Okay, I retract my comment, as I have yet to see any other pics of your tank besides your sig, which doesn't reveal much. Do you have a thread yet?

Also,
THE PIPEFISH EATS! and even better, it was frozen food! I mixed in some frozen cyclops with the brine shrimp today, and the brines movement got him excited, and then he started eating the cyclops! This is a big relief, I was worried, since pipefish need to eat a lot and all. The way the tank is currently set up, it is effectively a gyre, which keeps the food suspended in the water column, which is excellent for prolonged feeding. I think he'll be a lot happier once I get some eelgrass, too. And one of the people at my fishstore, who has experience with cw animals, said that bay pipes (which is what I think this is) are some of the easiest of all pipefish to keep, which was encouraging.

I also have a question to pose to the public. I know that tropical pipes need an almost constant food supply, since they have a very rudimentary digestive system. I was wondering if in colder water, they would digest and metabolize the food slower, and thus not need to be fed as often? Like, one or two times a day, versus 4-5?

-Jamie

Oh, and I forgot to mention, I've found three (so far) tiny frosted nudibranchs in the tank. Supposedly they eat snails and hydroids, I'm guessing that they came in on the pink hydroid colony for that reason. They're pretty, so, a welcome addition, and hopefully they'll be less problematic than the opalescent nudis.

-Jamie

Congrats on the pipefish! Coldwater fish can't afford to be as picky as their tropical counterparts, so I think you may have better luck with a once a day schedule with yours than with tropical pipefish.

And no, I don't have a thread yet. During a monsoon last week the humidity got up to about 80%, which finally made my tank sweat. So much, in fact, that the paint peeled off the back. I'm still trying to fix the problem.

Ahh, that's no good. My tank has only sweat on the 100+ days, which don't happen very often here, so it hasn't been much of an annoyance. You must have AC, that doesn't keep the humidity down? And thanks for the info on the pipe, about to check google to see what I can find, too.

The AC helps, but the monsoons boost humidity from 20% to 80%+ in a half hour or less, so the AC can't always keep up.

Shoulda gone acrylic I guess, lol. Luckily we only get a couple really bad storms a year.

yeah, as long as it's not too often, it's not bothersome, imo

Well I'm jealous, if it gets over 90 here more than likly the tank is covered in sweat. This is with it covered in 1" styro on 3 sides and the bottom and sitting beneath an a/c vent. Maybe we should move to the desert once Daniel is done with school, I'm sure he could find work out there and he would more than likely be closer to the places he is trying to research. Ahh, what am I talking about its all pipe dreams he still has 5 yrs.

ANEMONE WEIRDOS.

says the one obsessed with mini carpets.

hmm, it gets over 90 a lot there, too, doesn't it? Move here! It's awesome, and it's near the ocean. Is Daniel going to be a professor? Lots of good colleges in Portland to teach at. Lewis and Clark, Willamette, Reed, Whitman (that one's kind of far away though), etc. DO IT!

yep...thats the plan....if i can take another 5 years of school (although only a year and a half of taking classes left).

Whitman geology program

Oregon wouldn't be bad either - better than the desert

Yeah, Whitman's kind of far from the ocean. It does have an epic coldwater tank though, which is a plus.

yeah, but closer to good ocean than what I have now...stupid Chesapeake

and the rocks around there are SPECTACULAR

we have a lot of sandstone and limestone.

just saying.

meh...

volcano good. sand bad. pretty pics, bad research

Good rocks at whitman? Or here? I found a fossil at the beach this weekend. That's a rock

They say that if people keep polluting at the rate they do, Puget sound will be the next Chesapeake.

Okay, I rearranged the rock so it divides the bottom tank in half, one side being high flow and the other low flow. It doesn't look as good as it did before, but it should keep every one happy. Pics if I can finish my homework before the lights go out.

-Jamie

Pretty much all of Oregon...it's all volcanics of some sort out there

sadly, i dont doubt it...we're facing the loss of so much blue crab due to pollution that they'll have to stop catching them or risk extinction. hope that doesn't happen to the Puget.

i know this is a long shot but.... where would I go about getting a spiny lumpsucker? Im seriously rethinking this temperate water thing since I live by such great resources. ie free filtered, cold saltwater

I don't know the answer to your question, but resize your sig or I'll do it for you.

thx.

i'll do it tomorrow. it needed bigness for the sexy emphasis

Yeah, there's a lot of new construction on Puget sound, and it's not going to stop. People just need to be conscious of everything that's going into the water. At camp they told us that the water in the Seattle area only gets fully flushed out once a year, so what goes in hangs around for a while, and I imagine it could build up pretty easily.

