Couldn't sleep last night. It was well after 2:30 before I got any reasonable kind of sleep. I don't know why. Didn't seem like there was that much going through my head. Wasn't that hot.
Now THAT would be wonderful, anything we could do to stop overharvesting anything natural is an improvement.
When I was in college, and head lab asst. for the bio labs, I set up a series of aquariums that all ran together as a "wall" in the Zoo lab. It was a great learning experience. I only tried salt water once or twice, and it was such a pain to keep regulated, I never tried it on my own once I left the lab environment.
They sure are pretty though, particularly the ones with enhancment lights and wave action.
I agree - and that was one of the most rewarding things about being a part of that sci.aquaria group back then. "reef tanks" were becomming very popular, fitler technology was taking off (ozonereaktors were dropping in price, foam fractionation collumns were becomming cheap, wet/dry filter technology for home tanks was in it's infancy, and bio-balls were only just being thought of). Nearly every aquarium shop on the west coast had corals and "live rock" that could be bought, most likely harvested from Floridan or Mexican reefs. Most of us on the sci-aq group were going nuts about the destruction of it all, and while discussing the ideas of how-to breed things like corals, we were working out do-it-yourself versions of the very expensive filter kits. I made a wet-dry filter out of irrigation pipe and a spa pump, and my own foam-fractionation collumn. One of the other guys took my collumn design and used it to make his own ozone reaction collumn. Several of us were experimenting with reverse-flow under-gravel filters. My salt tank was a 55 show plexi with a blue back. I had 2 small live rocks, with annenomies, mantis shrimp (a scourge), some damsels, a few chromis chromis, a sebae annenomie and a pair of sebae clowns. The lighting was a combination of flourescent tubes - actinic, Chroma-50's, Titans, and bright-whites. The filtration moved somewhere near 20 tanks an hour (1000 gallons per hour flow). Everything was very healthy. Then... the union-chem plant down in Pt. Richmond had an accident, leaked a lot of S02 into the atmosphere. The calcium precipitated from the water in the salt tank, killing everything in short order. I lost a lot more than just that tank. But yes, we were all hoping that some of us could make a difference, breed rare fish and corals, and make the industry more eco-friendly. I only managed with a few rare-but-popular african cichlids: L. Brichardi "daphodil", and P. Elongotus "electric blue". Those two types alone kept me in free aquarium equipment and free fish food for nearly 5 years (food for all the fish except Abraxxas).
That is what I miss about it, when I was fiddling.. the knowledge that I gained about the WORKINGS of the systems, that is knowledge that I have stored and have a hard time retrieving these days. *grin* My recall system isn't what it was when I was younger.
I do remember being fascinated however at the fact that I achieved the cleanest aquariums (I NEVER had to clean them out.. their systems worked like nature intended) when I used sand as my bottom material instead of rock and a home made under"ground" filter. You can't do that these days the way the under"gravel" filters are made, they would clog up.
You have a very interesting journal, would you mind if I added you to my friends list?
[mike bows] I would be honored to add another friend to my list as well! Please do add me. Thank you for the kind compliment!
Back in the 80's you could get pre-made under gravel filters for most common sizes of fish tanks, but none of them really "fit" the bottoms of the tanks except the common glass tanks. I started making my own out of a flourescent light diffuser called "egg crate" and fiberglass window screen material. They could be made to exactly fit any tank bottom, and could be made in sections so they could fit through the tops of the plexi tanks. I always left about an inch at the front and sides so the filters would not be visible from the outside of the tank (except at the back).
With my 100, a freshwater setup, I had just enough light, and a huge mat of java moss (great live plant), and perhaps 500gph of filtration flow - once every six months I had to do a 25% water change, and I'd clean the front and side gravel at that point. The water change was more to dilute the built-up salts from adding water than for any other reason. At it's height, the 100 had 20 clown loaches, a pair of telematochromus jacobfribergi, a huge plecostomus, a huge hong-kong eel, and Abraxxas the 2 foot long clown knife. Once a week it would also have about 100 feeder comets, but Abraxxas usually ate them all up within 2 or 3 days. Quite a bit of bio-load, but ballanced just right to work out well.
Many of the commercial filters now are very nice, some backfilters have bio-wheels, some setups even have affordable sand-filled modules and UV-sterilizing modules. But I've not yet seen an under-gravel filter (UGF) that can come close to a home-made UGF, and even the setups that are designed for reverse-flow (RFUGF) lose pressure and aren't as good as home-made RFUGF's. With an RFUGF, the water is mechanicly filtered with easily cleaned sponges or wool, then pumped down under the gravel. The water "boils" up out of the gravel bed, and that's where the bacterial action takes place. Add in a huge mat of plant, and some light, and that's really all you need.
