THE OFFICIAL ASK ALBERT THIEL THREAD

[atoll]

Tube worms anyone.

[albertthiel]

Tube worms anyone.

 

Very nice Les

 

Albert

[Paul.b]

I love tube worms

[albertthiel]

I love tube worms

Me too esp the real small ones

Albert

[DurocShark]

Me too esp the real small ones

Albert

 

I would love one of those groups of worms!

 

And I agree on the small ones. They're so cool when they start reproducing in your tank and little white curlicues appear all over.

[atoll]

They came in unnoticed on something but I don;t know what.

[albertthiel]

 

I would love one of those groups of worms!

 

And I agree on the small ones. They're so cool when they start reproducing in your tank and little white curlicues appear all over.

 

Love those small ones too

They came in unnoticed on something but I don;t know what.

 

Yes they always seem to get into the aquariums that way IME

 

Albert

I love tube worms

 

Love them

[atoll]

Finally managed to do a YouTube video of my sump modifications here.

 

[albertthiel]

Finally managed to do a YouTube video of my sump modifications here.

 

 

 

Nice Les ...

 

Albert

[atoll]

10 days on and one cleaning of the screen of the expected brown slime like algae and GHA starting to grow already.

[albertthiel]

Nice

 

Nice

 

Albert

[atoll]

Came home yesterday after spending a few days at my GFs only to find a major leak and a wet floor. The ATU res was dry and the return pump as sitting in a small amount of water vibrating away but luckily running if not pumping. I must have lost a good few gallons of water. When I saw it it was no longer leaking and the tank wasn't the problem nor the sump. To be honest I am not sure what caused the leak but I guess it was either my Deltec reactor or my filter sock overflowing out of the sump. I stripped the reactor down and retightened all and changed the filter sock ensuring if it overflowed it would not do so out of the sump. I had to use tap water as I didn't have enough RO and needed to top up the tank quickly. Luckily I had plenty of salt although the SG had dropped from 1.026 to 1.023. I will raise it again slowly. There was a smell from the sump so I cleaned all filter material inc my Siporax to be on the safe side and so fall all is well with no fish or coral losses although coral wise I'm not out the woods just let. My skimmer is pulling out more than usual as to be expected. Fingers crossed over the next few days.

[atoll]

Often overlooked and getting more and more difficult to find but in many ways ideal for the marine aquarium as decoration. Clumps of barnacle shells are light, hardly reduce water displacement and ideal for many small fish to reside in and even breed in. I bought 3 good size clumps for just £6 on Monday from a guy selling shells on Llandudno pier. They would have cost me a lot more from an LFS. I already had one small clump making 4 and I siliconed them all together to make one big clump. This will be added to the rear corner of my tank soon. Barnacles are also good for popping frags on frag plugs into.

 

[albertthiel]

Came home yesterday after spending a few days at my GFs only to find a major leak and a wet floor. The ATU res was dry and the return pump as sitting in a small amount of water vibrating away but luckily running if not pumping. I must have lost a good few gallons of water. When I saw it it was no longer leaking and the tank wasn't the problem nor the sump. To be honest I am not sure what caused the leak but I guess it was either my Deltec reactor or my filter sock overflowing out of the sump. I stripped the reactor down and retightened all and changed the filter sock ensuring if it overflowed it would not do so out of the sump. I had to use tap water as I didn't have enough RO and needed to top up the tank quickly. Luckily I had plenty of salt although the SG had dropped from 1.026 to 1.023. I will raise it again slowly. There was a smell from the sump so I cleaned all filter material inc my Siporax to be on the safe side and so fall all is well with no fish or coral losses although coral wise I'm not out the woods just let. My skimmer is pulling out more than usual as to be expected. Fingers crossed over the next few days.

 

Wow sorry to read that Les and glad that it was not worse, as it could have been

 

Albert

[HarryPotter]

Often overlooked and getting more and more difficult to find but in many ways ideal for the marine aquarium as decoration. Clumps of barnacle shells are light, hardly reduce water displacement and ideal for many small fish to reside in and even breed in. I bought 3 good size clumps for just £6 on Monday from a guy selling shells on Llandudno pier. They would have cost me a lot more from an LFS. I already had one small clump making 4 and I siliconed them all together to make one big clump. This will be added to the rear corner of my tank soon. Barnacles are also good for popping frags on frag plugs into.

 

 

You can also get yourself HUGE cleaned chunks for cheap from ReefCleaners

[Paul.b]

My blue devil circa 1972 over his nest of eggs in a barnacle shell.

