Many of us go on vacation to the tropics, snorkel or dive on a coral reef and when we get back home, contemplate establishing a marine tank that is just like something we've seen while underwater. Quickly we realize that it's a lot easier thought of than done! I decided to try it with a much simpler, artificial habitat.
First, a descriptionof my observations of the habitat I want to represent in my nano.
Nearly every channel into a seaport in the world has a structure of some kind to protect the channel from the destructive forces of the sea. In the Gulf of Mexico, many of the channels are surrounded by sand, which can quickly block the channel entrance during a storm. Often the channels are lined with rock, limestone or other material, to act as a barrier, holding the sand back from entering the channel. This channel, into St. Andrew's Bay in Panama City Beach, Florida, happens to be near where I live. I try and dive or snorkel there every chance I get, often every day (except the weekends with the tourists) during the summer.


The jetties are essentially a pile of rocks, large boulders of limestone piled in a line to define the channel into the Bay. On the inside, the water has washed out behind the rock to make a "kitty-pool" that is only 6 feet or less deep, while on the outside of the rocks the channel runs to 60 feet deep. The difference in life forms between the two sides is astounding, partly due to the current and depth, and partly because during the peak tourist season, probably 2-3000 people a day snorkel along the shallow side, but the outside (which requires a dive flag to explore due to boating laws) gets only about a 100 divers a day. Kind of hard to believe those numbers when you see this pic.

Even though the tourist pressure is high, you never know what you will see when you get into the water there.
Schools of all sorts of fish,


As I said, you never know what you'll see,

One of the most commonly seen fish, because it's so brightly colored and is also territorily aggressive and so doesn't swim off and hide when you approach, is the Beau Gregory, Eupomacentrus leucostictus. You can almost be sure that any tourist with a net will have one or more of these in his bucket at the end of the day.


Unfortunately only the juveniles have the bright colors, as they get older, and maybe wiser, the become a much more dull brown, but still just as mean



Another common occupant of the tourist trap is one or more of the many types of hermit crab found here.


Only little kids usually pick up the brown cucumbers found slowly creeping across the rocks, but they usually drop them when Mom screams to them to drop that nasty turd!

Interestingly, as the summer goes on, cukes are only commonly found on the channel side of the jetties, where little kids fear to paddle.

The more diligent observer will often be rewarded by views of the several species of butterflyfishes, whose larvae have drifted here from further south. When winter comes, they will all succumb to the cold.

The rocks are often lined with fishermen, casting their baits far out into the channel, while the objects of their desire are right under their feet!



Queen angels are quite common on the channel side of the rocks, and are one of the few tropicals that stay here all winter long. I've dove the jetties in January, with water temps. in the low 50's and they'll be swimming around just like in the summer.

awsome thread yard.. great pics.. we have break waters as u posted above, they are used to block rough seas from coming into the Casino areas... this you probably already Know

we fish the jetties alot.. but the ones we fish are in Grand Isle, LA

Up late too eh! Yep, and I'll bet if you dove those jetties and the visibilty was good, you'd see quite similar critters, or maybe not. I've not seen many of the fish show here, even off the barrier islands. I guess the currents just don't carry them over that way.

To show that there is a connection to further south, we do have actual corals here, but the species are very limited. They've got to be able to handle the cold water of the winter. These are Leptogorgia. Note the white polyps. They'd be very difficult to try and maintain in a tank. I've not tried it but too many others I've heard have tried and failed.

its pretty Muddy over this way.... due to shrimp boats and tugboats and so on..
youd see alot of shrimp and catfish though...lol

i have never dived but would like to.. i have a friend that lives in the bahamas that gives diving lessons,, what a life huh

There are a few species of hard corals, mostly Oculina. In the winter they bleach out white, but in the summer they develop a tan or brown color, evidently they can take or leave the zooxan. It is illegal to collect these corals here, but there is a way to get them in your tank legally. More on that later.





Get your license! If you can dive in Mississippi, you can dive anywhere. I once dove off Cat Island with an Australian friend, in 60 feet of depth with 1 foot of visibility. We felt our way around the sunken shrimp boat, and I managed to see some cool stuff. Later when I apologized about the crappy conditions (did I mention the 4-6 feet swell?) he told me that "Sometimes you just have to earn your gonads!" Let me tell you, the cold beer sure tasted good later that evening, back at the dock!


