Tinitanks 5gal pico, The Alcove (thread currently under construction)

[Wingy]

Duncans are vertical and can grow into a nice colony.  One you find the spot they like they are really easy to please.  Mine isn't bothered by things around it or brushing against it.  They love to eat and respond well to target feeding.  Best of all amphipods don't  seem interested in it.

[Hami]

On 9/25/2019 at 11:58 PM, Tired said:

I was really happy to hear from the shop that it should be cycled, too. They've had it for awhile, apparently, and it does look cycled- as much as anything can "look" cycled. The bivalve shells pretty much all seem to be empty, and are free of anything rotting. There's no smell to it (any more than rock and seaweed has), and it doesn't have any warningly-colored substances or anything that looks like it's dying on it. I'll keep an eye on things, of course, but I'm pretty confident that they're right.

 

Unrelated, what is this? The shrimp guy at the LFS wasn't there, and the person who was there wasn't sure which of their (long) list of possibilities this was. She said her best guess was "humpback shrimp", but if I try and google that, it's mostly camel shrimp that come up. This is much cooler, and I want to find out what it is and if I can keep one. That fuzzy bit on its back, at the bent section, is part of its body and not just something behind it. It wasn't doing much, just sitting there looking around. Such a strange-looking thing, though- the snout! It reminds me of a lantern bug. If I had to name this thing, I'd probably call it either a platypus shrimp or a lanternbug shrimp, but I'm sure it has a name already. It was in a tank with some other shrimp and some zoas, so presumably it isn't a danger to those things. 

 

And then this is an anemone shrimp of some sort, right? 

I know that this post was a long time ago... but I found that shrimp... I didn’t see that anyone else found it, so here it is

[Tired]

Oh, yeah, that guy! I did find out what he was, I just forgot to post it here. They also go by Donald Duck shrimp. They're so rarely available in the hobby that there's very little info on them, and I kinda wish I'd bought that guy. They do seem to be at least somewhat reef-safe. 

 

Thanks for the ID, even if I had already found him out. I appreciate it.

[Tired]

Made some purchases that will be arriving in the new year, now that shipping has calmed down a bit. I got some zoas and a Fruity Pebbles encrusting monti from POTO, for one. For another, I've placed an order with KP Aquatics. Some snails, some bits and bobs, and something I'm pretty excited about: this guy.

A roughhead blenny. About the smallest blenny you can get ahold of. Very cute. I wasn't planning on one, but when I saw these were in stock, I had to grab one. Their bioload is really low, and their whole diet is pods. I just have to give it a nice spot where I can easily see it. Hopefully it takes up residence somewhere visible, and not behind the rocks. I'll have to check if I have a tubeworm tube in my shell collection anywhere, these guys apparently love sections of those. 

[Tired]

I got a bunch of stuff. Most of it came in on the 4th, and I've been watching for it to settle in. I don't really have nice photos of most of it, I'll get those once I place everything in final spots. 

 

I do have pictures of this lady! 

She's from KP Aquatics. Male roughhead blennies tend to be darker and have a black spot on their dorsal fin, so this is a female. No name yet. She's very small, only about an inch long, and incredibly slender. 

 

She's set up shop in a hole on the front of one rock, where I can easily see her. She's a bit picky about food- she won't take any prepared foods I blow directly at her. I have to put it next to her, and after it settles on the rocks, she'll eat it. She's mostly eating copepods for now, and since she's so very tiny, I give her frozen BBS now and then. She'll try to tackle larger food, but can't swallow chunks of PE mysis with any degree of success. 

She's hard to photograph because she's very small. For perspective, that first picture (taken by flashlight at night) has a goby who's about 1 1/4" long. Doesn't help that she's near the back of the tank. Surprisingly bold, though, she'll sit in there and watch as I rearrange things with the tongs. Funny contrast to the goby, who darts for cover if I so much as move too quickly near the tank. I guess having a hole to dive into makes her more confident. 

(Also notice: the porcelain crab molted between these photos. It grows brown algae all over itself, then sheds and turns shiny again.)

I love this fish. Hope she lives a long time. She has these little cirri that move when she's looking around, and she watches me when I come near the tank. Expressive little face. 