I know what you mean about recall. I used to know more about fish than I can remember. It's bad enough i've forgotten many of the latin names, but they've gone and changed many of the cichlid names. Damn scientists!! :-)
I feel the same about plant names and families.. they keep changing the things, and the only reliable way to KNOW what plant anyone else is talking about is to use its latin name, common names are so regional.
I can't remember now what I made my undersand filter out of, but I know that it was home made using the information I was learning in water chemistry at the time. I even used sand out of the river and heated it to sterilize, instead of store bought sand.. we were a small school, and had to make do in many ways. But thinking back on it I remember wondering if that collected sand was the reason it worked so well.. because the organism were at least partially established in the medium already. All of this was pre 80's btw.. I graduated from college (after 6 years) in 1982.
Lol... I attended UC Santa Cruz from '81 - '87. Someday I'll go back and finish off a degree... For about the last 20 years there have been various cultures (FritZyme#7, etc) that you can add to a new tank to "seed" the gravel with bacters. They work fairly well. :-)
Back in the 80's I belonged to the Pacific Coast Cichlidae Association - it was great fun to hang out and talk fish once a month with some serious fishheads, some who would travel the world taking pictures and talking with the big professional breeders / researchers.
It's been nearly a decade since I was active. The last house I rented, if I'd had the 100 in the living room and filled it with water, it would have landed in the basement. (the 100 gallon tank, plus accessories, weighed well over 1000 lbs.) I've recently reloacated to hell, er.., L.A., and am looking for a place to buy. Once that's done, i'll definetly set several tanks up again. Probably another south-american community (100g), and a couple african breeder tanks (50's, 30's).
The largest tank I have had on my own (I own my house) was a fifty when I was in Colorado. We put in a dozen feeder fish to start the bacteria in the tank, and they DID NOT DIE.
We were feeding goldfish food, as it was the cheapest thing, and they turned a beautiful orange, and got to seven or eight inches before I had to move and get rid of them (they became oscar food for an acquaintance). The reason we never went farther with the tank.. was the "loyalty" of the carp. The tank was in a frontish entrance hall, and they would collect at the narrow door end of the tank when we walked in the door, and follow us around as best they could. They KNEW where we were, and exhibited "dog" behavior in following us. I could not flush them, even when small.. I grew too affectionate of them.
The last tank I had was a 35 I think, and I had.. err.. Thing one and Thing two in it.. I think they were some kind of tetra, but they were shaped and banded like tiger barbs. For three years every fish we put in that tank with them (they were part of the first batch of tropicals we bought to populate the tank) they ate.. although at first we didn't know it was them that was doing it. I put aggressives in there toward the end, and they still ended up eating them. In the end we left it with just them in the tank, and my ex husband stopped feeding them in the hopes that they would die. There was enough in the tank for them to survive on for another year before one of them finally beheaded the other and he flushed the survivor.
We gave the tank and set up away after that. *grin*
*lol!* One of my friends in canada had a really nasty "red devil". It killed his "green terror". Finaly he decided to put the devil in with a serrasalmous naterri (red-bellied piranha). The devil killed the piranha.
Many tetras require a small school (at least 6) to stay well enough distracted. Tetras, and the barbs, and hatchets, are all rather agressive. Barbs and hatchets are related to piranhas.
I had a red-bellied pacu (vegi piranha) that was very dog-like. I hand fed him at least once a week. When I came home from work, he'd "dog" follow me in the tank, but if I brought friends home, he'd hide in the back corner! He was great! Once I was feeding him cheese, and he grabbed my finger by mistake. The minute I moved it, he let go and almost jumped out of the tank. Paco the Pacu was a cool fish.
He'd occasionally let me "pet" him, and he'd pal-around with Albert the Synodonis Alberti catfish from Lake Albert. He never got along with the arowana I had, they fought so much I ended up having to sell the arowana back to the fish store. (I bought Art when he was about 3 inches long; sold him when he was over a foot long. Cost: about $2, sale price: about $40.)
I had Paco for about 3 or 4 years before the Loma Prietta quake shut our power off for a week. He was about the size of a dinner plate. My roommates at the time were also fishheads; we must have lost over $1,000.00 worth of fish that week.
