WaterNotes

20: Three months

If you’ve ever wondered just what exactly algae is good for (other than primary production, nutrient turnover and feeding all the yummy zooplankton than our coral, seahorses and baby fish love!) check out these really interesting companies who are basing their biotechnology dreams on models of algal species.

Mera Pharma
Rincon Pharma

I’ve been following the tank for the last few weeks since the cycle for how it consumes nutrients, especially nitrate and phosphate. In the early weeks of the graph you see the nitrite and ammonia rise and fall and then the steady build of nitrate. But, also notice the periods where nitrate had totally bottomed out becuase of the plants uptake through growth. It didnt take much time for this to happen, every three to four days the tank consumes 120mg of nitrate!

Notice that each time the nitrate bottoms out, and phosphate is present, I see an immense cyanobacteria bloom, as noted “C” in the graph. The phosphate consumption is still quite far behind the nitrate, about 8mg of phosphate over the same period of time. So, still these two are being consumed in an average 16:1 ratio.

Cyano:

The cyanobacteria I’ve been dealing with by simply adding nitrate into the tank. I’ve been tempted to try some of the chemical methods for getting rid of this pest, because I’ve just about had it! But.. so far the holistic approach is still winning out. I will say that I never had cyano, even when nitrate bottomed out, in the old ten gallon tank that had about twice the light load. I’m almost beginning to wonder if the extra light makes for faster uptake by the plants and pretty much excludes the cyano from growing by removing the nutrients.

Hopefully this silly pest algae will decide to leave the tank for good this time and I’ll be more on guard for keeping nitrate levels at the top of the range at 7.5ppm. I also have new bulbs coming this week for a larger light setup, I’ll be pushing the light levels from 4.5wpg to 6.5wpg. Still the same 6700K flavor though. That should encourage better growth out of all the different seagrass species.

Seahorses:

These guys arrived a few weeks back and have been in hyposalinity treatment and under quarantine since they arrived. They are sooo cute, its hard to pay attention to anything else in the apartment. They are doing wonderfully on copepods, enriched BBS, 48 hour old enriched BBS and teenage BBS grown up on Nanno phyto and enriched on Selco. The first babies were born three weeks ago and they are really growing fast.

I’ve never used panacur or any other anti-hydroid chemical in the quarantine tank. I really dont plan on it either. I have yet to see a single hydroid. I decap the BBS before hatching and all the macro and other natural things in the tank underwent a freshwater dip with vinegar added to try to exclude the jellies. I used a 10% vinegar soak for 30min and then kept the hitches in freshwater for another 24 hours. A lot of the macro did not take well to this, but about 50% survived and that was suitable for my purposes. I cant be sure that that killed the hydroids though.

There are ten ponies currently, all H. zosterae, and in varying sizes and colors. I dont have any white though, which is the most common color! The biggest guy is green, the next two females are yellow, always, and the smaller two females are always brown. The two smaller guys are bright bright yellow/orange and super brown. All have striped tails. The three babies are all usually in shades of tan with stripes on them. Super cute!

Isnt our quarantine tank incredibly boring?? We like the natural stuff better than plastic!