She'll top out at an inch and a half, and stay really slender. I don't think I'll have any bioload concerns, since the fish I have in here are just her and the goby. 

 

The antenna goby is AWOL, unfortunately. Has been for months. The pistol shrimp stopped sounding off at the same time as I stopped seeing it in its burrow. I don't know if something fell on them both, or if they somehow killed each other, or if it was coincidence. I'm getting another pistol shrimp, but I don't know if I'll get another antenna goby. That's the third one I've tried- the first one jumped, the second vanished, and now this one's vanished. I don't know what happened to the second two. I don't think the trimma goby was responsible- I saw him near the third one, and he just sat there, no chasing that could have caused anything. Trimma gobies aren't very aggressive anyway. 

The pederson's shrimp is gone, too. I got a new pump, and had some trouble hooking it up properly to the outlets, so it was temporarily pointing kind of a weird direction. It blew right over the mushrooms, strongly enough that the shrimp left them. I didn't think that would have hurt the shrimp (I figured it would either hang out in something else, or be OK for a couple days, since they don't just keel over dead in holding tanks from not having mushrooms with them), but the day I was able to put the flow back to normal, I couldn't find the shrimp. Still can't. It seemed sort of subdued while out of the mushrooms, but I didn't know that would apparently hurt it. Poor lil guy. 

I can't find the heart mime crab either, no clue when that happened. For all I know it's still alive, but I think I would have seen it by now. 

 

Corals are mostly growing well, or are at least not dying, but I'm having some algae trouble. I first attributed it to the death of a very large snail during Election Week (when I didn't really have the energy to do water changes, due to being on strong anxiety meds to prevent an adrenaline issue from riling me up horribly), then to having gone too long without changing the carbon filter in my RODI unit. I don't think either thing helped, but after having changed the filter, done many water changes since then, and added a few more snails, I still have algae. Mostly cyano, with some hair algae underneath it. It's going down slowly, at least.

After some reading, this seems to happen sometimes in tanks around the one-year mark. It's frequently attributed to a buildup of organic matter in the tank. There's definitely quite a bit of gunk behind the rocks. Which brings me to the largest issue this tank is having: I should not have put the rocks this close to the walls. I can't get  behind them to clean, and I think my snails are having trouble getting back there to clean. 

So, I'm going to fix that. I'm not going to drastically change my aquascape, but I think, with some fiddling, I can move the rocks inward enough to allow snails and siphons to get behind the rocks on either side. I'm also going to remove the sand behind the rocks, as it's laden with detritus. I think I'll fish out the micro brittles, rinse it, and put about half of it back. We'll see if that helps the algae. At least the corals are healthy! They're annoyed by algae, but healthy. 

In the interest of honesty, here's an "I haven't cleaned the glass in awhile" pic. I didn't clean it right before the pic because I have lemon juice all over my hands. My coral cutters got rusty, and we have a decorative lemon tree in our yard that sheds lemons constantly. I went out, got some lemons, cut about a dozen of them into quarters, and squeezed it into a bowl. Soaked the cutters in that, and they work perfectly now. But my hands smell really lemony, and I don't think I should put them in the tank until that wears off a bit. 

That triangle of cyano up against the glass is my decorator crab. It seems to like the cyano, and since the snails can't crawl on it to clean it, it's got loads of the stuff on it. 

 

On a positive algae note, I got my hypnea to start growing, finally. It melted away to basically nothing, but the tiniest little fragment of it survived, and is growing. It's multiple half-inch strands now, camouflaged against the rocks on the back wall. I'm not touching it until there's a nice big clump in that area, but I hope to transplant some of it around. I also have the encrusting halimeda growing, and the codium. Most of the rest is largely gone, except for strands hanging out behind the rocks, thanks to the algae that engulfed them.

 

My micro brittle stars are doing well. The white ones have multiplied a bunch, and the "black" (striped) ones have grown. I'm hoping they'll multiply, too. Anyone near Austin want some white micro brittles? You can have 'em if you come get them, I have spares. 

 

My encrusting montipora is growing nicely. It lost the color in its polyps (suspect high phosphate, low light relative to high phosphate, or both), but the color on the base is solid, and it's growing. So I got a JF Fruity Pebbles encrusting monti. It lost most of the color on its base while in shipping, but has nice polyp extension and polyp color, and a few patches of blue. Guess it got stressed. Will post a close picture when it gets its color back. 

