus of being what my wife the former zoo keeper refers to as “enrichment,” basically stuff to do, for the fish. It also makes for a more enjoyable experience watching the fish chase after the live food!

So, that’s what’s going on in our little Marine Land. Oh! And we also got a swingin’ deal from eBay on a refractometer, since our hydrometer was woefully inadequate to the task of accurately measuring salinity. Hydrometers are nice to have around for quick checks, but you should always compare the results to a reliable refractometer and adjust your measurements accordingly.

We’ve been introducing new life into the tank and I’ve noticed a trend which I thought I’d share with the blog. Feeding the tank is always a concern when working with reef aquariums. With fresh water aquariums, you can usually just throw a bit of food in every day and the tank will take care of itself, since there’s already a lot of algae and other natural growth associated with healthy fresh-water tanks.

But with salt water tanks, over-feeding the tank can have deadly consequences. It was the buildup of ammonias due to exactly this type of over-feeding that partially contributed to our melt-down. It was also this concern that led me to post my most recent post on “building from the bottom, up.” For the sake of water-chemistry alone, you need to avoid over-feeding.

But the trend I’ve noticed is that not only do you not want to over-feed, you actually want to go to some lengths to assure that there is always a need for more food. As concerned aquarists who’ve invested a lot of time and money into our tanks, it is entirely normal that we tend to want our tanks in optimum performance, and so the tendency is to want to assure yourself that everything in the tank is getting fed exactly the right amount.

This is a nice instinct, but not one that squares with the reality of a natural reef environment. Life is struggle, and for marine life, that struggle is the constant quest for the next meal. That’s as evidenced by the fact that there are so many more numerous species of heterotrophs, or animals, than vegetable autotrophs in the marine environment. Plants can make their own food by photosynthesis, but most things in the water need to actively seek out their next meal. They are geared towards this quest, their bodies optimized to go without food most of the time and feed when food is available.

So if they aren’t given that impulse to actively hunt for food, they aren’t going to be very healthy, actually. Precisely the opposite of what we tend to think. Since we’ve added in the new clown fish, we’ve not bothered to increase our feeding cycle at all. The result has been that our diamond goby has been much, much more active and looks a little better. The snails and crabs are constantly working overtime to get their own sustainence. The sand is constantly cleaned by the goby’s activity and the entire tanks is generally more enjoyable to look at.

Best of all, when the goby filters the sand, he kicks up a lot of uneaten food which the ocellaris gets a second crack at. This is the kind of semi-symbiosis that you’re looking for in a tank: let the life that’s there do the work of feeding itself.

So, how much is enough? Well, that’s not an easy question to answer. Another ripple in the current tank’s setup is the introduction of more copipods, which of course represent a constant, reproducing stream of food for the fish, and one that is basically invisible to us humans. How do we know we’ve got enough in the tank when we can’t see them?

You have to just go on what the fish look like, I suppose. If your fish are getting a little thin or if feeding time is particularly aggressive and includes a lot of fighting, then perhaps its time to increase the load slightly. Or perhaps the frequency of feedings should be increased and the amount per feeding decreased, but it’s all going to be instinct that guides you. It’s your tank and they’re your fish, so only you are really going to know how things really work in your little marine universe.

About the only potentially helpful guideline I could suggest would be to consider your tank in terms of those “bottom up” strata I discussed in my earlier post, along with considering a kind of “aggression strata” as well. High-swimming fish such as clowns, called pelagic fish, are going to get first-crack at the food, whereas bottom-feeding gobies, known as benthic fish, won’t tend to get the food till it’s on the bottom. That’s one strata. The other is aggressive fish such as tangs versus passive fish such as dragonettes.

If you have a mix of these types of species, you might want to consider feeding more than once a day so that the aggressive fish get their fill and the passive fish can feed later. You’d want to limit the amount of food in each feeding, of course, and put in just enough food to satiate both strata.

When considering these strata, you’re probably only going to need to consider the fish, not the inverts. Snails just eat algae or scraps, so do the hermit crabs and others. They’re used to catch-as-catch-can, so you don’t really need to worry about them too much.

