Tank Thread Tank reached 38 years old...in 2009!

[Paul B]

Camanuch, I put the mud in a dish on the gravel. After a few days I remove it as I just need the bacteria. I don't have a sump as they were not invented during the Civil War but if I did, I would put it there. I also shoot some into my UG filter. Idove in the Bronx for many years, mostly in the 70s and 80s.


ReefDiver. You can have some of the blue sponge as it is growing a little to long. I go collecting all the time in the summer and rarely find anyone who wants to go. I don't dive in the Sound any more for a couple of reasons, no one wants to go and my tanks are to old to fill. Remind me in the summer if you want to go collecting but it has to be during the week, my boat is booked on the weekends. If you want some sponge, let me know.

 

[Paul B]

These razor shrimpfish I added are extreamly cool but I doubt they will live long. They eat very well but only live new born brine shrimp and for the last two months there has been a problem with brine shrimp eggs. They are very hard to find and the ones I have have a very low hatch rate so I am using 4 or 5 times more than normal and still can't get a good hatch of shrimp. I also have a few pipefish, mandarins and ruby red dragonettes that rely on shrimp so this may be a problem. I even ordered them on line a wek ago and they are not supposed to get here for 2 more weeks. My selection of fish depends on new born brine shrimp but there must be a problem with them at the collection site.

 

[Geraud]

Hi Paul, if you are looking for a good source online, I am using BrineShrimpDirect.com, I have been a customer of theirs for 3 years now for my dwarf seahorses, and they are always serious and fast.

I highly recommend their "shell free" eggs. http://www.brineshrimpdirect.com/Hatching-Shell-Free-Brine-Shrimp-Eggs-E-Z-Egg-400-ml-p138.html

Note that to get the highest yield during the whole life of my box, I always rinse the eggs in a sieve before introducing them to my culture. I had noticed that the yield was dropping towards the end of the container (even if I always shake the bottle after getting the daily dose), and after starting to rinse, that did not happen. With RO/DI and Instant Ocean at around 1024 (as they recommend) I get very good yields (supposedly they say up to 95%)

 

[Paul B]

I know Brine Shrimp Direct very well, they used to sell an invention of mine, a seahorse feeder. Sold many hundreds through them. I have a lot of eggs but they are not very good. I just got a new shipment today. I have been hatching brine shrimp almost 50 years. I hatch them every day, sometimes twice a day

 

[Geraud]

Oh that's great Paul. Do you happen to know a good local source to get eggs? And I mean, the big containers?

 

[Paul B]

LFSs sell the small vials of eggs and thats the way I like to buy them. I have bought the large containers but if you get a bad batch, it may be $50.00 that you lose. The small vials are about $3.00 and if it is bad, as some are, it is not to expensive. I hatch them every day and sometimes twice a day. Because I have been having some problems with bad eggs my mandarins stopped spawning and one of my shrimpfish doesn't look to good. But I got new eggs yesterday so by tomorrow it will get better.
There is Manhattan aquariums but I was only there once and don't know if they sell eggs

 

[Paul B]

I got these two shrimpfish last week and they are very cool. One of them is not so well as he stopped eating and is covered in parasites. He was damaged when I got him with a broken "tail", which is more like a spear, and rotted fins, clowdy eyes etc. The other one is fine and eats all the baby brine shrimp I could hatch. (you can see the3 broken tail on the one on the left)
The lights didn't come on yet so I am not sure if the sick one is alive, if he is I may try to remove him and cure him, but I don't think I could catch him. If he dies, I will replace him as I think the LFS has two more. I didn't look at this one when the guy in the store put him in the bag. That was a mistake as I usually scrutinize fish very well before I take them. If I could catch him, I can cure him in a couple of days but I have to go through setting up a tank, and all that. They are an interesting loking fish but eat a lot and are so skinny (which is why they are called Razor fish) that they need to eat at least 3 times a day. I have been having a hard time getting good brine shrimp eggs and have 3 vials of them that hardly hatch. I received new eggs yesterday so Ihopefully I will have better luck. I have been hatching shrimp for probably fifty years on and off but constantly, every day for the last 10 or 15 years. I ususlly hatch them twice a day because of all the shrimp eaters I have

 

[Paul B]

OK, he croaked. I replaced him this morning but I am still having trouble hatching brine shrimp. They must all be defective as I got two new vials of shrimp a couple of days ago and so far, they are not hatching very well. I will try another batch today. These fish will die in a couple of days if I don't get some good eggs soon. Those shrimpfish don't eat anything else except adult brine shrimp and I don't have any of those. It is what it is.
My mandarins are also giving me dirty looks as their feeder has been almost empty for a few weeks and they don't care how much I have spent so far on bad eggs. My ruby red dragonettes are scratching slurs in the glass but they are young and will get over it.