There are several species of anemone present, unfortunately I don't have any clue as to what they are called.




The first difficulty in establishing a tank representative of the habitat you are interested in is that usually some of the dominant organisms are very difficult or impossible (at this time) to maintain in a tank!
Sponges occur in all shapes and colors and I have not been able to keep any of the ones I've tried.

Okay, so there's the background on the habitat I'm going to try and emulate to the best of my and my nano's abilities. I'll be back a bit later to show how I put it together.

ha... i was at cat island yesterday, we stayed out there.. went floundering all night then fished all day.. yes , i would say the beer was good also at the dock..very good

that pic above the anemone is a colony of tunicates
that last pic you posted with the yellow sponge i think is also a tunicate but not really sure on that one, but to the left of that theres a hard coral i think
any ideas on that?

I saw a bunch of sea turtles last time i swam the jetti in port aransas, texas

yea you can get the oculina (aka star coral) if it is on aquacultured live rock. pretty sure thats the only legal way. the lfs i work at has been getting 1000 lb shipments of key west cultured LR with tons of oculina on it.

Joe, you are too quick for me.That is the way to get an Oculina, the only legal way. You may be right about those two organisms. The first very light colored one is possibly a tunicate. and the last pic of the "striped sponge" could be too. There are thousands of them on a dock right around the corner of the peninsula from the jetties. That white thing I believe is a sponge, but it could be anything. In the spring they are everywhere, somewhat hard and waxy feeling, and they get the size of your fist, but they disappear before the end of the summer.

Awesome description and nice pics. Can't wait to see what you do with this set up Those urchins look neat, too, though not nanoish.

Thanks Clifford.
A word about the Reef Lab. A little over a year ago I decided to build my fantasy playroom, a place to keep all my tank stuff and to experiment to my hearts delight. Thus came the "Tank Room". If you are the least interested in how I built it, go Here to read the build thread.
Later my 8 yr. old niece who loves the tanks told me it reminded her of a "Science Room" When Genie, my wife, comes looking for me, she says "I knew I'd find you in "The Lab" so to place a formal name on it I call it the "Reef Lab". The "Ghetto Beauty" was developed there, and now the "Jetties Nano"
FW folks making the transition to Salt often try and use equipment they are familiar with so set up tanks with HOB filters, canisters, etc. so I thought I'd experiment to see how well they could work.
Equipment:
10 gallon tempered glass tank
2- Aquaclear HOB filters
2-36W PC lamps with individual reflectors, retroed into a DIY canopy.
Live rock and 2" of aragonite sand.

great shots!
regarding about your thread, we need to login.
why not you post some more info here?

The Live Rock
After observing the life on the rock at the jetties, I knew that just buying Fiji rock wouldn't get it, so I had a few options,
1) Buy some rock from the maricultured places farther south (Sealife, Inc. or Tampa Bay Liverock for instance). Problem with this approach is similar to using Fiji. There are differences in the life associated with the rock farther south, so I felt it wouldn't be a true representation of the habitat.
2) Just steal some rock from the jetties. Though most of the rock there is limestone boulders, there is some smaller rock that appears to be aragonite. I couldn't find out much about the history of the rock, I figured that the smaller aragonite rock had been used to provide more habitat for marine creatures, so I knew that wouldn't be a good thing to do, plus I'm a wuss and don't want to go to jail.
3) The option I finally opted to do was take some base rock I'd purchased, and some rock I'd made, and stash it at the jetties for awhile to get seeded like all the other rock. I even asked permission of the park officials, and their response was "Huuuh?" After discussing it with others, it's probably borderline not permissible to do this either, but if anyone asks, I'll deny having done it to begin with.

I found a spot in a gap in the boulders that I didn't think the average tourist would see and that waves wouldn't wash away, and placed about 30# of rock over several trips. Then I watched over three years to see what would happen. No surprise, algae grew all over it, sponges and anemones came and went, hurricanes blew in and I was afraid it was lost, but surprisingly it stayed where I'd put it and this spring I decided it was ready.

Intially I only had 36W actinics for lighting, as I'd robbed the fixture from another project I'd done in the past. I decided though that this was okay as the rock had a lot of algae growing on it, ad does all the rock there in the spring. Nutrients washing out of the bay I guess.


While the rock had a lot of algae on it, during it's devleopment I'd seen a lot of nice corraline growing, so I knew that as soon as the algae was removed, the rock would look nice.