You can see my montipora containment strategy on the back wall there. I made a flat piece of putty, then attached the Mystic Sunset to the top of that. Now, once it gets near the edges, I can just cut it back and add new putty edges. The JF Fruity Pebbles was too tightly attached to a frag plug to remove, so the putty on that one is around the plug. That putty is gray because I ground up some activated charcoal and put it all over the putty, to try and make it less white. Worked okay. 

 

I can't photograph it nicely, but I got a little RFA, about an inch and a half across. In front of it is some Nirvana zoas, which are going to stay on a frag plug in the sand because they're apparently a very fast grower. Next to it is a Chemical Warfare favia (got it as a "mystery frag" from TSA), which I will be moving further away from that anemone. It's a type of favia with very small polyps, like the Fascination favia, so I'm going to give it a try. Apparently their sting range is only a couple inches, even once they get a bit larger, and right now it's only a half-inch frag. Really nice colors, too. I made a frag disc extender, with more charcoal dust on it. 

 

The blue-green sympodium is looking nice. It grows slowly, but has gotten larger polyps since I started feeding it. It has some Sonic Flare zoas to the right of it (which I'm probably not keeping in that spot), and I believe those are Eagle Eye zoas in front of them? Very small, very cute. Got them as a freebie with the rock flower anemone. The Holy Grail micromussa (which has not kept its full color under my lighting- "tweak lighting to try for more color" is another thing on my list to do this year) is directly below the sympodium, with some nice feeding tentacle extension. It's been growing. 

 

This is what I got for my branching coral. Nice little candycane. This pic is just after putting it in the tank, it's puffed up since then. I'm keeping it near the ricordeas until it grows larger, and plan to eventually attach it to the rock near the Captain Jerks palys, once it's long enough to get into the light despite their shading. 

 

I got this nice Vulcan/Bloodsuckers combo frag. They make a good combination. I know there's some risk of zoas eventually overwhelming each other, but I'm going to keep them together because I like how they look. The frag was a good price for either zoa variety, so if one eventually gets crowded out, oh well. I think I'll put them where I formerly had the pink clove polyps. I took those off the rockwork- decided I didn't want to deal with trying to wrangle the little buggers. They get to go on a frag disc while I decide if I want to keep them.

Funnily enough, my mystery zoas that I ordered from TSA were Bloodsuckers also. They're another type, though. I think these are WWC and those are TSA strain Bloodsuckers? The other ones (don't have a pic) don't have the sort of black radial stripes, and their frill is more towards bronze, not gray. Might let those mix in, too, see how they look.

 

These on the left are Pink Candy Apples, I think. The others, I'm pretty sure are bleached. Didn't realize it from the sale photo, but in person they don't look quite right. Ah well, they opened fast and seem healthy, bet they'll recover. Curious to see what they'll grow into. The ones above those are the yellow-eyed blue zoas that KP Aquatics sells, which have opened up since then. 

[Tired]

Oh, right. I was going to actually put my to-do list here. 

 

-Contain the Captain Jerks better. I like them and want to keep them, but my original plan to fence them with macros didn't work so well (because all the macros melted), so now they're loose. I think I'm going to use coral cutters to snip the rockwork they're attached to off, then use a similar strategy to what I'm doing with the encrusting monti. I figure the safest route is to make them a sort of frag plug, that I can specifically take out of the tank to prune when needed. 

 

-Move the rockwork in slightly so I can get a siphon down both sides of the tank more easily. 

 

-Siphon out all the detritus back there. 

 

-Find final positions for corals. 

 

-Slowly increase my lighting intensity a bit to see if the corals respond well. Possibly adjust lighting color slightly. I'm willing to sacrifice some color if it means I can keep the light at a look I prefer, I don't really like the look of those solid blue tanks. 

 

-Manage algae. I've already changed the photoperiod- previously my lights were on full from 10am to 8pm, with a 10-minute ramp-up in the morning (so as not to scare the fish, mostly), and an hour of the lowest possible setting from 8 to 9, in an effort to lure amphipods out for my fish to eat. So that was a 10-hour period of the lights being at full brightness. I took an hour off at the end of the day, and that hour will be at a very low level now instead. Figured it was worth a shot to try 9 hours of full brightness, instead. 

