Oct042009

New Animals

By Glen | October 4, 2009 | Posted in Marine Aquarium | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

I noticed something new in the aquarium yesterday.  It was small, pink, had spines on it, and moved quickly.  It was about a millimeter in diameter, and the part I saw was about 10 to 15 millimeters long.  It lives in a tiny hole near the top of one of the live rocks.  I wish I could post a photo of it, but it was only visible for about 30 seconds.  I was so startled to see it, I forgot to grab the camera.

With a quick look around the Internet, I’ve concluded that it’s probably a Bristleworm.  melevsreef.com has some good pictures of Bristleworms.  From what I’ve read, Bristleworms are normally nocturnal, and are good cleaners – very reef safe.  This one is welcome to stay where he is as long as he behaves.

We also purchased more cleaners today.  Mrs Salty Geek has complained that there is still a lot of algae in the aquarium.  It’s only been 2 weeks since the Reef Janitors arrived, so I’m happy enough to let them do their job.  But, I have to admit they could probably use the help.

We happened to be at a local fish store today, looking for small shells.  Since there are about 30 hermit crabs that are eating like pigs in the aquarium, it’s pretty likely that they will get too big for their existing shells.  Since hermit crabs don’t make their own shells, they can’t make them bigger.  Instead, they will switch shells when they get too big.  I understand that they will even kick snails or other hermit crabs out of their shells if they feel like it’s time to upgrade.  So, we wanted to make sure there is a good variety of appropriately sized shells available for growing hermit crabs to move into.

As we were looking around, we noticed an aquarium with 50 or more Margarita Snails in it.  We decided we should buy a few more snails to help out with the cleaning chores.  When we looked a little closer, we also discovered a larger hermit crab, with black and orange legs.  They called this particular hermit a Halloween Hermit Crab.  Since it was reasonably priced, we decided to hire him too.

Jack munches quietly after an exciting day of Shell-Jacking

Jack munches quietly after an exciting day of Shell-Jacking

A few hours after putting the new recruits into the aquarium, I noticed that Jack, the Halloween Hermit Crab, had already taken over a new shell!  We originally named him Jack after the lead character in The Nightmare Before Christmas, Jack Skellington.  But since he already hijacked a new shell, I think the name suits him well.  My son called it “Shell Jacking”.  I don’t blame Jack, however.  The conch shell he arrived in was pretty beat up, with lots of barnacles on it.  He looks pretty handsome in his new snail shell.

Jack's old beat up shell

Jack's old beat up shell

By Glen | Posted in Marine Aquarium | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)
Sep282009

Janitors

By Glen | September 28, 2009 | Posted in Marine Aquarium | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
Stimpy darts in front of an amazingly clean live rock

Stimpy darts in front of an amazingly clean live rock

Last week I discussed purchasing some “Reef Janitors”. Well, they have been hard at work, cleaning up the aquarium. I have to say, I’m very pleased. One of the live rocks has lots of hills and valleys, and it’s about half way up the aquarium. Last week green algae, and a little bit of red algae covered the entire rock. This week, it’s almost bare. If you look at the picture on the right, you’ll be able to see some of the hermit crabs and snails working on the last bits of algae.

I had also purchased some Grunge from GARF.  The Grunge came the day after the cleaning crew.  Grunge is something like live sand, but it is cultivated in aquariums instead of gathered in the wild.  Beneficial bacteria, Coraline algae, and even tiny starfish and sponges are supposed to be all over in this sandy goop.  The instructions said to just put the Grunge on top of the substrate and live rocks.  They seemed to know what they were doing, so that’s exactly what I did.

The aquarium just after adding Grunge

The aquarium just after adding Grunge

Just after adding the Grunge I also turned the white light off, and just had the Actinic light on.  As you might expect, the water got just a little cloudy with all that new substrate.  And, the fish got just a little agitated.  They began zipping back and forth in front of the aquarium.  The picture above will probably never be repeated, at least not in this aquarium.

It took me a few more days to discover the most impressive part of the changes.  Yesterday, I did my weekly chemical check.  The week before, I had both ammonia and nitrite levels at 0, and nitrate at 5.  The nitrate level was low enough that I had decided to skip my usual 10% weekly  water change.  This week, I expected the nitrate level to be back up to 10 or 15, and expected to change the water.  I was shocked to see that the ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate levels were all 0!  The Grange had an almost immediate positive affect on the bio filtration system of the aquarium.

