49 Year Old Tank

Thanks ,I was going for awe inspiring, but I will take Legend. I was always a Legend in my own mind, but I am nuts and have PTSD so it doesn't count. :001_cool:

I just went to an LFS here who promised me copperbands, male mandarin, male bluestripe pipefish etc and You know what I got? Nothing. Zippo.

He had tangs, damsels, very common, boring stuff that everyone has.

Then a friend of mine told me of a brand new store near my wife's Doctor so we went there.
The place is very new and clean. A beautiful store that I would like to live in, but the same boring stuff.
This place is also more expensive but not out of sight.

He charges $49.00 for a copperband (if he had one) and the other guy charges $29.00 (if he had them)

This place also gets in fish every 3 weeks which is weird, but they quarantine them for 2 weeks before they sell them.
I asked the Mgr. if I could get the fish before he quarantines them. I will even pay more for them. They are going to let me know by E Mail so I will see how that works out.
 
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I took another video. About half of the fish are hiding but I have a lot of those types of fish. Not seen here is a
Hippo tang, bluestripe pipefish, mandarin, 2nd sunburst anthius, 2nd possum wrasse, 2nd watchman gobi, 2 gecko gobies, 2 rainsford gobies, green clown gobi, 2nd striped cardinal, 2 six line wrasses, 5 fish that I have no idea what they are and an arrow crab.

I took this to show a natural tank. You can see tufts of hair algae, cyano, aiptasia, asternia stars, dead corals and Godzilla larvae.
The 29 year old fire clowns are tending their eggs as they lay them every few days.

Tank now is all NSW taken right from the surf with nothing added and nothing has ever been quarantined, medicated, dipped, de-wormed or anything else.


I can never get even most of the fish out at the same time and many of them just never come out. The Gecko gobies I have never seen an entire fish so I may have 1 or 2, I can't tell. The same with the possum wrasses. I had 2 of them but they are so secretive that I have never seen both of them and they look exactly the same. 6 line wrasses also. There is a matting pair of watchman gobies but they are usually both at the entrance of their cave.

I designed this tank so that almost the entire reef structure is raised off the bottom an inch or two and in there is all interconnecting caves/tunnels so fish can and do hide for months.

It's not so good for me, but great for the fish because I know they don't want to see my ugly mug every day.
I also only buy the more odd, unusual fish and they tend to be secretive.

This new guy is at the very beginning at the right in the back, you can hardly see him but he is behind that black fish that I forget what it is.


This guy is hard to photograph but stays in the front in the montipora.


The Hippo was still sleeping and doesn't get up until about 9:00.



I am not sure where this guy is.


I forgot about the big decorator crab. He only comes out at night.


Hiding



Hiding.


The female is hiding, she hunts on the back glass


I could probably go on.
 
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@Paul B there should be a drop down arrow on the top right hand corner of this page, chose the arrow down and it should say edit thread, chose edit thread and you should be able to edit your subject line, thanks
 
My tank is doing great but I have about 2,372 aiptasia. I guess my copperband was eating them, who knew?

I have been tying to get a new copperband and they are normally very common but for the last couple of weeks I have not been able to get one.

3 LFSs promised me last week that they will have them today, so tomorrow I am going on a quest.
I am getting my taxes done tomorrow and that is about 40 miles west of here so I will try some stores there.

I hate it when I can't even get a common fish. If I find some I may get two of them.

I gave up trying to get the types of fish I really want as all stores only stock silly common fish like tangs and some wrasses.

I have one Mother of all aiptasia about 4" tall and If I can find a spare tank I would like to keep that one for study as I never seen one that big. Nice looking animal. :oops:
 
I am very happy with my tank now. I have quite a lot of the fish I prefer to keep which are all smaller, odder and a little more difficult to get like the Janss Pipefish.
I am going to try to list the fish but I am not near the tank.

Copperband
Hippo Tang
2 Rainsford Gobies
2 Possum Wrasses
2 Sunburst Anthius
2 Fireclowns
Perchlet
Fang Tooth Blenny
2 stripped cardinals
Black cardinal?
Janss Pipefish
Bluestripe Pipefish
Mandarin
Scooter Dragonette
Purple Psudo
2- 6 line wrasses
Yellow wrasse
some kind of stripped wrasse
2 Gecko Gobies

Red something and 5 or 6 other fish that I can't remember.
 
Now we live out east on Long Island and it is not very populated out here. No one is worried about Lyme Disease any more from ticks so I am sure the ticks feel bad.

I baked some muffins this morning and put coffee in a thermos and we took it down to the beach to have breakfast. We stayed in the car because it is 32 degrees and very windy. But it was nice to watch the waves crashing on the rocks while we ate.

Then we took a ride out east and discovered some roads that led to the sea and a park we never knew was here.
I also found a lagoon where I may be able to collect amphipods but I am not sure if a road goes there. I can go by boat but my boat is on the other side of the north fork of Long Island and I can't really get there from here but I can put my inflatable boat back there and find the place.