 

-Get candycane pistol shrimp, and keep an eye out for mime crabs for sale. Also dove snails. Planning on an order from ReefCleaners in the spring, when more stuff comes out of hiding and they can catch it. Probably get another anemone shrimp.

[A.m.P]

Someone else looking for dove snails, a fellow reefer of culture! Although I've read that the lightnings are anecdotally useless compared to the varieties out of indo.

 

Lol I think moving the rocks is a great idea, thanks for the update.

[Tired]

They're pretty snails, and I like that they breed in aquariums. I like variety in my snails, too. Figure they're worth a shot. And cute, newly hatched snails would be pretty nice, too. Hoping RC gets some in this spring. 

 

Part of the reason I had the rocks so close to the walls was I was trying to keep too many things from getting knocked down there by hermits. I'm just going to glue things instead, and/or not put them near the edges. I love my hermits, but scarlet reef hermits apparently like to lift things and look under them for food, and I wish they wouldn't. They're great at rolling things away from where you meant to put whatever it was.

[Tired]

Found what looked like some kind of eunicid worm tonight. 5" or so, fairly slender, was crawling across the front glass. I haven't fed recently and suspect it was looking for scraps due to that. Tried to remove it with my tongs to get a picture and more accurate ID, inadvertently snipped through it- I forgot these break really easily into pieces. The front two-thirds escaped, the back third is now food for my decorator crab. Sorry about that, worm. Note to self: next time, use the turkey baster. 

 

I'm not worried. I've had these in the tank since the start, and haven't seen any signs of them chewing corals. If it started getting really big, I might try to remove it. I wonder if I can figure out where it lives, to keep an eye on it better. 

 

Edit: I have captured what looks like some kind of eunicid worm. Got up to brush my teeth and saw it squiggling around in midwater. It had gone near where my trimma goby lives- I wonder if he tried to eat it? 

I had some clean water available, so did a one-pint water change and put this guy in a container with the tank water. Just want to double-check that no one has had a worm that looks exactly like this that comes with a story to the general extent of "when it got big, it ate all my corals, stole my identity, and committed tax fraud". 

[Tired]

Rocks are uncooperative and frustrating to arrange, and I am very much not pleased with having spent 3 hours struggling to accomplish what seemed like a very simple change to my scape. I didn't get what I was going for, and couldn't figure out how to put the scape back the way it was. It's fairly similar, but a lot of things are lower now. This may turn out to be good, but I have to ignore it for the rest of today, otherwise I'm just going to obsess over it. 

 

Was somewhat entertained the whole time by the blenny. She was in one of the rocks I was moving. Sitting in the rock while I moved it, tucked slightly back into her hole but not crammed into it. She would resume a normal posture whenever I put the rock down, and frequently caught bugs that I had disturbed. The goby cowered the whole time, poor thing, but the blenny seemed largely unbothered by the giant yellow hand periodically picking up and moving her rock. She also doesn't even tuck back when I'm in there with tongs moving things around. Incredibly bold little animal. I think she would try to eat my fingers if they looked like food. 

[billygoat]

5 hours ago, Tired said:

Rocks are uncooperative and frustrating to arrange, and I am very much not pleased with having spent 3 hours struggling to accomplish what seemed like a very simple change to my scape. I didn't get what I was going for, and couldn't figure out how to put the scape back the way it was. It's fairly similar, but a lot of things are lower now. This may turn out to be good, but I have to ignore it for the rest of today, otherwise I'm just going to obsess over it. 

 

Was somewhat entertained the whole time by the blenny. She was in one of the rocks I was moving. Sitting in the rock while I moved it, tucked slightly back into her hole but not crammed into it. She would resume a normal posture whenever I put the rock down, and frequently caught bugs that I had disturbed. The goby cowered the whole time, poor thing, but the blenny seemed largely unbothered by the giant yellow hand periodically picking up and moving her rock. She also doesn't even tuck back when I'm in there with tongs moving things around. Incredibly bold little animal. I think she would try to eat my fingers if they looked like food. 