On a happier note, it's September, and you know what that means: time to start thinking about the trade again! I don't know what the temps are like in your areas, but it's definitely cooled off here. I've got a few changes on my end, one which will effect the trade some. My mom convinced me, and it's probably a good idea, that I shouldn't get the animals first. I don't have much experience shipping, and even though I'm by far the closest to foreshores, I think it would be better for someone with more experience to redistribute everything, just to be safe. I don't want to kill everyone's livestock. That being said, I think Jeremai's the next closest, but I guess with free shipping it doesn't really matter where it goes first, so whatever you guys think. The other thing ( I mentioned this earlier) is that since I already have a U. grebelnyi, I'll be taking of that off my list of ordering things. That means I'm ordering 1 C. californica and 1 E. lizbethae (brooding anem). I'll also add 1 E. prolifera, as that would fit in perfectly with my eelgrass biotope. If he still only has a couple brooding nems, I'll drop that off my list, and just get 2 E. prolifera, that wasy someone else can get the brooding nem (unless no one wants it, in which case I'll still get it). Let me know what you guys are thinking!

-Jamie

It's cooled off a bit here - only 95 today.

I'll bump the other thread and get things moving again.

It only got that hot here like, three times this summer!

I'll keep my eyes open for the other thread.

I finally uploaded the pics from my trip to the San Juans! All of these pictures are of fouling communities (stuff growing off docks) in either Friday harbor or English Camp, both on San Juan Island. I basically just stuck the underwater camera in the water and pointed it at stuff on the docks. Didn't even have to get wet!

Purple Duster, Metridium farcimen and (I think) M. senile


Shrimp!




Yellow tipped nudibranch


M. farcimen


Assorted feather dusters


Urticina grebelnyi


-Jamie

Jamie the maroon/purple feather dusters are actually crinoids. Well at least the ones in the second to last picture are. I can't tell about the one in the first picture, but I think it is as well. I didn't know there were any cold water species. hmmm must show Daniel.

Did you buy or collect the feather dusters?? And if you collected them, how did you get them?! Ive tried many times without success at collecting them!

Awesome tank by the way Jamie!

That was my first thought, too.

My second thought: WANT!!!

After looking at the picture with crinoids in mind, they really do have that look, but I can assure you that they are in fact Vancouver feather dusters ( Eudistylia vancouveri): http://www.seaotter.com/marine/research/eu...ouveri.jpg.html

In the second to last shot they are partially retracted, which gives them the crinoid look. In the first shot there is another, open one that is slightly out of focus. The crown is 1 - 1.5 inches across, and I believe (though I don't know much about them) that crinoids are much larger than that. The biggest Identifying characteristic though is that if you touch them, or even get near them, they shoot back into their tube, which makes it pretty clear that they are some type of tube worm. We have feather stars here (are these close to/the same as crinoids?), I believe they only live in deeper water, but I can't find my book to check on that.






Those shots are all in the wild, not in my tank, so I didn't have to collect them, but I have had cw feather dusters before. I basically just gently peeled the tube off the side of the dock they were attached to. These were the soft-tubed kind, so it didn't seem to stress them out too much. I wouldn't try to detach a calcareous one though; I think that you would just crush it's tube and kill it.

-Jamie

feather stars = crinoids

i know there are temperate crinoids, but i have no idea how shallow they go. i would imagine they come into diver range at least.

Would be cool to have one...slower metabolism from cool water might make them more easily fed/kept.

Of interest on the Crinoid front:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/v147048876h49528/

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr...C5gnKSM#PPT5,M1 - scroll through that one a bit, it's awesome

At any rate, I still WANT!

Thanks for the info. I know that they're in diving range, because oddly enough I remember a quote from my book (though i still can find the book itself! ): "If a diver detaches a feather star from the substrate, it may walk up and "invisible staircase" through the water column." (I can't wait to find my book to see how far off that quote was! ). The important part of the quote, for this discussion, is that there is in fact a diver present, and the fact that it is listed in the book at all suggests that they must be found reasonably often while diving, otherwise it would be pointless to include them! So, we know they're in the depth range of most divers, at least.



Want a crinoid or a feather duster? or both? I think either would be pretty cool.

And in tank news. Well, nothing much. The pipefish seems to be doing well, and the urticina still hates surge, and is still generally too large for my tank. Setting up the 20 gallon perhaps? No, probably not, but it's a nice idea, at least. I think having the 20 gal high with just this urticina, maybe another, if I can find one, and a painted greenling. Painted greenling, like clownfish, are symbiotic with anemones, specifically Urticina lofotensis, but are also compatible with other Urticina species. i think that would be an AWESOME display, just because I love symbiosis, and anemones. it would also get the Urticina out of the surge tank, so it could actually have surge again. Decisions decisions.

-Jamie

Somehow I managed to entirely miss both of supernips posts on the previous page, so, SORRY! But honestly, I have no idea where you could get a spiny lumpsucker. I've seen snailfish in tidepools, which are related, but no lumpsuckers. I'm getting certified this fall, so once I can dive hopefully I'll see more stuff. But even then I don't know how common they are, so i won't likely be able to help you in getting one. You might try talking to someone who dives here, they might know where to find them.

I finally got a pic of the pipefish. It's absolutely terrible, but you can tell it's a pipefish. I had some slightly better pics, but apparently I am sometimes not allowed to crop things on my computer, so they are gone. Here's the terrible pic:



I also got a couple more pics for my sig, I think I'll probably pick one of these over the others I posted, and yeah, they're basically the same picture, but if anyone has opinions one way or the other, I'd like to here them.





