Aquarium Maintenance by Everything Fishy

817-293-1782
Looking for: Home
Accessories
Air & Bubbles
Backgrounds
Breeders
Carbon
Cleaning Tools
Conditioners, Water
Cycle
Decorations & Plants
Filters
Filter Cartridges
Filter Media
Fishless Cycle
Food & Feeders
Heaters
Hydrometers
Lighting
Medicine
Nets
Parts
pH Adjustment, fresh
Pond parts and supplies
Protein Skimmers
Pumps & Powerheads
Saltwater Supplies
Tests
Water Pumps

--------------------------------------------
Sealants
Pond Supplies
Cat Products
Dog Products
--------------------------------------------
Aquatics Articles - Ponds too
Aquarium Services - Local
Home - Everything Fishy Pond Services - Local
Security
Shipping Info
Shopping Cart Errors
Warranty Info
Top of Page

Marine aquariums
By comparison, a 55 gallon marine tank will hold approximately 5 fish. It will require additional pumps and filtration equipment, a protein skimmer, and additional special lights if there are corals in the tank. Recommended maintenance on a marine tank includes two water changes per month containing high quality marine salt, plus additional trace elements, calcium, strontium/molybdenum, and iodine supplements. Granted, the fish are beautiful. My betta, (right), has a taste for live guppies occasionally. Other marine fish also have special dietary requirements. One of the chief problems in marine fish-keeping has to do with the temperament of the fish. A reef is a highly competitive environment. Every creature in the reef eats another resident. This marine betta singlehandedly ate at least 40 beautiful tubeworms before I discovered what was happening to them. I no longer add live rock graced with these delicate creatures to my tank, since their demise would be guaranteed.

The yellow tang that opens the page keeps the green trimmed off of the rocks, and robs the anemone and corals of their brine shrimp, just for sport. He also demolished an amazing quantity of beautiful red calerpa when I put the plant in the tank. He tripled in size that week.
A hermit crab killed the first anemone we added. He went back to the store, but the anemone still died. The 'chocolate chip' starfish attempted to eat the 2nd anemone. The starfish failed to consume his prey, (because I caught him and moved him), but the anemone still died. The star fish went back to the pet store. The tiny live rock crab that killed the 3rd and 4th anemone also killed a beautiful coral. He went back to the pet store, destined for a non-reef tank, when I finally caught him. The tiny crab had grown by then, to 3/4 of an inch wide. A 'pencil' sea urchin can be a predatory species as well, although they move very slowly. We added him to help clear the algae off of the glass. Instead, he developed a taste for corals, and I was constantly moving him away from them. He did succeed in sucking my turban snail out of his shell. He returned to the pet store the next day, to find a home in a tank without corals or snails.
This (above, right), is a long tentacle anemone, number 6 I think. Long tentacled anemones and sebae anemones are favorites of clownfish. This is a sebae clown, (right). We have discovered that sebae anemones are harder to keep alive than long tentacles. This sebae clown seems to like the long tentacled anemone just fine. He bites me if I get my hand too close to his anemone. I have learned how to detect an 'upset' anemone before it is dead. This one is a year old. I recently raised the SG of my water change water, and he isn't entirely happy. He's a little smaller today, and won't snap up the brine shrimp. (Feeding response is weak). My next water change will have a lower specific gravity, since I am very fond of my anemone, and this one has done so well. I will worry about skimmer function, pH and calcium levels a little less if it will keep him alive. More pictures of marine fish and aquariums are coming. Everything seems to need done at once right now.

February 2000. The anemone didn't make it through 1999. So far my record is a little over a year, but I'm still learning why. The reef got boring without him, and a bored fishkeeper has to do something. So I added 3 striped damsels, and 3 blue with yellow tails. I did a nice gradual pH shift while I restacked the whole reef. (Without rearranging the rocks, these guys didn't stand a chance. My betta, tang, gramma and clown have owned this tank for 5 years.) I did a freshwater dip to knock off parasites before I added them to the reef. And I crossed my fingers. The blue in the center of the photo had an eye injury by the time I got him out of the bag, and is currently lost in the tank. I think he is alive, because I can't see a body. I lost the bottom blue. He'd been rammed by one of the other fish before I moved him to a quarantine tank. He died there instead of the reef, but his injuries really were fatal I think. Surprisingly enough, the healthy blue that looks like he will survive is the top one, with the nipped tail. All 3 striped damsels seem to be adapting well. So far, the betta hasn't eaten any of them. I haven't seen this much of my Royal Gramma in years. He usually just hides out in his cave until dinner time, since nothing very exciting happens in the tank. The new arrivals brought him out for a snapshot.