Changing the 'scape is just the worst. I don't think I've ever made any rockscape adjustments (even for just one rock!) that took less than an hour, and I've easily spent four or five hours working on more complex changes. And of course, it's just as you say - as soon as you decide you liked it better the way it used to be, you quickly discover that you have no idea how to get it back to looking the way it did before! 😅

 

Hopefully the new arrangement works out for both you and the animals. I think it's a good decision to set it aside for awhile and come back to it later with a fresh perspective.

[Tired]

There's the whole stress of "I've been doing this for awhile now and scaring things, I should finish up soon" on top of everything else. And, in my case, the whole "I physically do not feel well if I stand upright without walking for this long". Plus, now I get to re-think where I'm placing a lot of these coral frags. So that's even more stuff to decide where I want to put it. 

 

Gotta say, the initial aquascape is much easier. You don't really have to worry about existing creatures, just one or two hitchhikers if you've got nice live rock. No "okay, where are all the crabs, where's the fish, where are the snails, should I go to the trouble of chasing everything around to catch it?" 

 

I think I'm going to like the new scape. I'll get a picture tomorrow. More of the back is visible, which gives some potential for zoas to climb up, and more space for a couple of encrusting montis. It might have given me a spot for these really nice Frozen Apples to go. 

 

Lighting's weird because the dust hasn't settled yet, but here's the still-unnamed blenny, probably wondering what all the fuss was about. I've never had a fish so calm about me rearranging things. Things with her in them, no less! 

And before I was moving that rock around, she was in her other hole, in a different rock, while I took a bone cutter and then a chisel to the rock to remove my Captain Jerks palys. She put up with most of it! Just stared at what I was doing, until she finally got annoyed with it and moved to this rock. She seems to go back and forth between the two holes, and I'm not sure under what criteria. 

[Tired]

Well, I've just seen the first conflict between the blenny and anything in my tank. 

 

I have a porcelain crab. I regularly feed mysis pieces to the porcelain crab, to keep it well-fed. When I give it large pieces, it makes a hugging motion with its claws to corral the food, then catches the food in its fans to eat. I just saw it do that with the blenny. She darted out of its grip, of course, and it made no effort to grab her again. It didn't do any harm, since it didn't grab with its claws. My guess is it mistook her for a piece of mysis, as I was feeding the tank at the time. 

 

(She also seems to be a bit annoyed with the bristleworm that's found its way into one of her two hidey-holes, but that's a bit less dramatic.)

[Tired]

Cyano's pretty much gone, except a spot on the decorator crab. I'll try to remember to clean the glass and actually get a picture. 

 

Blenny scared me by vanishing for a week, but I found her again. She's taken up residence in a shell, on the sandbed, right by the glass. Behind a patch of algae. She's also turned nearly the same color as the shell, which is interesting- I didn't know these did that. She's darker than before, and mottled. 

I think she may have moved to get away from the things that live in the rocks. One rock she seemed to like is full of micro brittles. I'd imagine having those in one's home is annoying. She also frequently grabs at pods while in her new spot- it seems to be good for that. I'm making sure to have a bit of food escape the corals at every feeding, so the pods are well-fed, as I'm starting to see fewer and fewer of them now that two fish are eating them. I'd try to feed the fish during feeds also, but one hides when I open the lid, and the other isn't really interested in prepared foods. She'll occasionally take a bit if I place it right next to her, but interestingly won't grab it out of the water column. I guess if it's in the water, she wants it to be moving. She'll take frozen BBS sometimes, and will snatch up fragments of mysis that land in the right spot. 

 

I need to pull out some of that white sponge. It seems harmless enough, but there's a lot of it starting to get amongst bits of stuff on the sandbed, and I don't really want it all in the sand. Fortunately it's very easy to yank. Unfortunately, bits of it attach to things easily, are pulled loose when that thing is moved by a hermit, and then wind up elsewhere.

[Tired]

Small update before the power goes out again. Battery backup saving the tank, my room has gotten very cold every time the power goes out. I have this big heavy thing the size of a lead-filled shoebox, with my pump and heaters plugged into it. I can't say the temperature has definitely been stable, but it's stayed acceptable. Everything seems to be doing fine so far, except that the hypnea sprig died a bit ago. It got chewed on pretty heavily right after I rearranged the tank (I think it got stressed by being removed from the water for a bit, and the amphipods gobbled it up), and then the quarter-inch sprig of it that was left fell behind the rockwork and died off fully. So I guess I'll have to order some of that again when live-plants.com has it back in stock. And when it's not below freezing outside.