That is sad. It reminds me of another fish story posted somewhere on my journal this week from a young man in England. He is taking care of his neighbor's pond while they are on holiday and two of the pond inhabitants were sturgeon. Their pump went out and one of them died in the heat. Now they have a hose rigged up over the fences, from their house, trying to spash enough water in the pond to aerate it enough so the remaining sturgeon and the carp won't die as well.
He posted pictures, but not of THE sturgeon, since it was dead.. but he did describe it as it lay on the bank. Someone pointed out that sturgeon are ocean fish.. and as such were never going to survive in a fresh water pond for long.. but that doesn't make sense that they have been there for several months at least. The entry is from last week or so in turkdiddler's Journal if you are interested.
Only two feet long? I wonder if that's standard for the european variety. My dad has seen them in the Wisconsin river, head on one side and tail on the other side of his canoe.
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chiming
no subject
Date: 2004-07-31 02:32 am (UTC)From:When I was in college, and head lab asst. for the bio labs, I set up a series of aquariums that all ran together as a "wall" in the Zoo lab. It was a great learning experience. I only tried salt water once or twice, and it was such a pain to keep regulated, I never tried it on my own once I left the lab environment.
They sure are pretty though, particularly the ones with enhancment lights and wave action.
no subject
Date: 2004-07-31 03:11 am (UTC)From:I made a wet-dry filter out of irrigation pipe and a spa pump, and my own foam-fractionation collumn. One of the other guys took my collumn design and used it to make his own ozone reaction collumn. Several of us were experimenting with reverse-flow under-gravel filters.
My salt tank was a 55 show plexi with a blue back. I had 2 small live rocks, with annenomies, mantis shrimp (a scourge), some damsels, a few chromis chromis, a sebae annenomie and a pair of sebae clowns. The lighting was a combination of flourescent tubes - actinic, Chroma-50's, Titans, and bright-whites. The filtration moved somewhere near 20 tanks an hour (1000 gallons per hour flow). Everything was very healthy.
Then... the union-chem plant down in Pt. Richmond had an accident, leaked a lot of S02 into the atmosphere. The calcium precipitated from the water in the salt tank, killing everything in short order. I lost a lot more than just that tank.
But yes, we were all hoping that some of us could make a difference, breed rare fish and corals, and make the industry more eco-friendly.
I only managed with a few rare-but-popular african cichlids: L. Brichardi "daphodil", and P. Elongotus "electric blue". Those two types alone kept me in free aquarium equipment and free fish food for nearly 5 years (food for all the fish except Abraxxas).
no subject
Date: 2004-07-31 12:12 pm (UTC)From:I do remember being fascinated however at the fact that I achieved the cleanest aquariums (I NEVER had to clean them out.. their systems worked like nature intended) when I used sand as my bottom material instead of rock and a home made under"ground" filter. You can't do that these days the way the under"gravel" filters are made, they would clog up.
You have a very interesting journal, would you mind if I added you to my friends list?
no subject
Date: 2004-07-31 03:44 pm (UTC)From:Back in the 80's you could get pre-made under gravel filters for most common sizes of fish tanks, but none of them really "fit" the bottoms of the tanks except the common glass tanks. I started making my own out of a flourescent light diffuser called "egg crate" and fiberglass window screen material. They could be made to exactly fit any tank bottom, and could be made in sections so they could fit through the tops of the plexi tanks. I always left about an inch at the front and sides so the filters would not be visible from the outside of the tank (except at the back).
With my 100, a freshwater setup, I had just enough light, and a huge mat of java moss (great live plant), and perhaps 500gph of filtration flow - once every six months I had to do a 25% water change, and I'd clean the front and side gravel at that point. The water change was more to dilute the built-up salts from adding water than for any other reason. At it's height, the 100 had 20 clown loaches, a pair of telematochromus jacobfribergi, a huge plecostomus, a huge hong-kong eel, and Abraxxas the 2 foot long clown knife. Once a week it would also have about 100 feeder comets, but Abraxxas usually ate them all up within 2 or 3 days. Quite a bit of bio-load, but ballanced just right to work out well.
Many of the commercial filters now are very nice, some backfilters have bio-wheels, some setups even have affordable sand-filled modules and UV-sterilizing modules. But I've not yet seen an under-gravel filter (UGF) that can come close to a home-made UGF, and even the setups that are designed for reverse-flow (RFUGF) lose pressure and aren't as good as home-made RFUGF's.
With an RFUGF, the water is mechanicly filtered with easily cleaned sponges or wool, then pumped down under the gravel. The water "boils" up out of the gravel bed, and that's where the bacterial action takes place. Add in a huge mat of plant, and some light, and that's really all you need.