The fish is some little guy who got in the way when I was after a Beau Gregory to place in the tank





I kept the rock underwater except for the brief moment when I transferred it to the tank, so I thought I wouldn't have much dieoff, without out any cycle, but I still only added tough fish, the Beau


and a Molly Miller Blenny (who I caught as a rare yellow morph, but who turned the usual green after only a week in the tank)

While there are many kinds of macroalgae on the rocks, the only ones I've had any success with are this guy, and I don't know what it's name is, and Halimeda.

So I've caught up with my thread. Everything in the tank seems to be doing well.
A couple of observations.
1) The tank is full of crabs. Even though I got rid of the ones that came out of the rock on the way home, there are quite a few more in the tank At least 10 in a 10 gallon! From watching them, they seem to be picking algae off the rocks and eating it.
2) The algae on the rocks didn't go away until I got a spiny urchin. While others say they will eat corraline, he seems to prefer the algae. When it's all gone, I'll likely move him to a prop tank that is having algae problems.
3) All the sponges died so far. This resulted in cycle of the tank, with heavy growth of microalgae on the walls of the tank. Initially I tried to do water changes with water from the jetties, but it only made the problems worse. I began using IO mix and my rocks began to clear up.
4) I've seen no pods but then the blennies and Beau likely keep them eaten out. I trapped the blenny and small minnow and returned them to the jetties. Since I have kept everything out of this tank but stuff from the jetties I figured it'd be alright.
Snorkeling, I saw a gap between the rocks out into the channel, and since the water was clear and the light bright, I had inspiration for the aquascaping and background
5) There are brittle stars, and I've seen a very small pistol shrimp. There is also either a larger pistol or a mantis present because I can hear the snapping often during the day.
6) Right now, the tank is mostly occupied by crabs, the Beau, and anemones. There are three big ones and a couple of smaller ones. Doing fine on diet of krill and the stuff floating in the tank.
So, here is a full tank shot, with one 36W - actinic and a 36W-10000K

I am impressed all around. Serious dedication waiting for that base rock. You sir have follow thru.

Ultimately I'd like to have a couple of those beautiful butterflyfishes swimming around in the tank. Unfortunately I'll probably have to wait until next year. The ones I've seen there lately have been chased all summer and are wise in the ways of tourists with nets. Early next spring the new ones won't be so wiley. I've been told the only way to get them to survive is to use rock and water from the jetties initially, until I can get them to eat.
Thanks for the encouragement. Neat thing about having a lab is there's never a shortage of things to do, so I don't rush any particular project when waiting.
I hope it continues to develop the way it has so far.
I'll try and keep this thread updated. I think it's time to go diving again!

Oh, one more thing. In contrast to most rock from the Pacific, the rock I seeded is full of all kinds of clams/oysters. One in particular struck my eye, and it seems to be doing well. A yellow spiny oyster/clam?

thats really awesome you waited for the rock 3 years. I would have been far too impatient. I think the algae you dont know the name of is called codium, although that looks alot hairier than most codium i've seen. Maybe its fuzzy codium
Nice job, the tank looks great. Keep us updated on those crabs you found because some of the really live stuff that hasnt been quarantined can have predatory crabs on it...luckily you saw yours eating algae so its most likely not the case but i would watch them if you start getting a heavy coral & fish load.

He's right... that algea you have is codium

tHIS IS AMAZING THREAD KEEP US UPDATED. TANK LOOKS VERY NATURAL. wISH I COULD HAVE DO WHAT YOU HAVE GREAT JOB

Thanks for the name. Isn't it cool how when you know the name of something you can know so much more about it? Having that label I learned quite a bit about it by reading. I hope it survives. Now to figure how to get Sargassum, Gracillaria, and Ulva to grow in the tank. They are all present at the jetties but I can't get them to grow for squat.
Thanks again for the name!

Patience is not easy to come by for me either. I was determined to get some of the hard corals to grow on the rock. The first two years, nada. Then, this year it began to appear everywhere. Must have spawned this spring. So I finally got some to start, but I wasn't patient enough to let it develop, only single polyps! Here is one of them extended. I've counted five polyps on all the rock.



Nothing fancy on this tank either. The creatures at the jetties can't afford to be to specific in their diets, as whatever floats by is what they grab. This anemone, a curley-cue I think, was fed flake food, and you can see it through it's tissue!

