For nearly seven years I have kept a tank on my deck to put the different species of fish in. It used to be kind of a family experience but for the last couple years I have done all of it. It used to be that I would catch the fish and other animals in the beginning of the summer and release them at the end of the summer. Last year I kept some of the animals that i caught over the winter. Anyway instead of rambling on about the boring stuff i will just post pics.

So this was the 20 gal that i was using to keep some of the fish in over the winter. Nothing spectacular, but it was fine for it's applications. (sorry for the crappy pic)

This is one of two anemones that i had caught and was trying to keep. Idk i just like this picture that i took.

Here was the deck tank before it was filled (I get water, sand, and rocks right from the beach and estuary.)

Right after the stuff was added.

And here is the tank today

Sponge ball

Mottled skulpin

Scallop

A baby lumpfish (died awhile ago )

This pic has a lot in it to talk about. First off you can see that i have a snowy grouper in there. yes the kind that lives in the gulf of Mexico. I caught it as a very small scared fish. it is a tropical fish and would have died over the winter if i hadn't caught it. It must have came over on the gulf stream. It was half an inch when i got it but now its around six (they get to like 100 pounds ) I may end up donating it to the Aquarium......
Anyway there is also a bit of codium covered in prey mantis shrimp (for my pipe fish)

The pipe fish

Mumichogs (flounder, bluefish, and grouper food)

Lol i love this pic of the flounder

Baby bluefish

And some hard orange stuff that was covering a rock. It looked and felt the exact same as encrusting monti. I have no idea what it is.

nice tank!

Cool! How do you control the temperature?

Very nice! I like the eyes on the scallop.

didn't know all that stuff was down on the cape...... havent been there there in a long time

I know what big Blue Fish are like... You should keep a billy club by the side of the tank.

I actually don't really. The places that i catch most this stuff comes from water that hovers around 75 throughout the summer. It only has around six hours where there is direct sun and that is in the morning when it is cooler anyway. The tank generally stays around 72 because there is so much surface agitation even on days where its 85. On the days where it gets really hot i have frozen jugs of water in the freezer as a backup.




Oh yeah! I caught a 15 pound one not too long ago which is the biggest one i have ever caught! Maybe if i get the chance i will post a pic of it. anyway the two in there are the Blues brothers. The flounder is a fluke so it's name is Luke the fluke.

excellent tank. Too bad you have to tear it down every year but I guess that is half the fun, to have to build it back up next spring.

Wow, very cool, thanks for sharing!

Nice! Im liking your flounder

tasty looking tank. when do we eat?

Haha, thanks guys. Yeah I'm actually nervous about the flounder. I caught him at about 4" last year and he was in a 30 back then. Now hes about 12" and in a 50 gallon. I really don't want to let him go. At least he accepts frozen and live so he would do fine in the wild now. That reminds me, I should take some vids of feeding time.

That would be awesome!

Wow. Great job on the tank!

Feeding vids.

Lol, currently the tank is being taken care of by my neighbor, Ed, at the Cape while I'm back here at school. I think next weekend I might head down for a little to get the stuff. I have a thirty set up with black sand i collected on the beach in my basement which will be their winter homes. But for now i have nothing to tell. I would have taken those vids but my camera is screwy and i just sent it back for repairs yesterday. I have no idea when Pentax will get it back to me. It had a big ol' blue line across the screen and in the pictures!

Does the tank stilllook the same?

Sadly no. But that's half the fun. I re-do it every year. This year was one of the best though. My neighbor kinda went crazy on feeding while i was away though... I told him to feed them once a week because its getting colder and their metabolisms slow down. He's old... and he fed them every two days so the water is cloudy and the tank looks like $h!t right now. I'm actually at the cape right nowto pick them up so I'll be getting up early tomorrow to drive with the fish back up country.

I hate when people over feed my tanks .

Im lovin this tank!

Wow, I really like this tank. Great setup and theme - just like Cape Cod.

