Blog Comments

Well we will see about the disaster proof thing.

Cool. Definitly keep us posted. This seems a lot less disaster prone than surge systems that try to accomplish the same thing.

It is a timing motor for controlling things like defrost cycles.
There is also a motor like this to push the ice cubes out of the ice cube maker into the bin. Geared down motors like this are common in appliances.

That's pretty neat. What does the motor usually do in a fridge?

I have also kept many of them but many of my fish live for decades, copperbands and other skinny fish do not. I sometimes keep them for 3 or 4 years but I noticed that in these types of fish, only when they are very young, about as large as a silver dollar they get this.
They are not stressed, this reef has been going for 41 years and as I said, I did autopsy them as I do with any fish that dies from circumstances that are not clear. In this same tank are 19 year old clowns along with many other old fish.
I feed them live worms every day as that is what I see them eating in the sea. I have spent more than a few hours with them underwater in the South Pacific.
You can see him in this video from a few days ago

In 15 years I've never had an issues keeping any of these fish for several years. It could be something in your water causing stress to these fish which can't take a lot and most of the long nose fish take special diets and are finicky eaters. I've never had an issue when they would cut them selfs and have open wounds they always healed never died. Sorry you are having soo many issues with these fish.

Phil, I noticed the same thing and it is really astounding at how fast soft corals grow with nitrates. My giant mushroom was tiny for years and now in a few weeks it grew to about 9" across. The SPS are doing fine but not growing as fast as they were but the leathers and mushrooms are skyrocketing. I don't want to lower the nitrates and am actually trying to keep them up. Yes, I know, wierd.

Paul, that's awesome! I considered one of these at one point, forget why I didn't go with one? Probably just never got around to it.

I noticed that when I added the algae scrubber to my tank and brought the nitrates down that my mushrooms actually started shrinking! Apparently mushrooms and some other soft corals need a little nitrate to really thrive.

Phil

I am putting it back together with some tweeks and I wil start cycling it again. I changed the flow from bottom to top just to make construction easier and I added 2 air vents and test ports. Right now I don't want to lower the nitrates too much because for some reason the corals are growing very fast. I have a giant mushroom that for 5 years was a tiny mushroom looking thing, now it is close to 9" across and it grew in a few months. I am afraid to feed the thing because it is taking up too much real estate and is covering some neighboring corals which are themselves getting too large for the tank.

This shows some of the internal parts, two of the tubes are inside other tubes and are not shown.

Thats OK, I forget everything

That's a blast from the past.... I totally forgot about that method of reducing nitrates...

Today I decided to clean the algae out of my algae trough. There was just too much algae and the water was having a hard tiime getting through. The thing has a plastic window screen in it that I normally just roll up, then brush off the algae in the sink and put it back in but this time it was just too much of a job. The screen was covered in those hard tube worms and bubble algae. There was also just too many amphipods in it to save. I swirled the screen in some salt water and collected as many amphipods as I could and threw them back in the tank. Then I threw out the screen and installed a new one. I don't like to do that because I like a coating of algae on it and algae takes a long time to grow on a new screen.
I also like to smear a coating of cement on the screen because algae grows very fast on cement but I didn't have time to prepare a screen so I just put in a new one. Now it will take a good 3 weeks before algae grows significantly on it.
I may make a cement covered screen in the meantime for next time.
Today I will go to my marina to "play" with my boat and I will collect a bunch of amphipods to replace the ones I lost.
Have a great day

Guess there's a reason I are an engineer instead.

your pictures are not showing up for me

They are not that interesting, just make believe you can see them.
I don't know how to make them appear.

Adam, some types of flatworm are destructive and will kill corals, but not all of them. Some just want to lay in the sun and get a tan. They will leave when they get bored.
Lettuce nudibranch's are really slugs and not nudibranch's. Slugs are vegetarians but lettuce slugs or Elysia Crispata live on bryopsis then they continue living on just light. They are useless for hair algae control.
I raised hundreds of them and wrote an article on them.
http://www.seaslugforum.net/find/11846

I agree with a lot of what you're preaching

I don't preach, these are just some things that go away for me. There are many ways to get things done. It's just that I am older than most people here and me and Abe Lincoln have been at this for a while. The fiftees actually. No not the eighteen fiftees.

You've always been a great reminder to just have patients

Phil, if I had any patience before I started this, I would have been a Doctor.

I agree with a lot of what you're preaching. A couple of years ago, I tore down my tank to remove all of the fish with little white spots on them and treat them with Cu. Attempted to let the tank go fallow for 10 weeks or whatever the recommended amount of time was. After reintroducing my fish, the white spots reappeared again and I had enough. I was ready to let nature sort it out. I will say that to this day, I haven't had ICH claim any of my fish, but I've seen it pop up from time to time upon introduction of new fish. I think as long as your fish aren't stressed, it's not a killer. Likewise with the algae - try not to get too excited unless a piece of coral is in jeopardy, in which case I've been known to take swift action on occasion. Never have regretted throwing out bubble algae though!

Thanks Paul. You've always been a great reminder to just have patients.

Phil

nice to hear. I've had all these problems as well. I went about them more hands on. I used flatworm exit successfully. Hair algee was another story after months of scrubbing adding lettuce nuibreas I gave up and tore the tank apart and added newly cycled rock. In some cases allot of us could learn to be a little more patient. The less I put my hand in the tank the better it does.

your pictures are not showing up for me