After some serious tank watching this past weekend, we realized we had a serious problem with crabs. It seemed as if they were overruning the tank, and when we put a small wrasse in the tank Sunday we'd caught and he disappearred within a few hours, we knew we had to do something.
I called up the famous exterminator,

KUNG PAO CRAB

loosely translated into English as the

Florida Crab Snatcher

and got the job done. She removed 8 crabs last night and this morning!

Awesome thread yardboy!

Travisurfer and myself have had more than one conversation about starting a local tank from Wrightsville Beach/Masonboro Island & Jetty.

Even though I looked and looked some more, logged 10 dives just looking for one thing, a small cucumber, I couldn't find one. There are hundreds of cukes at the jetties, and every one I've seen is at least a foot long. Surely they don't "spring from their mother's womb" as full grown cukes, but i haven't been able to find one, so I finally bought the first critter for my jetties tank. He came from the Keys I think, and called by the lfs in Pensacola as a "tiger tail" cucumber. He's been doing his job since he was introduced two days ago, as witnessed by the piles of clean white "cuke poop" sand. The detritus in the sandbed was getting out of hand so I had to do something.

very cool yardboy! i love the idea of being able to seed and supplement a tank from local natural sources. it's just so hard to duplicate the diverstiy found out there by buying each piece separately. your tank really does have a natural look to it.

regarding your comment about using water from the jetty and having to move to IO to get rid of the algae - did you test it for phosphates? just curious what you would find there. also, what are the other parameters that you see there of the local jetty? i've heard of some pretty wild local variations of salinity, Ca and hardness. can you let me know the values of everything you've tested?

you'd probably be a monster with your lab room if you lived anywhere in the tropical pacific!

Thanks for your interest Mr. A,
The salinity does not vary as much as I expected during tidal changes, due to the fact that the bay has very little fresh water influx. Also I've not been looking at the parameters but a few years and we've been in a drought condition, so it hasn't rained much either.
Nitrates, I've measured as high as 20 ppm, but then the Bay is shallow and full of seagrass, so they probably absorb a good portion of it. Also Florida has very strict runoff laws, where all new construction has to have catch ponds to trap runoff. With very porous sandy soil, there's not as much runoff here as at other places I've lived.
The flux of algae growth on the rocks at the jetties is pretty dramatic during the course of a year. In the winter, when the water gets as low as 55d F., algae covers everything. All kinds, but mostly micro stuff.
As the water warms in the spring, the black urchins appear and slowly eat it all away, so that by July the rocks are mostly covered with corraline.
I've not measured phosphate, but will have to start looking at that.
One of my anemones spawned last night. Very interesting to watch. Over the course of an hour, it kept shooting out strings of white finely divided material, I couldn't tell if it was male or female, but since I could see the particles with my eyes, I figured they were probably eggs. Unfortunately it's the only specimen of that species I have, but I also noticed that the corals were extended greater than I'd ever seen them, so they were probably getting their fill!

The tank is doing quite a bit better after removing a total of 10 crabs. There are a few more but they will have to be trapped. They are so quick it is unbelievable. They have antennae like a shrimp or something and are like shadows, they move so fast. Their mouth parts open and close quickly, their whiskers are constantly moving around, they are the hummingbirds of the crab world.
Anyway, I went back to the jetties yesterday and found this cool anemone. I feel more certain that this one is indeed a rock anemone. IT has the lines in its disk and purple tipped tentacles. It's pretty small, about the size of a quarter, and has moved around more than any other anemone I've ever seen.

Wonderful project, I think a region specific tank like this is very cool. Great work and great patience!

nice work there Yard.. (any new cool pieces)

you know what i was thinking yardboy? i bet you if you had a jetties full size tank with alot of anemones and other stuff found in the jetties, and you made your photoperiod match the natural one in your area, along with temperature, & moonlighting, i would be willing to bet you could get your anemones reproducing sexually. of course this tank would have to use either no filtration or sponge filters or the goods would be filtered out

Very beautiful tank!! I would love to have something like that!

Clint

any updates????

wow, great thread, im hooked! cant wait to hear the next update

Thanks for the encourangement guys.
As it has been said, "THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE", you just have to see it.
After bragging about catching 10 crabs out of the jetties nano, and earlier noting that it seemed as if they were eating algae........ well, maybe you can guess the rest. Major algae outbreak. It hasn't gotten as bad as it could, I guess, due to the spiny urchin working major overtime. Trouble is, if he continues to eat as he has, he'll be as big as a linebacker for Green Bay before he's through!
I've been back to the jetties diving, but the water is beginning to get chilly, and I haven't found any algae munching snails like I'd hoped. Earlier in the year, I often saw these brown sea hares (a type of sea slug) munching away.