All in all, I’m very happy with both the Grunge and the Reef Janitors.  Bravo, GARF!

By Glen | Posted in Marine Aquarium | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
Sep242009

Cleaning Crew

By Glen | September 24, 2009 | Posted in Marine Aquarium | Comments (0)

Last week I discussed the algae problem.  Well, I contacted GARF as I had mentioned, and purchased some “Reef Janitors”.

Snail stuck to the Aquarium

Snail stuck to the Aquarium

The purchase went a little differently than I had expected.  I had expected a web shopping cart interface, where you chose your selections, checkout, and enter credit card info.  GARF handles things a little more low-tech than that.  The form is a simple email posting interface.  They collect your email address, phone number, and a general idea of your order.  A few days later, I got a phone call from Leroy.  Leroy was very helpful.  He asked questions about the aquarium and the type of algae I had.  Leroy asked me a few questions to help decide what type of algae I have: red slime or Coraline algae.  After a few moments we decided the bloom is red slime.  Leroy commented that he would throw in a few extra Hermit Crabs to help clean up the mess.  He also suggested GARF Grunge to help get the future reef settled down.  I purchased some of that as well.

A couple more days, and the Reef Janitors are here!  Mrs Salty Geek was out this morning, so of course the delivery guy came while she was out.  And, of course he left the box on the porch. And, of course it was over 90 degrees Celsius.  Luckily, Mrs Salty Geek came home about an hour later and brought them inside to the air conditioning.  Plus, the box the reef janitors came in is insulated.  When we opened the box everyone seemed okay.

Hermit Crab dining on Red Algae

Hermit Crab dining on Red Algae

When I got them acclimatized to their new home, I put the new crew on the substrate.  I sure didn’t have to give anyone any special instructions.  No contract negotiations. We didn’t even discuss working hours.  Everyone just took off and started cleaning!

As I’m looking at the aquarium about 24 hours later, certain parts are looking better.  Parts of the substrate looks great.  Mrs Salty Geek mentioned that the back glass looks a bit more covered in green algae, however.  I’ll give them a few more days and report back.

By Glen | Posted in Marine Aquarium | Comments (0)
Sep182009

WordPress Themes, and Other Web Hosting Chalenges

By Glen | September 18, 2009 | Posted in Internet and Programing | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3)

I’m going to take a short break from the aquarium to show off how geeky I really am…

A couple of weekends ago I spent a long time fixing up my WordPress theme.  One of my sons helped me find a good public theme to start with, named Bloxy.  It looks nice, and is primarily blue (a nice color for a blog about an aquarium).  But, as I was browsing the site and testing stuff, I started to see some problems with the theme.  In some views, the metadata area, which describes the author, tags, and categories of each post, was writing over some of the formatting graphics.   Thumbnail pictures at the end of an article were writing over the metadata area, and even sometimes part of the next article.  Nothing was really terrible…  But, it was bugging me.

You guessed it, I decided to fix the theme.  At first I started out with easy stuff… I updated style sheets (css) to change font sizes and colors.  I changed some inconsistent data in the metadata area.  I fixed the shading in the title area – specifically, the boxes that say “Blog” and “About”.  I noticed some German text, and translated it to English.  At the end of about two hours I was feeling pretty happy with the theme, and ready to do something else.

I decided to searched for the Bloxy theme again.  I don’t recall why I did this – I think I wanted to compare the Bloxy theme before I modified it with what it was like after I finished.  But, instead of finding Bloxy again, I found Bloxy Two!

Sigh…

Well… Bloxy Two has some interesting extra features.  The search field looks better.  It has icons for the RSS feed.  The design of the  metadata area ensures that it won’t overwrite anything else, and has cute little icons to represent tags, categories, author, and comments.  My only complaint was, it wasn’t blue – at least it wasn’t all blue.  So, I decided to combine Bloxy and Bloxy Two into a hybrid.  The hybrid was to use the general colors and background images from Bloxy, and add the cool visual features from Bloxy Two.  Easy, right?