My fish eating some live white worms.

 
This is a shot through the back of my tank after I scrapped it clean. It's a mass of sponges.


I also got two of these guys there, very hard to photograph.

 
Last night I wanted to clean the front glass of my tank because if I don't clean it in 3 days, it looks like sheet metal so I clean it every day.
I lifted the front panel and stuck the glass cleaning magnet inside.

The tank overflowed a little. I figured maybe I dropped it in to fast and it splashed.
The top rim of my tank is just at my eye level so I can't really see the top of the water.

I started to move the magnet cleaner and a lot of water spilled out.

OOOOOOhhhhNNNNNNoooo.

So I stick my hand over the rim and notice the water is right up to the top rim. AAAAAhhhhhhhhh

I immediately shut off the inflow to the tank from this 7 gallon bucket I have hanging from the ceiling behind the tank that automatically fills from my RO/DI using gravity which goes to a float valve on the top of the tank.

I get a hose and siphon out 10 gallons of water so now the water level is about an inch down and in no danger of overflowing.

Then I look for the problem and find it right away.

Lately, with not much to do I have been cleaning the back of the tank using a magnet scraper.
I have a 6' plastic on the back of the tank that leans against the lights because I lose a lot of fish to jumping. Especially when I listen to my Janis Joplin music.

I must have moved the plastic to much and it was pushing down on the float about an inch so the float valve wouldn't shut off.

I tested the salinity and it was about 0.14 so I could have kept kissing gouramies or goldfish.

I immediately took some dry asw and after mixing it with a little water, poured it into the manifold that feeds the Reverse undergravel filter.

I am not one of those people that worry about raising the salinity more than one percent in 24 hours.

So I did that a few times over about an hour and now the salinity is probably closer to 0.018.

I have not seen the tank yet today but instead of letting the ATO fill the tank in the next week, I will add back the water that I siphoned out and eventually it will get back to normal.

These little occurrences are needed to keep the interest up because if nothing ever happened, we would call this "stamp Collecting"

You could see that white plastic piece here over the back top of the tank.

 
All seems good and everything looks great today and on an added note, I think my Rainsford gobies are starting to spawn.

They normally stay on different ends of the tank, but looking through the back glass they appeared to be doing the Macarana. But it could have been the Hustle or Tango. I am not sure because Janis Joplin music doesn't lend itself to those dance moves.

 
I am diatoming my tank again. Do I have to? No, I just did it last week. I am starring at the detritus particles going into the intake. This is as exciting as watching paint dry which I did this morning when I painted a wall.....Again.
My fish have no idea why I am doing this again and the tank is not dirty. It is just a total waste of time.

But it is an essential waste of time at a time when I have more time than I need. At this stage of the year I would be working on my boat. Of course it is still shrink wrapped and I can't get in it as that is not an essential part of life.

Well, for me it is but I can't leave my wife alone to long as she doesn't have the enormous amount of totally useless hobbies that I do.
She will just keep vacuuming until she makes a hole in the floor and my couch will fall into my garage. I installed a very powerful "whole house" vacuum that will suck out your ear wax from across the street.

I can take fish pictures, but I already have to many. I can wax my workshop floor, but I did that too. My car is very clean and if I put more wax on it I will slide off the seat.

I can spent my entire life in my workshop/Man cave as I am now but only because she is on the phone with one of her bored friends.



 
My good friend who is sick still has a fever and is very weak even though he tested negative. His wife is trying to get him to a doctor today to re test him and her as he obviously has something. I am very concerned for him and his wife, our closest friends for most of our life.

Here on Long Island we can't order food from a supermarket for curbside delivery because it is a 2 week wait just to order so I am going to have to go in person because I don't have enough Amphipods to eat and my fish are all hiding.

I know Larry from LRS foods eats his fish food but I am not in the mood for sushi today.
I may have to start fishing behind my house but I am not sure what I will catch there. In Know in the summer there is sea bass but now I think all we have is ducks and seagulls and I don't want to yell Fowl.

I made a nice breakfast this morning and my wife and I had it on the beach. But it was cold. So cold I saw a chicken with a cape-on. :rolleyes:
 
On a brighter story, I noticed my last batch of Fireclown eggs hatched so with nothing else to do, I figured I would try to find some of them.

I turned off all the powerheads, I have 5 of them. And I looked closely at the film on the surface of the water.

After a while I saw one. A couple of seconds went by and I started to see more and more of them. Of course I can barely see them but there are quite a few all over the place.

I don't raise fish any more so they will become gorgonian food but thats just the way it is. Even if I wanted to raise them, I couldn't as I can't get rotifers now. Maybe in the future I will again raise some fish but now I have more pressing things to do and these guys spawn constantly. I don't even like Fireclowns as they are not that interesting even though thy are quite rare as I rarely see them anywhere.

I got the male 29 years ago as a baby and I thought it was a RedHawk fish because I never saw a Fireclown.

 
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