Donya's 55-Gallon

[lljdma06]

Bah...so much for that plan. Slow leak on tire + ridiculously small spare + places closed today = no fishy fun for me.

That is epic sadness.

I hate it when life gets in the way of fun.

Me too.

Meh!!

 

[Donya]

At a coffee shop now while the tire is getting sorted out. Turned out to be an even more annoying situation than I thought: the last place to work on anything tire-related apparently felt the need to put the nuts on so tight that they can't be gotten off by any reasonably-sized human being. So I guess it doesn't matter how tiny the spare is; may as well not have had it! Good thing it went flat close to home and not in the middle of a busy freeway. Anyway, all was also not lost yesterday, as I got fed up with it all and dragged my old garbagemobile out of hibernation to go to a much closer LFS, where I got the biggest dang tube worm I've ever seen. Pics after I get home.

 

[Donya]

Giant tube worm!

Well, giant to me anyway. I have never seen them that big in the trade.


Also, proof that you can turn a BTA into a pelleted food junkie:

 

[Donya]

Ok I will fess up, this is the real reason I couldn't stay properly for the chat earlier today...one of the stores I was kept away from previously by the flat tire extended its sale over the weekend.

This brings me to 6 urchins in this tank and 13 total...Not enough. As long as I keep bringing them home one at a time, nobody will notice...right?

 

[lljdma06]

Ok I will fess up, this is the real reason I couldn't stay properly for the chat earlier today...one of the stores I was kept away from previously by the flat tire extended its sale over the weekend.

I knew it!

This brings me to 6 urchins in this tank and 13 total...Not enough. As long as I keep bringing them home one at a time, nobody will notice...right?

Nobody will notice. All urchins look alike to me.

 

[crazyforcordoras]

What a nice urchin! Is a pincushion urchin?

 

[Donya]

What a nice urchin! Is a pincushion urchin?

Lytechinus variegatus. Incredible color variety in the species; I've got a green and white individual and another that is pastel pink all over. Common names are basically useless with sea urchins; here's what I've seen label-wise in the last few years:

- Pincushion: L. variegatus, Tripnuestes gratilla, and some Echinometra species.
- Tuxedo: Mespilia globulus, T. gratilla, rarely L. variegatus (because of the range of color, some individuals exhibit white or differently colored "bald" patches).
- Rock-boring: various Echinometra species.
- Longspine: Diadema and Echinothrix species with the rare juvenile Echinometra interloper.
- Pencil spine: mostly Eucidaris tribuloides, but others sporadically like E. metularia.

As with many inverts, the common names are too much of a mixed bag to be helpful except with reasonably high probability for longspines and pencils, which are dominated by sufficiently similar Diadema species and E. tribuloides respectively.

All urchins look alike to me.

Bah! There are only two of mine that I have trouble telling apart. I have 3 of a black & very dark purple species in one tank; I can tell one of them apart easily, but I must admit that the other two are getting harder to distinguish as they age.

Have to say I am sort of wanting a longspine of some kind now...I wrote them off as too hazardous for me some time ago, but somehow having done that makes me want one more now lol. Probably will still be scared of Diademas but need to do reading on Echinothrix.

 

[Donya]

Walked into the tank room this evening and got to see some of the courtship dance of Clibanarius virescens. I didn't get to see all of it though since a peppermint shrimp bombed through and interrupted it. So, this species' dance involves alternating taps with the first two walking legs while rapidly wiggling the arms up and down. Strangely no shell clacking, which is common to a lot of species, although that could be just because it was interrupted.

 

[crazyforcordoras]

Cool, great to see.

Just got a question. What do you feed your tubeworms?

 

[Donya]

They get the same stuff the rest of the tank gets fed. I haven't tried target feeding them or anything since they retract with irregular water movement. So, the tank gets the following: 2 types of phyto (chromamax and phytomax), 1 type of zooplankton (zoomax), and 3 types of other random particulates stuff (coral smoothie, oyster delight, and some rotifers thing). Basically I tried to cover as many types and particle sizes as possible and the tank is fed twice per day at much higher than the recommended amounts of each type of stuff. IME the recommended feeding rates of most foods like that are way too low to support most filter feeders. As an example of how much I'm putting in, the phyto brands say to add something like 2 drops per 50gal a couple times per week, but I'm putting in 5 drops of each at each feeding (so 10 drops per day of each).

EDIT: forgot a food - microvert.

 

[crazyforcordoras]

Thanks! Ill try some of those.

 

[Donya]

Hermit crab news: Clibanarius virescens is sexually dimorphic. When I put them all in some months back, they were all about the same size (super small) and all immature. I have two size categories now: big ones taking shells around 1" and others no more than half the size. Nothing in-between really. There is a lot of courtship going on and it is always between a big one and a small one, with the big one doing the male behaviors. I started wondering if I was going insane, since this really would be the first time I've seen it in any of the hermit crabs I've kept in captivity. I know other sexually dimorphic species exist, but have never read about it in species descriptions for anything in Clibanarius. There were also plenty of other confounds for what was going on in my tank, like that females could have grown more slowly or I just hadn't waited long enough to see two big ones go at it...but no! I eventually found this:

C. virescens show sexual size dimorphism in which male crabs uniformly dominate the larger size classes at all localities.

From: http://www.nmmu.ac.za/documents/theses/M_Wait.pdf

YES. Good to know I haven't gone insane.

 

[lljdma06]

That's awesome, Donya.

 

[Xraymark]

I'm impressed if you read that dissertation.

I don't think we have seen a FTS in a while.

 

[Donya]

Not much has been happening with this tank because I will be going out of the country in early September to present a paper at a conference. Since the husband will be in charge of all things fishy during that time, I don't want him to have to deal with any surprises (or at least I want to minimize them), so that means no new interesting critters and no major overhauls of anything until I get back.

However, trying to minimize surprises is bound to attract one or two of them in the process. The candycane frag that was growing out so nicely popped off its plug AGAIN this morning despite the amount of glue holding it down. The glue just pulled a layer of the plug free this time, so the rest of the plug is still firmly glued in place on the rock! What a pain, although better to have it now than after I get on a plane. I guess this is a potential problem with anything that gets top-heavy without encrusting the plug. Overall it looks pretty good and is even eating after being slapped onto a square plate to keep it upright, but one polyp broke a septa that is now poking out of the tissue. Fingers crossed nothing comes of that and it heals over. Once I see clear healing on the candycane, it and my acan that was on the same platform are going on a rock on the ground with less distance to fall if they pop free. The platform will then be unpopulated, so I guess it can become a zoa platform or something later this year.