 

Getting macros and corals to both grow in the same tank is turning out to be trickier than expected. 

 

I ordered a small canister filter. When the power goes out, I can hear the pump running. That's fine for me, but it makes me fixate a bit on if the fish are bothered by the vibrations. I want to move the pump out of the tank entirely, and a canister filter will do that! I figure if it's only attached by soft tubes, and any place where it touches the tank or stand is padded, the vibration is nice and contained. Plus, maybe detritus will wind up in there and I can clean it out easily. I won't have any media in the canister (except maybe some activated charcoal, if it's convenient to put in), so it shouldn't build up gunk too badly. 

[ZekesReef]

Ahh thats so rouch with the power! Is it a little computer UPS? The work ok for low powered things.

You could always try a little prefilter thing with filter material in it to catch any detritis. That would also be an easy thing to clean leaving the canister for circulation/bio filtration. Even if you put some lattice work/egg crate in there to allow sponge and other filter feeding inverts to grow should provide some beneficial area. 

Try and get some flow going in behind those rocks. That should stop a lot of the debris settling there. Give it a good turkey basting and wait for it to settle in the tank and you should be able to siphon it off the sand.

Tend to find with algae control less is more. Less snails = less bioload = less nutrients. Astrea for the glass, strombus for the sand. 

[Tired]

It's a thing nearly a foot across, very heavy for its size, meant to power larger computer-type electronics. Holds more than enough power to keep a little pump and two mini heaters alive. If it came down to it, I'd unplug the pump- I know an aquarium can last some amount of time with just stirring for circulation, but I wouldn't want to let it go without heat with the power out. It did get down to 62F early on (before I put the space heater closer to it), but nothing seemed to mind too much. I'm sure that would be a bad thing long-term. 

 

I'm going to have a look at how easy it would be to baste detritus out of the filter, when the filter arrives. If that would be difficult, I'll add a prefilter. If not, I'll leave it alone and just suck the detritus out. That way there's no prefilter to slowly get clogged up. 

 

I'd have to have some exposed sand, first, to do that. It's pretty much all covered in frag plugs right now. I'm trying to decide on final locations for things. 

 

The thing is, I don't want less nutrients, not really. I have corals that like nutrients quite a bit. I'm trying to find a balance for the tank that will work with few water changes (for chronic fatigue safety), so I'm trying to find a balance that tends to have higher nutrients and likes it. This seems to be approaching it. The algae is largely gone by now, I just have the tiny patch of cyano on the decorator crab, and a little hair algae on the very white putty around my encrusting montis. For snails, I mostly have a lot of dwarf ceriths. I like them, they're multi-purpose. 

I'm not too worried about algae, anyway. As long as it's not bothering my corals, it's fine. 

[Tired]

Here's sort of a photo update. I got a canister filter.

I worry about the vibrations bothering the fish, like I mentioned above. Now the vibrations have been banished to outside the tank. No vibrations can make it fully up those soft hoses into the tank, so they can't bug the fish. Plus, that's half a gallon of extra volume, and will hopefully trap detritus. There's a screw-in plug thing on top of the filter that I could easily get a turkey baster into, to get detritus out. There's no media in the filter, but I might pop some activated carbon in there eventually.

My only reservation is that I don't know how easily I can access the actual pump, to clean and otherwise fiddle with it. Honestly, I forgot to check. I doubt it comes apart very easily. 

 

Everything is, for the most part, continuing to grow well. My rics seem somewhat displeased, off and on, so I'm not sure what's up with them. My Holy Grail micromussa briefly started to recede, but after I started to make sure to feed it frequently, it's bounced right back and started growing again. 

 

I'm about 95% sure the blenny can change colors, or at least color intensity, depending on where she is. It's hard to tell from different angles, but she seemed paler when she was trying out that white shell. Don't mind the Nirvanas being tall in the background, I need to move them to somewhere else. 