I know what you mean about recall. I used to know more about fish than I can remember. It's bad enough i've forgotten many of the latin names, but they've gone and changed many of the cichlid names. Damn scientists!! :-)
Thank you sir.. added
Date: 2004-07-31 03:57 pm (UTC)From:I can't remember now what I made my undersand filter out of, but I know that it was home made using the information I was learning in water chemistry at the time. I even used sand out of the river and heated it to sterilize, instead of store bought sand.. we were a small school, and had to make do in many ways. But thinking back on it I remember wondering if that collected sand was the reason it worked so well.. because the organism were at least partially established in the medium already. All of this was pre 80's btw.. I graduated from college (after 6 years) in 1982.
Re: Thank you sir.. added
Date: 2004-07-31 04:18 pm (UTC)From:For about the last 20 years there have been various cultures (FritZyme#7, etc) that you can add to a new tank to "seed" the gravel with bacters. They work fairly well. :-)
Back in the 80's I belonged to the Pacific Coast Cichlidae Association - it was great fun to hang out and talk fish once a month with some serious fishheads, some who would travel the world taking pictures and talking with the big professional breeders / researchers.
Re: Thank you sir.. added
Date: 2004-07-31 04:26 pm (UTC)From:Re: Thank you sir.. added
Date: 2004-07-31 04:31 pm (UTC)From:I've recently reloacated to hell, er.., L.A., and am looking for a place to buy. Once that's done, i'll definetly set several tanks up again. Probably another south-american community (100g), and a couple african breeder tanks (50's, 30's).
Re: Thank you sir.. added
Date: 2004-07-31 05:15 pm (UTC)From:DID
NOT
DIE.
We were feeding goldfish food, as it was the cheapest thing, and they turned a beautiful orange, and got to seven or eight inches before I had to move and get rid of them (they became oscar food for an acquaintance). The reason we never went farther with the tank.. was the "loyalty" of the carp. The tank was in a frontish entrance hall, and they would collect at the narrow door end of the tank when we walked in the door, and follow us around as best they could. They KNEW where we were, and exhibited "dog" behavior in following us. I could not flush them, even when small.. I grew too affectionate of them.
The last tank I had was a 35 I think, and I had.. err.. Thing one and Thing two in it.. I think they were some kind of tetra, but they were shaped and banded like tiger barbs. For three years every fish we put in that tank with them (they were part of the first batch of tropicals we bought to populate the tank) they ate.. although at first we didn't know it was them that was doing it. I put aggressives in there toward the end, and they still ended up eating them. In the end we left it with just them in the tank, and my ex husband stopped feeding them in the hopes that they would die. There was enough in the tank for them to survive on for another year before one of them finally beheaded the other and he flushed the survivor.
We gave the tank and set up away after that. *grin*
Re: Thank you sir.. added
Date: 2004-07-31 05:42 pm (UTC)From:One of my friends in canada had a really nasty "red devil". It killed his "green terror". Finaly he decided to put the devil in with a serrasalmous naterri (red-bellied piranha). The devil killed the piranha.
Many tetras require a small school (at least 6) to stay well enough distracted. Tetras, and the barbs, and hatchets, are all rather agressive. Barbs and hatchets are related to piranhas.
I had a red-bellied pacu (vegi piranha) that was very dog-like. I hand fed him at least once a week. When I came home from work, he'd "dog" follow me in the tank, but if I brought friends home, he'd hide in the back corner! He was great! Once I was feeding him cheese, and he grabbed my finger by mistake. The minute I moved it, he let go and almost jumped out of the tank. Paco the Pacu was a cool fish.
He'd occasionally let me "pet" him, and he'd pal-around with Albert the Synodonis Alberti catfish from Lake Albert. He never got along with the arowana I had, they fought so much I ended up having to sell the arowana back to the fish store. (I bought Art when he was about 3 inches long; sold him when he was over a foot long. Cost: about $2, sale price: about $40.)
I had Paco for about 3 or 4 years before the Loma Prietta quake shut our power off for a week. He was about the size of a dinner plate. My roommates at the time were also fishheads; we must have lost over $1,000.00 worth of fish that week.
Re: Thank you sir.. added
Date: 2004-08-01 04:59 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2004-08-03 01:48 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2004-08-04 10:16 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2004-08-04 11:31 pm (UTC)From:Some kinds live in fresh water.
no subject
Date: 2004-08-04 11:56 pm (UTC)From: