Hey guys! My dad and I are doing a 75g coldwater setup and have had it up and running for 3 months, but have been waiting for the tank to look good and the critters to settle down a bit before we posted anything.
We've checked with Fish and Game and also the university out here HSU to see if it was legal to collect critters and they said yes, so no worries about that. We built a stand for it and got almost everything we need since we're kinda short on money. The only thing we need and actually sorta want to get is a Fluval 405. Well anyways, enough of me blabbering on, lets go to the equipment and livestock lists!


Equipment:

-75g aga Black
-Millenium 3000 HOB from our 55 [glass broke so we bought the 75]
-Coralife T-5 series Double Linear Strip, 48", 10,000k daylight, Tru actinic 03
-AC 802 Powerhead
-Frozen 3-liter bottle of water to keep temp down till we get a chiller

In one of the pics you'll see a 29g sitting underneath. That's our anchovi holding tank for one of our fish since he eats an anchovi a day. We're also going to turn that into a sump/refugium sorta thing and use another one of my 29g's as a 'chovi tank.


Livestock:

-3 adult walleye perch
-7 baby walleye perch
-1 mid-size shiner perch
-2 small black rockfish
-1 mid-size blue rockfish
-1 stag horn sculpin
-2 cabezons
-2 flatheaded clingfish
-1 baby pacific halibut [shhhhhhh!]

CUC:

-20 to 25 hermits
-lots of snails
-1 baby moon snail about the size of a quarter
-5 very small red starfish but we dont know what species they are
-1 4" purple starfish that loves to eat banacles, so i collect rock for him to eat off the barnacles

And now its time for the pics! Sorry, but i lack good picture tanking skills with my own camera, so some if not all are a little blurry. Enjoy!!!


stag horn sculpin aka the "devil fish" by my mom, eating an anchovi.












The Divil Fish!!!



one of our small red starfish and a hermit or 2 eating a dead anchovi




Right side tank shot

Left side tank shot

Left side shot again

FTS

FTS angled

And thats it for now. Ask questions and comment please! WIll take some more pics when we get a certain anenome that we want. Do you guys like our biotope?

DO YOU COLLECT A LOT OF YOUR STUFF FROM LIKE A TIDE POOL OR DO YOU BUY IT?

Yeah, some of the stuff I get is from a tide pool, but most of it is from the bay. Everything in there besides the fish is from the shore in the bay and the fish we caught in a slough and at our dock.

Nice, simple set-up, looks good. Your fish seem a little large for the tank though, lol. And you could use some more anemones.

Yeah, the 3 big perch are going back to the bay and the little school of babies are staying till they reach 4".
And tonight at 2 AM Im gonna wake my dad and we're at low tide to this boat ramp and get some big green anenomes. Thanks for the comments Jeremai.

Man, i dont think anybody is even interested in my tank except for jeremai.

lol, give it time.

on the contrary dude! I think this is a great tank, though I've never visited humboldt bay myself, its pretty natural looking. Did you guys catch those fish with hooks and such or did you just nab em out of the water ?

Yay for coldwater! Maybe a stupid question, but where is humboldt bay? And I agree with Jeremai, less fish, more anemones! A very good start so far.

-Jamie

thanks guys!


Yeah, we caught all the fish with hook and line. Try fishing some day with a "sabiki". They are the BEST jig to catch almost any kind of bait fish you could want! Six hooks with lil beads and fish skin feathers on them.
Jig up and down in a school and you'll catch 6 fish at once! But the bad side was we had to treat the fish in our quarantine tank for a few days to let the hook wounds heals.


Humboldt Bay is the 2nd largest natural bay in California and it has 2 peninsulas separating it from the ocean.
I live in Samoa, which is a small privately owned town on the southern end of the northern peninsula. My boss owns the town. It's pretty cool. Anyhoo, sorry for getting off topic. Earlier we went to Petco and baught the largest net so we could get the 3 large walleye perch out. It worked. Man, those were some tasty perch! lol
They were big enough to eat and we had 3 of them and the bay is a mile from our house, so we cooked em up and ate them. Sorry if I sound barbaric. We're setting up another 75g as an aquaculture tank in a few months when our money situation gets all sttled down again.

EATING PET FISH FTW!!!

whats FTW mean?
and so, everything in that tank is edible and my dad wanted it to be an aquaculture tank to begin with so we can stock our house with fresh seafood, but i convinced him to not do so. Glad I did, cuz this tank is awesome! BUt hey, we solved the "too many fish" problem and our hunger problem at the same time! lol

FTW = for the win.haha.
give me more pic's!

Thanks Toomin man! or woman...

Anyhoo, pics will be up in a few minutes. Hope you didnt go to bed already

Ok, sorry, but there seems to be a problem with my potobucket account. New pics will be up soon, but probably tomorrow since its 1:07 am.