 

[atoll]

Not the best pic as lights not fully on yet. My barnacles cluster is now in with 5kg of LR to lift them I bought for £20off a fellow reefer. Now I have more space to attach some more frags I have. They will get covered in encrusting algae etc ina few weeks so won't stand out like a sore thumb as they do now.

[albertthiel]

Often overlooked and getting more and more difficult to find but in many ways ideal for the marine aquarium as decoration. Clumps of barnacle shells are light, hardly reduce water displacement and ideal for many small fish to reside in and even breed in. I bought 3 good size clumps for just £6 on Monday from a guy selling shells on Llandudno pier. They would have cost me a lot more from an LFS. I already had one small clump making 4 and I siliconed them all together to make one big clump. This will be added to the rear corner of my tank soon. Barnacles are also good for popping frags on frag plugs into.

 

 

Yes indeed very good "fish hotels" I use them myself in my tanks

 

Albert

Not the best pic as lights not fully on yet. My barnacles cluster is now in with 5kg of LR to lift them I bought for £20off a fellow reefer. Now I have more space to attach some more frags I have. They will get covered in encrusting algae etc ina few weeks so won't stand out like a sore thumb as they do now.

 

I like Les

 

Albert

My blue devil circa 1972 over his nest of eggs in a barnacle shell.

 

 

Nice Paul

 

Albert

[atoll]

6 frags so far mounted on the shells and rock. I think I could get a couple more on there.

[albertthiel]

6 frags so far mounted on the shells and rock. I think I could get a couple more on there.

 

Nice Les

[Paul.b]

I have been thinking about this for seven or eight years and finally, through scientific research and my experimentation I think I have figured out something that may change the way we run aquariums. For many years I have been feeding live blackworms, live amphipods and live new born brine shrimp to my tank and I always assumed the excellent health of my fish was a result of that. My fish seem immune from just about everything including bacterial infections and parasites. Although live food seems to be the reason for their immunity, I think I found out the exact mechanism for the immunity. It's not so much that the food is live, but that the bacteria inside the guts of the food is also live. Many of our fish are quarantined for 72 days, then put in a sterile tank and fed things like freeze dried worms, pellets, flakes and frozen food. Almost all of that food is sterile although frozen food "may" have some living bacteria, albeit weak. Fish in the sea eat nothing but live food along with it's associated gut and skin bacteria. New reasearch indicates that a fishes immune system, while vastly different from ours still depends on the fish meeting an infectious agent to impart immunity to the animal. Our immune system is mainly concentrated in our bone marrow but fish have no bone marrow and instead produce antibodies in their kidney and spleen. The bacteria on the food the fish eat filters through the kidney which helps the immune system recognize a threat. The immune response of fish is to produce slime which completely covers the fish and the slime contains "activated macrophages"

Following are just "partial" quotes of this informative article that I have found which makes good reading especially to the many aquarists that don't believe fish can become immune from disease and parasites. I quoted some parts of the article that I thought were more suited to this post but it is incomplete and can be read in full if you Google the link starting with (ISRN ImmunologyVolume 2012 Maria Angeles

Ref:

Copyright © 2012 María Ángeles Esteban. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

 

(ISRN ImmunologyVolume 2012 (2012), Article ID 853470, 29 pageshttp://dx.doi.org/10.5402/2012/853470

Review Article

An Overview of the Immunological Defenses in Fish Skin

María Ángeles Esteban)

Quote: Immunity associated with the parasites depends on the inhabiting discrete sites in the host. Especially important for this paper are the ectoparasites, those habiting in or on the skin. Until recently there had been little direct evidence of innate immune mechanisms against parasites associated with mucosal epithelium [285]. The active immunological role of skin against parasitic infection has been shown recently [286–288], and now mucosal immunity against them start to be elucidated.

Non-parasitic fishes usually die following infection, but animals surviving sublethal parasite exposure become resistant to subsequent challenge. This resistance correlates with the presence of humoral antibodies in the sera and cutaneous mucus of immune fishes.

According to these authors “probiotic for aquaculture is a live, dead or component of a microbial cell that, when administered via the feed or to the rearing water, benefits the host by improving either disease resistance, health status, growth performance, feed utilisation, stress response or general vigour, which is achieved at least in part via improving the hosts or the environmental microbial balance.”

The first demonstration that probiotics can protect fishes against surface infections was against Aeromonas bestiarum and Ichthyophthirius multifiliis in rainbow trout [330]. The research on this topic is considered of high priority at present because enriched diets could be used as preventive or curative therapies for farmed fishes. End Quote

 

Another interesting fact found in a recent issue of Scientific American By Ferris Jabr | September 12, 2012 |

States that zebra fish whose guts were rich in bacteria absorbed more fats from their food as compared to fish in a germ free envirnment which in turn increased the number of energy-rich fat bubbles stored within the fish's intestinal cells for later use.