 

[Mattl22]

Hi Paul I love the shrimp fish at 1 time the manhatten aquariums had a school of them in there display tank they all schooled in a ball and where awesome to watch

 

[Paul B]

This week I was asked to help some engineering students to design machine to connect to subway trains in Manhattan to pick up garbage on the tracks. These students are supposed to be in an advanced class for gifted engineering students so I was honored to be asked to help them. They have a $10,000.00 budget and already spent half of that on failed prototypes, I hope I can help them.

 

[Paul B]

I eat fish almost every day but they are dead before I eat them. I talk to them about my old girlfriends and bore them to death. Then I eat them. But the fish in my tank live long and prosper and are very lucky because almost all of them are spawning. So my fish know life's pleasures while I am slaving and driving through snow to get them worms for dinner. I just got them lunch and took this picture of my house just before I parked. By the way, on my way home from the LFS on the highway. The Jiboni in front of me in a silly car without 4 wheel drive spins out of control right in front of me and stops facing me on the road. This is what I go through for my fish
I just took this picture of my house.

 

[Paul B]

Doing some much needed maintenance. Once a year or so I stir up the gravel as good as I can all the way down to the reverse UG filter. This typhoon makes a mess and the pipefish are making nasty faces at me as I normally lose my bluestripe pipefish when I do this, but I am going slow and taking all day to do it to try to save them. I still see them so they may be fine, if not mad. The rest of the fish don't seem to mind and never do. This bit of maintenance is the secret to my tank's long term health and it would crash from Old Tank Syndrome (or boredom) if I didn't do it. I would like to leave this diatom filter on the tank all night but it is a terribly designed piece of machinery and if I kept it running it would burn my house down. I have 4 of them and out of the four, I have enough parts to get one working. The bearings are garbage the seals are useless and the overall design is horrible so I really need to re-design one because I need to do this all the time. I also have one Eheim running with some floss in it but that doesn't filter to well like that. I may design a diatom filter using the Eheim as a base. I just need time and I never have enough of that. It's been running for about 4 hours now and I keep stirring it up. I could do this for 12 hours and still find plenty of gunk to suck up but I don't want to make a career out of this today. The diatom is very hot and I want to finish before the thing stalls like I know it will.
Maybe I will do it again next week (but I doubt it.)
I realize most people don't stir up their gravel or sand but most people also don't have a very old tank. Don't stir up a DSB unless you want to take down your tank and take up stamp collecting

 

[mbg75]

Funny. I have the same diatom in a bucket to catch the leak.

 

[Paul B]

You always need to run them in a bucket and it helps to keep a fire extinguisher near
by

 

[Paul B]

My workbench looks like a diatom re-design factory. The XL is on the left, I think I have two more units stored away somewhere in various stages of disassembly.

It is odd, that the motors are the same but the large XL unit on the left has a much smaller impeller. I never figured that out. I can probably figure out how to change it around to have the large impeller on the large unit.
The middle unit above has a custom built bag.

 

[mbg75]

It took me 3 complete ones to make one that works. Even better is they used an unsealed on/off thumb switch so you get a little jolt every time you switch it on or off.

 

[Paul B]

You get a shock on all of them if you tip them sideways as the seals always leak (which I always run them in a bucket) and the water runs up into the unsealed iron motor which rusts badly. It's a shame because I love the job these things do. I realize these pumps are 40 or 50 years old which is very old for anything, but they are problematic from the beginning. They are a device that are not designed to be used continuously so between the 4 or 5 of them I have, each one may only have been used for 10 or 20 hours which is not an awful lot. They have problems from being stored as the seals dry out and the internal bag disintegrates. They are glued together and the glue comes apart so I sew them around with nylon thread. Then they rot where the bag is sealed to the housing that plugs into the pump and that is tough to fix so I just make new bags although you can still buy them. I am fixing one now by putting an acrylic tube through the housing into the bag and I will seal the bag to the bag. This will work for one or two uses but I will still need to build or buy a new bag. My tank now is crystal clear because I ran it all day yesterday but upon disassembly, I see 3 big holes in the bag so there was a lot of by pass.

 

[mbg75]

A different or separate pump would be nice. Something made to get wet

 

[Paul B]

I got one filter going great and made another typhoon because you can't have to many typhoons. This is s a good one as I can't see the back of my tank so I know I am sucking out a couple of years worth of muck. I think the diatom will last for the entire cleaning. I repaired the bag, stopped the leaks, oiled it up good and drilled more holes in it to cool it so I am sure it will work at least for this cleaning and maybe next years also.

 

[Paul B]

I picked up another shrimpfish today. I can't stand it, they are just to cool. They had two of them and one was dead. Although the dead one was very cheap, I took the still alive one. I am sure in a few days he will be in fighting shape in my tank.
Yes, I know these are not shrimpfish. I have a nice shrimpfish video but Photobucket says it is to big to post even though it is about 15 seconds. Does anyone know how to post those?

Here is a video without the shrimpfish.