That is a really interesting Pipefish... how did you manage to catch that guy?

Do you go to Cape Cod? I'm glad you like it. You should see the males of that pipefish. In some areas while I'm snorkeling I will just spot them on the bottom. They are very slow when they think they are not seen and you can grab them with your hand.

lol holy crap you got a baby blue in there. That thing is going to eat everything when it gets bigger...even you jk but that's awesome man. I was going to keep one during this summer and was going to acclimate it for my tank, but I felt bad for my damsel so I dumped the whole thing

Awesome Tank!!!!!

I didn't know we had pipefish in MA. I've always wanted a Cape Cod biotope tank!


How is it doing?

Summer is on it's way! Gonna be setting up the tank soon

that is an awesome tank!

So what are your waterchanges like?

Very nice, the flouder is crazy lol.

The water changes were fine. I'm like a two minute drive away from the Nauset Estuary (really clean water) so whenever I need to I just drive down with a 5 gallon bucket. This year I'm actually going to hang a 150 watt mh in a mini wooden (shingled like the house) enclosure I made.

That's awesome you're setting up a new tank.

I still want to set up a Cape Cod Biotope too lol.

I like it! And I covet that huge stand of codium--I love macros.

It's funny seeing a baby bluefish; I grew up in Florida and I remember us locals warning tourists not to go in the water while the blues were running. They come in large schools to feed on bait fish and they'll chomp on anything--fish, surfers, swimmers--in their path. The tourists thought we were crazy, but they'd never seen the feeding frenzy of a huge school of bluefish going after mullet--with a few sharks thrown in to boot. I can vividly remember being at the beach as a kid and seeing the blues and several sharks chasing the baitfish in every swell.

Funny story with that! I was surf casting off of Nauset beach and I caught a gorilla bluefish (thats what we call the big ones) and I left it on shore just to kinda die... as I use them as bait for lobster traps. While I was fishing more I look back and see this lady sticking her fingers into the still alive fish's mouth! She was trying to put the bait fish that it threw up on the sand back into it's mouth.... turns out she was like a "super tourist" and thought they didn't have teeth...Shes lucky she didn't lose her fingers!
Lol damn tourists...

Yeesh. I'll see you your gorilla bluefish story, and raise you one idiot snowbird kid who pitched a rock at a beached Portuguese man o'war--after being repeatedly warned NOT to--and had to be rushed to the emergency room when he got man o'war splatter all over his face.

What an intelligent kid..... Haha that sounds like something I'd have done when i was younger. I found an entire dead whale carcass on the beach once! It was to the point that you just couldn't tell it ever was a whale... haha it was huge and disgusting. But the weird thing is that it had absolutely no smell!

Sweet Tank! I have been wanting to do one of Mobile Bay! (Well not exactly Mobile, but Little Lagoon Bay in Gulf Shores, AL) Set up a 75 Gallon with a couple of Pigfish, Pinfish, and a Little trout (Like a Sand Trout), and a Blue Crab....... That would be a great tank! But your is awsome, a Bluefish, Flounder, and a Grouper! Wow! Amazing!

Wow it looks awesome!!! I love the way it's set up. Is the rock from the cape?

Have you seen the Gulf Pipefish exhibit at the NE Aquarium?

Zook,
This tank is awesome! I'm relocating to Boston in August and plan to do a similar set up. How do you get your goodies? Dive?

Great tank!

You've got to get a baby striper in there if it's going to be a real cape cod tank

Awesome tank, must be a lot of fun.

Yeah AM the rock is from the Cape. It's from a pond in the estuary. And no I haven't been there in ages!! I need to get down there soon.

Also AM, your inbox is full so here's my response since it answers rockhead's question too.