Snails?  Crabs?  Fish? Corals?  Which types of which?

There are so many choices of marine life to incorporate into your tank, it’s tough to know exactly where to start.  We had a blowout once that involved over-loading the tank, poisoning it with ammonia and killing most of the corals and all of the fish.  There were a number of contributing factors that led to this melt-down, but in part, I blame the process by which we chose our fish, which was really no process at all.

Perhaps it would matter less if we were less concerned with maintaining as much natural stasis as possible.  There are plenty of chemical solutions to help you balance out your tank, and they can get you past a rough patch if necessary.  But sooner or later, it all comes down to balancing the biomass in your tank, so chemicals while helpful are really no solution.  Our feeling is that keeping things as natural as possible is really what we’re after in the first place: a show tank emulating the reefs of the world.

What seems to be working for our tank now – and what seems intuitively to make sense for all tanks – is a kind of bottom-up approach to picking out your marine friends.  This is probably not the most fun-filled process for those of you who really just want fish, but if a natural balance is what you want, this seems the way to go.  Moreover, even fish lovers may discover new joys in playing around with different species.

From The Bottom Up

The bottom-up approach means working on your cleanup crew before the fish.  Once you’re salinity is OK, your live rock is cured and your nitrogen cycle balanced, it’s time to introduce some snails.  The nice thing about snails is that you don’t have to feed them: there will never be an occasion when you’ve run out of algae for the to eat so long as there’s a possibility of life in the tank at all.  So get yourself some snails, maybe one snail for every 7 to 10 gallons your tank holds, and let them begin the process of cleaning the tank up.  We use turbo snails from Mexico, along with one turban snail, and they seem to be doing fine.

But snails aren’t enough.  Hermit crabs or some other more mobile animal will also be needed.  We’re continually surprised by the speed of the snails, but they aren’t nearly as efficient as crabs and best of all, crabs will also eat meaty foods once that becomes a necessary thing.  We’ve got three red-legged hermit crabs, but we’re thinking we want a few more different types as well.

Porcelain crabs are filter feeders, stripping little microbes and such directly out of the water around them with a couple of fan-like claws.  They’re not going to get anything out of the bottom of the tank, but they will help keep the nutrients in the water to a healthy level.  Cleaner shrimp and blood red shrimp help keep things from getting left on the ground, but they don’t deal well with high nitrate water or warmer waters.  Still, they’ll help keep your fish happy and healthy when you get around to getting fish by removing dead scales and parasites from them.

Once you start thinking about fish, bottom feeders and smaller fish are probably a better choice.  We had a problem with red slime algae, needed to keep the nutrients down and the sand mixed up to prevent the slime from returning.  As a solution, we got a diamond goby for the tank.  This goby is one of the filtering type of fish that scoops up mouthfuls of sand, eats what’s good to eat, and spits out the rest.  They’re perfect for stirring up the sand at the bottom and our sand has really never looked cleaner since we’ve had the tank.

The big thing is: diamond gobies are good bottom feeders and require barely any food to survive, relative to other fish.  The reason for the low-food requirement is simple: while other fish eat some food but let the rest fall to the floor, the diamond goby is only going to eat stuff off the floor, anyway.  Therefore, top-swimming fish may eat 30% of the food, but bottom feeders are more likely to eat nearly 100% of the food.

Along the way, we’ve added in corals and such for the sake of decoration.  Most of them tend to be fed by the photosynthetic zooxanthellae living within them, but they do play a minor role in filtration of the raw materials present in the water.  The mushrooms we got do not have any photosynthetic cohabitants to feed them and so they’ve played a large role as well, despite introducing what we think was the cause of a recent hair algae problem.  What we want to see happen is that when we feed the fish that swim near the top, the food they don’t eat should barely hit the floor before something eats it.  Fish and other creature pooh is toxic, but it’s not as toxic as dead things rotting on the floor of your tank.

If anyone has observations on this theory, its graces or its follies, I’d be interested in hearing them from the comments!  So far, it’s working well, but we’re always open to opinions.