-Jamie

the pipefish has gone missing. It is clearly no longer in the top tank, so it either jumped out or rode the surge into the bottom tank. I looked all around the tank multiple times and couldn't find it. If it did end up in the bottom tank, it probably got eaten by the Urticina, but it's possible it's still hiding out somewher down there. Not in the sump, as far as I can tell, but the sculpin, shrimp, and porcelain crab are all down there. Hopefully he's just hiding.

-Jamie

Hope the pipefish is ok.
Amazing tank, btw. You guys with coldwater tanks are starting to make me jealous...

It's been a day and he still hasn't shown up, so I'm thinking he's probably gone.

Thanks. When you gonna get one? (you know you want to!)

I have a question to pose to all of you. I'm not saying this is going to happen, but, potentially, if I were going to get another tank, should I get a tropical tank (probably 10 gal), which I don't have currently, or another coldwater (probably 20 gal)? A couple things you should know first: I already have a lot of tropical livestock (RBTA, frogspawn, hammer, zoas) staying in my friends tank, so I could set up a new tank for that stuff, or sell it. I also have 100 or so dollars credit at the fishtore, which would cover any immediate purchases. I already have a tank, metal halide lights, etc, so setting up this tank would effectively cost nothing. The coldwater would also cost nothing, but getting livestock could pose a problem. I haven't really been able to find much more than Anthopleura anemones, and I don't need another tank full of those. The only reason to set up a new tank would be to house the Urticina, which needs either a larger, low flow tank, or to be sold to someone. Other than that it would be an empty tank, which wouldn't be too exciting, but eventually, with a few trips up to puget sound, and the fact that I'm getting dive certified soon, it could look good. The potential for having larger fish is very enticing, and I wouldn't have to worry about them overflowing into the sump. I have another chiller, so that's not an issue. So basically I will end up selling something (Urticina vs tropical corals) either way. Neither will cost more to set up than the other. The tropical could look prettier faster, but the coldwater could also look nice given time. So, what are your opinions? If I decide to get another tank, which should I get?

-Jamie

Quit it!!

Sorry about the pipefish...

And tough call on what type of tank to set up........ why not one of each?

I say coldwater, but I understand how enticing a tropical setup would sound.

I already have too many pets, and I'll be leaving for college in two years anyway, so I don't want to get that far into it. But after college, my house is going to be like, all fish tanks. I have like, ten different biotopes I'm planning.



Yeah, I'm leaning towards coldwater, but I really like tropical stuff too, so I don't know. Having a bigger coldwater tank would really open up potential livestock choices, which would be excellent.

I say go for a big cold one!

Okay, I'm getting more and more convinced I should get a coldwater tank. How should I get rid of the tropical stuff then? Just sell it off? My parents/friend who's holding the stuff are averse to selling things on the interenet, so any other ideas?

LFS credit!
No new FTS's?

The problem with credit is that with just coldwater tanks I hardly spend anything at the lfs, and I already have over 100 dollars credit there, so I don't think I'd use it all. Just food and salt, and occasionally, lights. I guess if I don't spend it all I could just consider it a donation.

Now that I've essentially narrowed it down to a 20 gal coldwater, and suggestions for livestock? Only requirement is it must be compatible with Urticina, so, nothing small enough to get eaten.

On the fts front, I'll try to get one soon, but I'm pretty busy with school, and the tank is not too pretty right now, due to lack of surge and giant anemone taking up most of it. I'll see what I can do.

-Jamie

Sorry, no new fts's, but i have some very importsnt developments in the CW vs WW dilemma.
1. i finally figured out a science fair project, and it's going to be coldwater, so I'm going to be setting up at least one cw tank for that.
2. The new unofficial contest is really tempting me to start up a 5.5 gal tropical. If I do another cw, I'm pretty sure I wanna do 20 gal, cause I really like the idea of having a bigger tank, but I suppose I could set up a ten, just for the contest. I could set up a ten, then upgrade to the twenty after the contest is over, too. Opinions? Recommendations?

-Jamie

EDIT: Oh wait, I just realized I couldn't do CW for the contest, cause the chiller would put me over the budget requirement. oh well. So, should I do the tropical contest, if I'm already gonna have another CW for science fair?

Well, decided to do the contest (tropical), so we'll see how that goes. I'm back at the beach this weekend, and just got through looking over the docks at Garibaldi. There wasn't much, and I wasn't expecting it, because the bay is brackish in the winter, but I got a really cool bright green sculpin, along with one of the regular coloration. Also a few baby crabs (larva?). They're about 1 cm wide, totally clear, and they still have functioning "tails." I can't wait to see what they turn out to be!

Sometime in the next few weeks I'll be going down to Newport to see what I can find on their docks because for science fair this year I'm doing something involving that invasive tunicate, and I've found it there before. We can expect some new additions then!

-Jamie

pics??!??!?

meh, If I can write my english paper before the lights go off then probaly.

Write faster.

wider margins

Nice one!

always my favorite

doesn't arial write bigger as well?