Like the cucumbers, I never saw any small ones. I'm going to bite the bullet again, and have ordered a sea hare from Sealife, Inc., which from the posted website picture, looks to be the same as I've got here.

Hopefully he'll help get things under control. Right now I'm changing 10% every two days to keep it down, but I could sure use some help before I resort to bluelegs or turbo's. (non-natives)

how did the sea hare work out???

tagging along now.

Very interesting thread... good luck your experiment and with catching the rest of those crabs!

UPDATE!!!

It's been a while since I've updated this thread. The tank is doing well, finally, but it requires a ton of work, more than any of my other tanks, not sure why, but it's either because the rock had so much nutrient in it, and with clams and mussels dying off, or there's no nutrient export other than water changes, so it's been a real pain. But I've wanted to be dedicated to imaintaining a biotope so I'm perservering. More than once though I almost gave it up, the red slime has been really bad and green hair can also be a challenge. I was unable to find a brown sea slug, but haven't given up yet.
I have scored some gorgonians, and another cool rock anemone, but he's in hiding on the back side of a rock, so no pics, but here is another of the bluetip I caught this summer, which I think is a flower rock anemone. I've also scored a horese conch and a decorator crab. After looking through my "Fishes of the Northern Gulf of Mexico", I've found that not only do clown gobies occur here, but so do neon gobies and jawfish. I'll likely buy all three if I can't find them myself at the jetties. I'm trying to trap the Beau Gregory now, as he's picked up the habit of moving frags around, he's pissed me off more than once over my gorgonians.


And here's the obligatory fts, hope you enjoyed the cucumber butthole in the above shot! Warnings of cuckes declining have been of no concern in this nutrient sump.

YAY!

for biotope tanks
for anemones

I like it! Glad you're sticking it out cause I really like this idea. Amber and I had a 3g biotope from PCB with dwarf seahorses and some macroalgaes for a long time. Really want to do something similar to your tank.

And I seriously LOVE those anemones

This is my favorite tank ever.

I really like your tank too. Your scape looks very natural and the anemones are nice!

Stunning! I too am doing a Florida/Florida Carribean biotope tank but mine is only 4.5 gallons. Yours looks very natural and its obvious you put a lot of care and work into it.

I tried to go snorkling around the Venice area on the Gulf Coast this Summer, especially around the docks and jetties but unfortunately they had really bad red tides this season and even if it would have been safe to go into the water, it most likely wouldn't have looked very pretty once in it. Dead fish lined the shore for miles in each direction and it really screwed with my plans to collect a few different types of crustaceans and macro algae common to the coasts.

Wow, what a thread! What a tank! Yardboy, that's SO amazing! That last fts looks so---natural! (And beautiful.)

I, too, love the nems. The pic of the spawning one is an incredible shot.

So, what temperature are you keeping the tank at? Do you intend to vary it? And if your crabs were, after all, eating algae, are you thinking of adding any back? (BTW, I loved the "hummingbirds of the crab world" characterization.)

Altogether sweet!

--Diane

Wow!
Thanks Guys. I didn't think anyone was even noticing this little tank. While its appearance makes doing it worthwhile, you all's nice comments and personal experiences with similar areas make the drudgery of it worthwhile also.
Diane, that's a good point to make about adding back what I took away, since I'm not sure but think that was at the root of my problem, not enough "clean up crew" to keep ahead of the algae and detritus. I adding adding some back, but with hopefully more diversity this time. I was never able to remove all the crabs initially anyway, we've counted at least 4 that are still in there, 2 of the little "sally lightfoot" type, very quick and shy, they can even tell when you direct your eyes at them for too long, and flash, they are gone, at least one that looks like a red mithrax, and a native hermit. I just put the decorator crab in, and might go with an arrow crab also, as they are very common at the jetties. I'm also looking for a pederson's anemone shrimp to see if he hosts one of the anemone's, they are supposed to be seen around here, but I've had no luck.
I did get a shot of my newest anemone, still looking for his proper place, but I caught him when I checked the tank right before bed.