There is no shortage of “key concepts,” involved in reef aquarium building.  In fact, there are so many, it’s hard to know until you see the results of your ignorance.  That is never fun.

But one concept which is much more important to reef aquariums than it is to most any other type of aquatic environment is circulation of the water.  I say this because, in most cases, there is very little in the water other than fish to block the flow of water.  In a reef tank, you obviously have the reef rock to contend with.

And what’s more, you won’t just be laying down your reef rock once: chances are, as you get the tank settled, you’ll need to move the rocks quite a few times.  Every time you do this, you’re going to need to take circulation into account.

Our personal experience with this came with a fairly significant encroachment of Red Slime Algae.  This particularly annoying pest is definitely one worth its own post or three, but suffice it to say that the only cure that worked was a chemical that we needed to add to the water.  When we did that, we dumped it in front of the power head to let the chemicals spread throughout the tank.

But unfortunately, one corner of the tank was utterly and obviously without current, and the Red Menace persisted in that corner.  Now, it is the farthest reach in the tank from the power head, so to some extent, this should be normal.  However, adding to that problem is the fact that we had live rock more or less wedged right into that corner.  We didn’t mean to, we’d just needed to do some adjusting after a recent change, and hadn’t noticed how close the rock was to the glass.

So until we made some adjustments to the rock’s location, that corner continued to have Red Slime.  But more importantly, that side of the tank might otherwise have continued to lack current.  That means less nutrients and oxygen for corals that might otherwise grow there, and in general less life in that corner of the tank.  Also, that section of the tank could accumulate waste ammonia and cause a problem farther down the line.  I don’t know for sure, but I’ll betcha that there are some nasties that could grow in such an environment also; I’m thinking that an abundance of anaerobic bacteria might gather there.

So the lesson is clear: make very sure when you set your reef rock that you’ve determined where the water will flow and whether or not that circulation is going to work the way you thought it would.  In fact, it might even be worth it to pick up half a handful of sand and drop it in front of the power head.  Then you can see from the movement of the silt whether or not the full tank is getting the circulation it needs.  Just be sure to blow the rocks off when you’re done with a turkey baster or something.

Just trying to get a handle on what messes I made last night and didn’t realize it. . .

Welcome to our new blog, dedicated to the novice aquarist.  The idea behind this site is to provide our own experiences so that people might learn a little bit more about the marine aquarist’s role in creating a reef tank.

There’s a lot to learn if you’re going to pick this up as a hobby, and it’s not a cheap exercise.  Be prepared to be unprepared for both the cost and the rules.  Talking to experts reveals a wide variety of opinions that often directly conflict with one another; consider this blog one more, highly-inexperienced, voice in the cacophony.  Mistakes that may seem innocuous have often been the most serious in our experience, and the reef aquarium is an ecosystem that can quickly be over-balanced, causing a melt-down of epic proportions.

None of this is meant to scare you off: as painful as some experiences have been for us, we wouldn’t give up our tank for the world.  There is nothing like the feeling of seeing a healthy tank full of happy animals that you’ve cultivated.  And if this blog can help you avoid some of the more painful experiences we’ve had, we’ll be glad to have helped you along the path!

To that end, here is a first piece of advice:

When you get your tank, free up some space in the basement or somewhere else convenient and turn it into your “marine laboratory.”  You’ll have more chemicals, hardware and other stuff than you know what to do with, so you’d better have a place for it!

Among your possessions should be another fish tank of about half the size of your current livestock tank, outfitted with water pumps, heaters and even an airstone.  You can use this tank to mix up your saltwater, keeping it warm, mixed and oxygenated for your next water change.  There will be times of crisis when the only thing that might save your tank is an emergency water change.  When that happens, you’ll need salt-water mixed and ready-to-go, because salt needs to have been mixed into the water for at least half a day in order for it not to burn the fish and corals.

The need for this second tank is not one that is ever mentioned in the stores.  I think that’s largely because most seasoned aquarists probably forget.  But the need for the second tank greatly increases your initial costs of ownership, and so is important to take into consideration.