New anemones. I'm not sure of the species. The pet store had them labelled condylactis, but the tips of the tentacles are not pink, nor are they bluish, as described in another book. These are well loved by the tomato clown, and have been actively exploring the reef for a little over a month. Really exploring. The white one walked up the rocks, front and back, squeezed behind the reef and came up the back wall to its present perch. Hearty eaters with superb feeding response, they have shrimp for dinner at least once a week.

One of my customers was very proud of her marine tank when this photo was taken. Freddy, the 7" wrasse, was certainly iimpressive, but eventually he seriously injured or killed most of his tankmates. The tank has since been sold. The yellow tang and tomato clown recovered from their injuries, and are now in my tanks. (Window reflection in photo.)

formerly known as a pseudotropheus lombardoi, this kennyi (Metriaclima lombardoi) male, in his 10 gallon jail cell. (He went to the pet store the day this was taken.) Young fish are blue, with fine vertical stripes as young fish, from the day they leave their mother's mouth. These are mouthbrooders, a fascinating and effective parenting technique. When they approach adulthood, the males turn pink, then yellow. When the female stops eating, she has a mouthful of eggs. A couple of weeks later, she will be starved and the babies will be free-swimming.She will eat voraciously for a few days. Once removed from the male, she can have a couple of broods before being in the same tank with him again. Brood size seems to range from 20 to 40. (I presently have at least 40 young p. lombardois. 25 are swimming with young m. interruptus in a 10 gallon tank, and about 15 more are in a community tank with gouramis and platies, until they start to approach adolescence, and find new homes or a pet store. When she stopped eating again, I put her back in the cichlid community tank. Only 2 or 3 from the last brood seem to have survived. This is somewhat of a relief. Still, the process was interesting.

A male m. interruptus is always on the move. These aren't the greatest pictures, but he was on his way to the pet store for the murder of my albino zebra male. I have several of his sons.For real african cichlid buffs: melanochromis interruptus females aren't always yellow. Their black and blue coloration is not as striking as the male's but only part of my females were lighter in color, and none were yellow. The only definite way to sex these fish seems to be the egg spots on the anal fin, which appear when the male is 1/2 his adult size.

While all M.interruptus are sort of yellowish as juveniles, and the males do darken more quickly, a mature female is black with blue. The large interruptus swimming past this rock is a female, who released her fry about 2 weeks prior to this photo. Notice, there are no egg spots on the anal fin, and her color is dimmer. Her nose is nicked up from quarrelling. I needed tank space for some customer's fish that needed quarantined and ended up with 3 M. interruptus, 1 male, 2 females, 1 sociolofi male, 2 p. lombardois, and 2 albino zebras, 1 male, 1 female, in the same 29 gallon quarantine tank for one night. The male zebra died overnight. The female albino zebra was the only adult fish that didn't go to the pet store the next day, since she seemed to have a quieter nature. She is now in with the yellow labido's I traded for, and her nature isn't as quiet as it was, but the baby johannis in the same tank help to keep her out of mischief. (She wouldn't eat or come out of the corner, in the 29 gallon all alone, for 2 days, until I put some of the babies in with her. Is this an adoption? She started eating again.)

One problem with africans is identification. Someone emailed me this photo last year, in an attempt to solidly identify the species. I think we narrowed it down a little. Dave from the Sydney Cichlid club, a hobbyist that writes in now and then, thinks it might be a female Tropheops sp.

My p. lombardoi took a year to identify, because I thought he was a p. zebra, and yellow is female in zebras. His behavior, and every book the library had, finally helped me identify him as a male, and by species.