Aquariums « ear-fung.us

18May/085

New Pictures of My Aquarium and Corals

I took about 200 photos of my aquarium and only wound up with about 17 good ones. That's the way it usually is taking photos of an aquarium. Here's some of the best.

Full tank shot:

Pulsing Xenia (Xenia sp.):

Curly Green Star Polyps (Clavularia viridis):

Purple Gorgonian (Sea Fan) - (Gorgonia sp.):

Trumpet Coral (Caulastrea curvata):

Zoanthid / Palythoas (Zoanthus sp. and Palythoa spp.):

Orange Birdsnest (Seriatopora hystrix):

Green Fuzzy Birdsnest (Seriatopora hystrix):

Orange Zoanthids (Zoanthus sp.):

Frogspawn (Euphyllia divisia):

Green "Dragon Eye" Zoanthids (Zoanthus sp.):

Purple "Psychedelic" Zoanthids (Zoanthus sp.):

You gotta see these up close!

Palythoas (Palythoa spp.):

Green and Yellow Zoanthids (separate colonies) - (Zoanthus sp.):

Tagged as: Aquariums, corals, fish, photos 5 Comments

23Apr/080

New Type of Lights

Check out this video of an amazing new light technology that may revolutionize the lighting industry. They're not only brighter, but provide a more sun-like light spectrum and cost less in electricity to run.

Typical Lightbulb:
15 lumens per watt
Typical LED:
70 lumens per watt
This type of bulb:
140 lumens per watt

I hope this technology makes its way to the aquarium industry.

[via]

Tagged as: Aquariums, electricity, lights, News No Comments

21Apr/081

Coral Growth Rates

A friend at work was asking about coral reproduction in my saltwater fish tank so I thought I'd slap together a few images of "before and after" to show how fast corals grow and what they look like when they get bigger or spread out. I apologize for the poor picture quality in a few instances; some images had to be cropped out of larger ones.

All my corals are under 36" 96 watt bulbs
92 total watts in a 65gallon tank
1x 10,000 kelvin bulb
1x Actinic 03 blue bulb

The first example is my orange birdsnest coral (Seriatopora hystrix).

This is my large colony of orange zooanthids (Zoanthus sp.). As you can see, the colony has probably more than tripled in 7 months. Right now, they are completely covering the original rock and have started spreading to the rocks around them.

Tagged as: Aquariums, coral, photos, saltwater 1 Comment

29Oct/071

WTF Is This? Snail Eggs Maybe?

I woke up this morning and this crazy little design was on the inside front of my glass. I'm thinking it's snail eggs that they've laid on the glass, but not totally sure.

*UPDATE*

Turns out it's my one of Cerith snails (Cerithium sp.). I caught him/her/whatever in the act this morning!

Tagged as: Aquariums, design, glass, mystery 1 Comment

28Oct/072

New Fish… I Know, We’re ALWAYS Getting New Fish!

My wife's parents were in town this weekend and we took them to see the Aquarium Center and her dad wanted to buy us a fish... like we were going to turn THAT down.

I didn't think they'd go for the Swissguard Basslet ($100) so we opted for fat little Royal Gramma.
He's adjusting fairly well and got in a little tussle with the Tomini Tang within about 20 minutes after being introduced to the tank... the gramma decided to go to the tang's little cubby hole and they were facing off with their mouths open... quite a show.

He's not going to replace our Midas Blenny who took a header out of our tank a few weeks ago, but I think he adds a nice bit of color to the tank for now.

We've temporally named him "Moda" for the wife's parents (MOm DAd)

He's a good looking specimen, but so fast, it's hard to get a good shot of him.

Tagged as: "royal gramma", Aquariums, fish, purple, saltwater 2 Comments

22Oct/071

Almost Burnt My House to a Crisp

OK, maybe I'm being a little melodramatic, but I got a call from my wife about 1:20 this afternoon saying that the fish tank was completely shut off. Nothing was going... no pumps, no light, no protein skimmer... NOTHING!

Naturally, I freaked out and drove home as fast carefully as possible. I went in and assessed the situation and determined that the breaker must have been tripped by something. They're building a new house about 3 doors down so maybe they interrupted the power connection for a minute and when everything tried to come on at the same time it overloaded the breaker. Yeah... maybe that's what happened.

So I go into the garage and trip the breaker and watch the fish tank come back to life. We determined it had only been off for less than 1.5 hrs so the corals should be all right.

Then I head back to work.

I sit down and unlock my workstation only to receive another phone call from my wife, "It happened again. And there's a big cloud of foul smelling smoke coming out from under the fish tank!"

"Unplug EVERYTHING," I said, and again, I rushed home.

It didn't take long to see what happened. The light on the heater was flickering on and off rapidly (indicative of a short). So I unplugged the heater and proceeded to remove it from the sump. Much to my surprise, the heater fell into two pieces as I attempted to remove it.

What a freakin' close call! I'm glad the thing was under water or it'd probably burned my house down!

All my corals seem to be doing OK except the frogspawn which looks a bit "deflated" at the moment. Hopefully he'll perk back up. The fish all seem fine except my Tomini Tang who has a few white spots on him, presumably from knocking into things while he was freaking out (he's really skittish).

Wanna see?

I'm glad it was a clean break or I'd had to get the glass shards out of my sump. There were, however, bits and pieces of carbon on the bottom of the tank that I got out with a turkey baster.

I just finished doing a ±15% water change.

Tagged as: Aquariums, crisis, heater, Home, photos 1 Comment

10Sep/070