[Wingy]

During the last long power outage I surrounded the tank with plastic soda bottles filled with hot water and wrapped the whole thing in old towels.  It kept the tank warm and was easy to do.  

[Tired]

That's a good strategy. We have gas-powered heaters, so I could have taken the tank to be in front of them, worst-case scenario. Or put the whole thing in a styrofoam cooler, I suppose. A good battery backup is probably simpler, though.

[Tired]

I have something that should be arriving tomorrow, that I'm really excited about. First off, I finally got a money cowrie. I had one in my previous tank, years ago, and wanted to try one in this tank. Partly since my hermit crabs have been steadily eating every glass-climbing snail I add that's larger than the 1/3" virgin nerite. Lil bastards. I'd get rid of them if they weren't kinda cute. But money cowries, since they have a small opening into their shell, are hermit-resistant if not outright hermit-proof. Plus, they're neat on their own merits, and they have an interesting history. Their shells were used as currency for centuries. I couldn't find a conversion into modern money, and it seems like their value fluctuated a lot depending on where you were and who you asked anyway. 

 

I also got a couple more virgin nerites, some halimeda, hopefully some codium if I placed that order addition in time (mine got shoved behind the rocks and melted), a bag of copepods (to meet the minimum order requirement), and something I've wanted for nearly a decade. I'll show it off tomorrow. In the meantime, anyone want to guess? It's a crustacean, rarely available in the hobby, that's not a crab but looks like one. It's commonly found living on another creature, and used to be available entirely as a hitchhiker on that creature, but doesn't require that creature to live. 

[Ratvan]

20 hours ago, Tired said:

I have something that should be arriving tomorrow, that I'm really excited about. First off, I finally got a money cowrie. I had one in my previous tank, years ago, and wanted to try one in this tank. Partly since my hermit crabs have been steadily eating every glass-climbing snail I add that's larger than the 1/3" virgin nerite. Lil bastards. I'd get rid of them if they weren't kinda cute. But money cowries, since they have a small opening into their shell, are hermit-resistant if not outright hermit-proof. Plus, they're neat on their own merits, and they have an interesting history. Their shells were used as currency for centuries. I couldn't find a conversion into modern money, and it seems like their value fluctuated a lot depending on where you were and who you asked anyway. 

 

I also got a couple more virgin nerites, some halimeda, hopefully some codium if I placed that order addition in time (mine got shoved behind the rocks and melted), a bag of copepods (to meet the minimum order requirement), and something I've wanted for nearly a decade. I'll show it off tomorrow. In the meantime, anyone want to guess? It's a crustacean, rarely available in the hobby, that's not a crab but looks like one. It's commonly found living on another creature, and used to be available entirely as a hitchhiker on that creature, but doesn't require that creature to live. 

Squat lobster?

[debbeach13]

Squat lobsters are in stock at reef cleaners

[Tired]

Ah, y'all got me. It's a squat lobster! Which has now come in the mail. I'll post pics later once it's all settled in. It's a black one with some white streaks, which I'm happy about- that's one of my favorite patterns. That's the pattern I originally wanted, back when the only place that ever had them was constantly out of stock. It's pretty small right now, maybe 3/4" in length with the claws factored in? But it's not so teeny it'll get lost, not in a pico. 

 

I wonder how long it'll take to teach it that the tweezers have food in them. I'd put money on "not long". 

 

The virgin nerites are nice patterns, too. 

[Tired]

https://imgur.com/gallery/mYWtwoQ

There we go! Click through for some short phone videos. 

 

This is a cute little animal. I'll have to name it. It almost reminds me of a spider, more than anything, because it has little appendages that look like pedipalps. It can swim, though! I forgot that squat lobsters can swim like shrimp do, juttering backwards. Tried to catch it out of the bag, and it shot around backwards for a bit instead of clinging onto the mesh. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, I've seen video of pelagic squat lobster species. I just hadn't made the connection that this kind can swim, too. 

 

Time to teach it to take food from tweezers: none. I gave it food and it took the food. Curious to see how long it'll take to start getting excited when it sees tweezers. 

 

Bonus pic: squat lobster lurking. I wonder where it'll end up living? I thought it might like to hide in the halimeda, but it's wound up there instead.