I also discovered while researching is that fish fed a vaired diet actualy had less bacterial diversity in their gut than fish fed only one or two different types of food. I have always said that fish do not need a vaired diet, they need what they were designed to eat and nothing more. My fish are normally fed only three types of food. Live worms, frozen clams and frozen mysis. The smaller fish are only given live new born brine shrimp. I sometimes increase the diversity of their diet as an experiment but when that is over, they go back to their normal diet.

Coincidently in this months "Popular Science" (August 2015) there is an article about this very topic. The author states that the most germ free envirnment today is on the International Space Station. Everything is sterilized including the air. All the surfaces are coated with bacteria limiting coatings, even the water is treated with iodine and biocidal nano silver so the only bacteria prsent are the ones coming from the astronauts themselves. They can't open a window or send out for Pizza so there is no fresh influx of microbes to balance the ecosystem. Sounds like quarantining doesn't it? He also states that a loss of gut bacteria correlates with many diseases and could impede longer space travel. If we lose our gut bacteria, our immune system goes dormant.

In the real world bacteria, viruses and parasites evolved right along with other organisms that help keep each organism in check. They have their enemies and friends. When we mess with the system by using antibiotics or extended periods of quarantine, or remove living bacteria from their food, we are dooming the fish to a life where they are on the verge of getting a fatal disease.

This is also the reason so many diseases are contracted in hospitals, a place where great pains are taken to keep the place clean. They are clean, so the only bacteria present are from sick people with no other bacteria or viruses to counteract them. It is now thought that people using those hand sanitizers from very young are at a higher risk of becomming an allergic toddler.

Human babies born normally pick up Lactobacillus in the birth canal which helps them digest milk and lowers the gut's pH to the normal range. but babies born by C-section miss out and could be born with Staphlococcus and sometimes antibiotic resistant bacteria. (Rinku Patel Popular Science August 2015)

So after researching all of this I have come to the conclusion that quarantining fish for an extended amount of time is actually very bad for our fishes health. In my opinion, if we want to quarantine I would do it using drugs such as copper in the theory that doing so will kill any parasites present in about 10 days while keeping the immunity the fish intact. Then I would feed at least some live food every day not just for the vitamins that come from live food, but for the bacteria. I am not sure how long a fishes immunity lasts but in the sea, it was immune, or almost immune for it's entire life. When a fish is collected, stored, starved and shipped it is in a very weakened state and their immune system is hardly functioning so even though the immune response to parasites, viruses and bacteria is there. It isn't strong enough to protect the fish, but if we can get it out of stress, fed live bacteria laden food and in a stable envirnment as soon as possable, it will recover and sustain some of their immunity.

How many times do we read that a tank full of quarantined fish suddenly crashes and all the fish are lost to a parasite? It happens daily and all you have to do is go on any fish forum and search for it. Fish quarantined for extended amounts of time and fed sterile foods "have no immune system what so ever". I didn't make this up as you can read the articles I referenced or just Google "Fish Immunity" where you will find a plethora of new research which suggests that keeping fish sterile is the complete wrong thing to do. I rarely put references in my posts because I normally do my own research. But I realize I am not a fish doctor, researcher or marine biologist. What I am is an aquarist with immune fish. How do I know they are immune? I know because some of them have been in my tank for over 20 years, I add fish from many stores and even the sea. I can add fish with obvious parasites and in no case will anything else become infected. Many times during the year I add mud from the sea for the bacteria I always thought it was a good idea, now I know why. My fish get some live food every day and always have. I even think that the fish infected with parasites that I add strengthn the immune system so they never become infected. Of course we can't add parasite infected fish to a system that is not already immune and that is where the problem starts.

. If this is not immunity I am an extreamly lucky individual and should go out and buy lottery tickets today.

[albertthiel]

A most interesting theory Paul and one that makes a LOT of sense indeed

 

Albert

[Paul.b]

Thank you Albert. I try as hard as I can.

[atoll]

New vid of my tank with 5kg of extra living rock in place in the back RH corner of the tank with a large cluster of barnacles on top of it. I have attached 6 frags mainly to the Barnacles. Small fish like Blennies and damsels seek shelter in them and some even spawn in the Barnacles. You can make intricate shapes with the Barnacles by siliconing them together in whatever configuration you desire.

[albertthiel]

Thank you Albert. I try as hard as I can.

Yes I know you do Paul and what you postulate makes a LOT of sense

 

Albert