I think the tank looks cool. It could use a background and some more rocks, in my opinion. Fresh seafood and entertainment!

New pics are here! Yeah, last night around 2 am, we went to the bay at an extreme low tide and got some more Caulerpa and other types of macro. We also got around 40 more anenomes! Thanks for lettin me know about the other uses of a credit card jeremai. As you might notice in our pics, the "devil fish" lol is the centerpiece fish in our tank. When you look at him from different angles, his eyes change color!!!
Anyhoo, here's the pics!

FTS


Some macro


Devil Fish


Others


Agnle Shot of right side corner


CLose up


New anenome!


Our sand sculpin


New "hang out" for critters





Hope you enjoy!

I'm amazed. Where is this bay? A stingray would be cool as well, but might eat your fish. Great job.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldt_Bay_(United_States)

A stingray would be too big for our tank and even if we got a baby Bat Ray around 4 inches diameter, it would be too fast paced and would need a large sandy bottom. And thanks for the comment!

Hey everybody, we went fishing earlier so we could get some food for the devil fish such as anchovies.
We got some jellyfish too!!! Is there anyway to identify what species they are???

Sick tank man... I love biotopes. My parents have a Monterey Bay biotope its dope... Humboldt county is off the hook too man.. love that place....

Thanks man! Do you happen to have a thread on your parents Monterey tank? Oh and we get all of our stuff from mainly Samoa and some of the stuff from Eureka. Ill take some more pics later. We have the awesome sponge that i got from a dock too. Its edge is outlined in a fire red color and the body is orange with black dots.

Nah, If I had a scanner I could scan some pics from the 80s but its nothing of what it looks like now...

Damn, that sucks man! Is it anything like my tank??? Oh and one of our jellyfish keeps swimming around and getting stuck on our filter's intake. You know of any way to prevent this?? Maybe some tube with holes in around the intake tube of our filter? If not, then im just going to transfer him to my 20g long upstairs.

Intake sponge might help.

Ok, thanks man. Ill try that.

bump

hey man, what is the avg. temp in that tank of yours? I'm trying to set up a pico w/o a chiller (coldwater I mean) and I can't get it cool enough. I am thinking about topping off with cold water and seeing if that will help, and throw a few ice cubes in too, let me know!

-Pat

You are going to find that you are going to have issues with your animals if the temperature stays to high. These fish and inverts are used to cold water. You didnt say what the temp is in your tank but its got to be in the high 60's if not the mid 70's. Its a glass tank right? If so than you might have some sweating of the tank if and when you install a chiller to get it down to 50. It looks cool though. You do not see people doing the temperate system. Good luck.....

Our average temp is 61 - 65 degrees F.
Dont use ice cubes as a chilling alternative. If you do, then your salinity would drop a lot! Right now, we're just using three 1 liter frozen bottles of water and tossing them into the tank. It works and keeps the temp around 61 - 65 degrees F. And auto topoff with coldwater wont work either man. Sorry to burst your bubble.
How big is your pico? Depending on the size, get 3/8" FLEXIBLE copper tubing and some compression fittings and connect that to a refridgerator unit. Make it a closed loop where the coolant just goes around the outside bottom of the tank. One of my friends did that as a sorta "tweak" to my mini fridge idea thats somewhere on this site, but it only worked for our 55 which broke and we now have a 75 and that doesnt do a thing to cool it down. But yeah, try that idea, it works pretty good.


We keep it at 61 - 65 degres F with the use of frozen 1 liter water bottles that we refreeze every 8 hours.

yeah, I've been thinking of different things, insulating the tank etc. The ice cubes in the tank was something I did not elaborate on. What I did was put about 10 ice cubes in a zipblock bag and floated it on top until the temp went to about 62 or so. I don't want to have to do this periodically though, without any cooling it stays at exactly 70.0. I suppose I could use a frozen water bottle until winter... Thanks for the info though!

-Pat

Does Humboldt Bay house Humboldt squid?

If so you definately need a few in there :-D They make mantis shrimp look like playtoys.

Yeah, the water bottle[s] work pretty good for us right now, but eventually we're going to buy a chiller. Money is just tight on our aquarium budget, so we might wait a few months. How big is your tank Pat???


Nope, Humboldt squid come from the Gulf of California or Sea of Cortez and they like the warmer temperatures donw there and also, Humboldt bay isnt deep enough for those squid. Another thing:
Humboldt Squid are about the same length of our 75g!!!!

oh yeah I know what you mean about the budget haha, my tank is 2.5 gallons. I might have to scrap the idea though, it just doesn't seem worth the hassle without a chiller IMO

Yeah, i know what you mean about the hassle without a chiller too lol.
I would say that if you were going to use a 2.5 to a 7g, get a 1/20hp chiller.