There are a lot of places I go. Mostly out of the Nauset Estuary and occasionally to the bay side of the Cape. If you ever go onto the Cape I'd be happy to point you in the right direction.
As far as your area idk. Look for places off shore where there are mussel beds. Small fish, and juvenile fish always congregate there and live with the mussels and the seaweed that is attached to the mussels.
There's various different methods really to catching stuff. One investment you can make for catching fish is getting a minnow trap, and using clams as the bait. It seems like all of the small fish react well to crushed mussels.
Another is visiting areas at low tide which is sorta obvious. In a lot of areas lifting up rocks (such as the ones in my tank) to find stuff yields some cool stuff.
Then theres another method where you just take a net and where there's seaweed (eel grass especially) you run the net along the bottom and it pics up everything. Then sort through it etc etc. You get the hang of this one.
The last would be snorkeling with a net, and when I do this I usually keep a dive bag wrapped around my wrist so when I catch something I don't have to go all the way back to my bucket and I can just keep filling it as I go.

Lastly I would advise you to get a bucket with a portable aerator. They do wonders for keeping stuff alive.


Also lol at the baby striper. The sad thing is I totally would... never caught one under like 9 inches or so, and even those ones are just from fishing for schoolies during the spring.

Thank You!!! That helped a lot!

I need to get some stuff

I love your tank! I'm studying marine inverts in New Hampshire so I enjoy these cold water tanks.
It looks like that crusty orange stuff you have might be Schizoporella, an encrusting bryozoan. Do you have any closer shots of it?

Have you ever seen any nudibranchs on your codium or other macros? They are pretty awesome to watch.

I really love your tank, is very inspirative fo a new display's!Is very impressionant...
New udates?

Are you setting the tank up this year? It was great in the past two summers so I'm sure it would probably be great this year as well!

Yeah of course I am. I got a job at the MBL in Woods Hole so I'll be spending a lot of time there this summer however I think I can get this tank up and running too. I'm actually busy setting up a macro tank at the Woods Hole Public aquarium. Fun stuff. When the tank is set up I'll update the thread too
.

Love your tank! Found this while I was surfing for info and planning on doing pretty much the same thing. I just started up an old metaframe tank, and I am doing a cape cod biotope for the summer. So far I have a few pipe fish, a couple of tiny flounder, some rock crabs, some hermit crabs, and some anemone. These are all scavenged from in and around E. Falmouth.

My main question for you is about food. I put a lot of crustacean larvae and mantis shrimp in there along with some seaweed. Most my residents seem to like eating the mantis shrimp. What else do you use for food in your tanks?

Any other advice on doing a local tank and where/how to find good catches would be most appreciated!

Another fun biotope system. I'm really enjoying this section of the forum. Very interesting. It's also cool that it is redone every year. I see more macro this time.

Liz

Hey guys. As you can see it has been a very busy summer for me. I'm at Uconn studying marine science now. Like I said I worked at the MBL over the summer. I was working 40 hours a week which I didn't mind, but I was also commuting two and a half hours total every day. I never really got to do to much with the tank. I had a couple days where I went crazy with it so I can tell you a little about that excursion. I went and caught three snapper bluefish, all about 4 inches long and was keeping them in the tank. I knew the key to keeping bluefish alive is keeping them moving with lots of water flow and in groups of three or more. I kept them happy by following those rules and by giving them a school of about 30 small silver sides at a time. They would last about four or five days, then they would need more food. Just feeding these blues was keeping me going with so little time.
I also had a 28g Oceanic Biocube going with macro algae like codium, red gracilia, ulva, and a couple oddball species. I was keeping all juvenile fish, such as northern puffers, northern king fish, butter fish, sea robins, and eventually mullet. All of these fish were caught off of a dock with a long handled, but small mouthed net in Woods Hole.
I might eventually put up some pictures that I took of the tanks when I get a chance. It was all worth it to work at such a place like the MBL, though. I'm only 18, now a freshman at college, and have already worked for NOAA and for the MBL so it's hard to complain. At least I was able to bring my reef tank with me to college

-Zach