Wrong! The two themes look almost the same.  They are even written by the same person, Arcance.  Yet, Bloxy and Bloxy Two are written very differently.  Without getting into details, I wound up spending another 4 hours getting the Bloxy hybrid working properly.  I think I updated every single php file.  If you look at the page source, you’ll see comments like “<!- index.php ->”, and “<!- articleMeta ->” all over.  That was me, trying to find all the php files and make sure all the <div>’s have corresponding </div>’s.  Bloxy was a little sloppy about closing <div> sections.  Oh – you’ll notice in the footer that I left the credit going to Arcance (give credit where credit’s due) but, I also noted that it’s a little modified.

I’ll probably change the theme a bit more in the coming weeks.  I think I’ll keep the same structure.  But, I’m considering grabbing a picture or two from Wikimedia Commons of a real reef, with perhaps a few fish.  Why Wikimedia Commons?:

  1. The price is right
  2. By definition, all content in Wikimedia Commons is public domain, so no copyright infringement
  3. I’m too cheap to take Mrs Salty Geek scuba diving in the tropics so that I can take my own pictures

Well, 6 or so hours working on a web site is enough for one weekend day, right?

Once again, wrong! After I finished fixing up saltygeek.com’s theme, I decided it was time to do some work on my other web sites.  My father had complained about a bug in the calendar Mediawiki extension I wrote for www.plychurch.org and www.gilroyscouting.org.  Also, the scout master from Gilroy Scouting had suggested a change to the way calendar events printout, to make them easier to read.  I spent probably another 4 hours working on that.

The bug was the hardest part to figure out.  The problem had to do with repeating calendar events.  If you set up a repeating weekly or monthly calendar event that went long enough (usually three or four months), it would eventually go bonkers.  Either the events would show up on the day before or after the day you wanted them on, or they would not show up at all.  I was using the standard php time / calendar functions, but for some reason they weren’t acting right for all days.

It turns out it was Daylight Savings Time that was messing me up.  The php time functions are automatically using the local time of the host computer (where ever that is).  I was calculating the day at midnight, and then incrementing by a fixed number of seconds to calculate the next month or week.  When the repeat moved past the DST shifts in the fall or spring, the time shifted by an hour and shifted my calculations to the wrong day!  I adjusted my time calculations so that they used 3:00 AM, and solved the problem.

If you are interested in using either my Bloxy hybrid theme, or my Mediawiki calendar extension, I’d be glad to share.  Just add a comment to this post and I’ll contact you with details.

By Glen | Posted in Internet and Programing | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3)
Sep172009

Red Algae

By Glen | September 17, 2009 | Posted in Marine Aquarium | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

One of the live rocks has grown a lot of red and purple algae.  This is partly expected – algae likes light just like coral does.  It must be feeling right at home with the new lighting we got a few weeks ago.  At fist I was thinking this was pink and purple Coraline algae, which is expected on live rock, but now I’m beginning to wonder…

Live rock with red and purple algae

Live rock with red and purple algae

The red algae has now migrated from the one live rock, to some small pebbles and a few empty shells in the tank.  I even found it growing on some substrate the other day.  In the picture above, you can also see a little bit of green hair like algae on top of the rock.  It hasn’t attached itself to the glass yet, except for a little bit in the back glass.  I’m trying to get the rear glass covered naturally anyway, so I’m not really concerned about that as much.

So, what to do?

I like the colors on the live rock.  I don’t mind it growing there, as long as it doesn’t spread too much.  So, I need to find a way to keep the algae in check.  A couple of things to do:

  • Algae survive on nitrates.  I need to keep my nitrate levels reasonably low
  • Hire a cleaning crew

I check the water chemicals once a week.  The last few weeks, the all the levels have been reasonable.  Ammonia and nitrite levels have both been zero.  Nitrate has been between 5 and 10.  I do a 10% water change weekly if needed.  Even though it doesn’t seem to need it, I’ve changed the water anyway for the last two weeks.

So, that leaves one option – hire a cleaning crew.  The Geothermal Aquaculture Research Foundation (GARF) sells what they call “Reef Janitors” for what seems like a reasonable price.  Reef Janitors are Hermit Crabs and algae eating snails.  Apparently these guys will make short work of even the worst algae outbreaks.  For a 50 gallon reef tank they recommend over 80 Reef Janitors – that seems like overkill to me.  I think I’ll start with somewhere around 20 or 30, and see how it goes.

By Glen | Posted in Marine Aquarium | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)