Oh, we've been getting news about lots of big tanks lately and we WERE going to buy a 300g aquarium, but it was cracked and the guy was going to sell it for $200, but we didnt buy cuz of the crack.
Our neighbor's brother-in-law has a 700g made of 1 inch acrylic. It's pretty bad @ass!

yeah, I was actually thinking of putting a bunch of ice/cold water in a cooler and putting tubing in it (Like a fridge chiller) and having it circulate through there and back into the tank, the cooler keeps the temps at around 39-42 degrees so we will see what happens haha.

Sounds like a good hillbilly idea that "I" would think of!
Let me know how it goes man!

so far so good haha. Its running at 60 degrees, I'm actually going to make a thread about it in a sec here with pics etc. It actually worked a lot better than I thought it would, with the cooler all sealed up (minus the holes for the two tubes going in the tank). It dropped from 70.3 F(roughly) to 60.0 F in 10 min or so. Very surprised that it worked.

-Pat

Wait, are you talking about something like a water cooler or swamp cooler? Where theres a drum spinning over water to make the air cooler? If so, wouldnt the salt jam up the cooler? Just thinking aloud here lol

I have an empty 2.5 up in my room right now so I think Im gonna go experiment with "hillbilly cooling" ideas.
Ill let you know what I come up with.

Oh and everybody else, Ill have some new pictures up tomorrow. We just hooked up our Magnum 350 canister filter and we're testing it out on our tank before we take any pitures. We also have around 20 more anenomes of 4 different species and are feeding them every 2 days.

yeah like a water cooler that you'd go on a picnic with haha. I'm not sure what exactly a swamp cooler is haha. Yeah test stuff out and lemme know how it goes man!

-Pat

Here's a swamp cooler:



Where #2 and #3 is, I was thinking that you could just put in a line going from the tank to the cooler in a closed loop made stainless steel maybe since copper is a big no-no.

Do you see how my idea works?

Kenny.

omg, swamp cooler gave me the best idea ever. Have a heat sink above the tank. Slowly drip fresh water over it and have a computer fan blowing over it. Evaporation would keep the heat sink cold, so it would just keep sucking heat out of the tank. The only problem is the method of connecting it to the tank, you couldn't use metal. Can you think of anything conductive that wouldn't rust?

-Jamie

How big is your tank Jamie? Depending on what size, this would be pretty easy, the bigger the better:

On the bottom black plastic border of the tank, drill horizontally with a 1/4" drill bit. Get 4-5 ft of flexible copper tubing, crimp an end closed, and coil it up FLAT and put that under the glass part of the tank with the open end connected to a RADIATOR from a car or something like that filled with water. Place a fan over the top of that and turn it on. The water in the radiator and the tubing will begin to cool the tank since the coil is sitting right underneath the glass. Trust me, that will probably work since Ive jimmy-rigged lots of stuff like that that I couldnt afford.

I should make a thread on "homemade coldwater chiller ideas/theories/experiments".

I've never seen a swamp cooler to be honest, is it something you buy or you make? That chiller sounds like a great idea!

Both: buy them brand new or make one if youre bored or smart or both. lol

Here it is again:

Well, my coldwater tank already has a chiller, so I won't be needing to make one any time soon, but very interesting idea. Unfortunately I don't have any spare car radiators laying around, so I'll have to wait till I come across one at least. I've been working on my heat sink idea, and might try it just out of curiosity. It'd be a really cheap way to make a little chiller if it worked, and it would hardly use any electricity, just a computer fan. You could even attach a temp controller to the fan so it would shut off when the tank got down to a certain temp.

That would be an excellent thread, but it seems you've already made it!

-Jamie

What about Peltier pads used for CPU cooling? I found this on ebay a little while ago and I think it would work pretty well, but how can you hook it up to a tank? Just stick it on the glass and put it by a fan acting as a heatsink??

Did someone attack your tank with a razor blade?!

I have no idea and have never even heard of a peltier pad. Sorry about that.


What do you mean by that?


That would be pretty to to do. Hey, "IF" you ever do come across a car radiator, maybe you can think of a way to put that into your idea, then lay the radiator flat with your 5.5 on top of it as a stand and build a little wooden cover up thingy to make it look more snazzy. Just a thought though.

I have 2 or 3 computer fans just laying around, what's your idea? Though I may not be able to acquire a radiator or swamp cooler

Read the top of this page and youll see one of my ideas lol.

I think im going to make a Surge Device for my 2.5 first and then probably my 20 long upstairs once i get it figured out.
Ill post pics of our new Magnum 350 in an hour or so. And maybe some pics of my tanks upstairs.

Here's 2 pics of our Magnum 350 canister as promised...just a tad late though.

From a Distance


Close Up