Billy's 40g Florida Keys Biotope

[lizzyann]

I've thought a lot about that too and grappled with it when starting my tank. I definitely wanted to only get captive bred fish and aquacultured/fragged corals and didn't stick to it at all, but continue to try and you've definitely motivated me to stick to it! I'm too good at compartmentalizing, hah. If I actually consider my morals, I would probably be vegan and definitely not in this hobby, but "out of site out of mind" comes easily to me. I can totally understand seeing the nitty gritty of wholesale every day start to wear you down! Appreciate the view point and reminder!

[A.m.P]

Captive-bred and direct from supplier are the only real "solutions" I can think of and they're far more expensive. The main issue which crops up is the accessibility and profitability we all expect, at least that I can see, but bottom-line is that aquarists have to do a better job teaching newcomers how to care for their animals and somehow we have to end up with more respect for them -as a society- to begin with. Given the situation with puppy mills and the equivalents for other domestic animals, the rare animal trade and smuggling outside of the aquarium hobby, and countless other bits going-on, well we're a long way off. 

Your animals already went through what they did to get into your system, breaking it down isn't going to change that or make it go away, they're better off in there than in 90% of tanks in the hobby, better-off than in the store or middleman holding system, and, most-likely, better off than in the wild. Past that, at the moment, you're mostly just paying power companies and salt manufacturers haha...

The further you zoom out and the more context you become aware of the uglier the picture gets, not just for our hobby either, I'm sorry that its' put such a damper on your ability to enjoy your system and your animals.
In terms of sustainability, the freshwater scene has us beat -no competition at all-, but saltwater is catching up specifically because some people do care and are putting in tremendous effort to change the hobby for the better, it'd be a shame to lose one of them.

[billygoat]

13 hours ago, growsomething said:

Hmmm

 

As someone who grew up netting fish and shrimp for bait,  I have no problem keeping them in a tank for my enjoyment, however, an 80% death rate for a hobby is pretty unacceptably high.

What do you think about our FL suppliers?  I've only heard good things about KP aquatics, TB Saltwater, Gulf Coast Ecosystems, etc. and their responsible handling of livestock.  That is who I've mostly used with one exception.

Netting fish for bait is one thing, especially if you're going to use them for something, but importing them at great cost for essentially no reason is something else, I think. The 80% figure is just a wild guess based on the small part of the supply chain that I've experienced, so take that with a grain of salt; I'm not sure if any actual research on medium-term mortality even exists.

 

As for the FL suppliers - honestly, if you're going to buy wild-caught livestock, the Caribbean species out of Florida are the way to go. The supply chain is MUCH shorter because most of the FL retailers buy direct from collectors without having to deal with wholesalers, and the animals don't have to be shipped internationally. Plus collectors in FL are subject to strict laws that regulate what species they can take off the reef, how much of each they can get from a given place at a time, and what methods they use to collect animals. Collectors in places like the Philippines have lax regulations that are rarely enforced, which often results in the use of easy but destructive collecting practices (e.g. cyanide).

[billygoat]

12 hours ago, lizzyann said:

I've thought a lot about that too and grappled with it when starting my tank. I definitely wanted to only get captive bred fish and aquacultured/fragged corals and didn't stick to it at all, but continue to try and you've definitely motivated me to stick to it! I'm too good at compartmentalizing, hah. If I actually consider my morals, I would probably be vegan and definitely not in this hobby, but "out of site out of mind" comes easily to me. I can totally understand seeing the nitty gritty of wholesale every day start to wear you down! Appreciate the view point and reminder!

Of course there are many things I would change about my life as well, if I really stuck to my morals all the time! 😅 But I think this thing really got to me because it was my job. I felt like I was being paid to participate in something I just couldn't condone at all, and that was part of what made it very difficult for me to handle.

 

10 hours ago, A.m.P said:

Captive-bred and direct from supplier are the only real "solutions" I can think of, and they're far more expensive. The main issue which crops up is the accessibility and profitability we all expect, at least that I can see, but bottom-line is that aquarists have to do a better job teaching newcomers how to care for their animals, and somehow we have to end up with more respect for them -as a society- to begin with. Given the situation with puppy mills and the equivalents for other domestic animals, the rare animal trade and smuggling outside of the aquarium hobby, and countless other bits going-on, well we're a long way off. 

Your animals already went through what they did to get into your system, breaking it down isn't going to change that or make it go away, they're better off in there than in 90% of tanks in the hobby, better-off than in the store or middleman holding system, and, most-likely, better off than in the wild. Past that, at the moment, you're mostly just paying power companies and salt manufacturers haha...

The further you zoom out and the more context you become aware of the uglier the picture gets, not just for our hobby either, I'm sorry that its' put such a damper on your ability to enjoy your system and your animals.
In terms of sustainability, the freshwater scene has us beat -no competition at all-, but saltwater is catching up specifically because some people do care and are putting in tremendous effort to change the hobby for the better, it'd be a shame to lose one of them.

There are certainly ways to make it better, as you've mentioned, and I think that in the future the hobby is going to have to become more sustainable whether it wants to be or not, simply because pressures on wild reefs will eventually mount to the point that it's no longer economically viable to collect animals. I was trying to brainstorm different ways to make the aquarium industry better, and all the things I could come up with (Strict government oversight of the entire trade? Astronomically increasing prices on everything to limit casual entry? Placing requirements for permitting and certification on home aquarists?) all seemed so farfetched as to be essentially impossible at this point in time. 

 

Anyway, I'm not going to be quitting or breaking down my tank, so don't worry about that. But I certainly will be paying much more attention to the cost of the decisions that I make when it comes to things like this in the future.

[A.m.P]

1 hour ago, billygoat said:

There are certainly ways to make it better, as you've mentioned, and I think that in the future the hobby is going to have to become more sustainable whether it wants to be or not, simply because pressures on wild reefs will eventually mount to the point that it's no longer economically viable to collect animals. I was trying to brainstorm different ways to make the aquarium industry better, and all the things I could come up with (Strict government oversight of the entire trade? Astronomically increasing prices on everything to limit casual entry? Placing requirements for permitting and certification on home aquarists?) all seemed so farfetched as to be essentially impossible at this point in time. 

 

Anyway, I'm not going to be quitting or breaking down my tank, so don't worry about that. But I certainly will be paying much more attention to the cost of the decisions that I make when it comes to things like this in the future.

Selective disenfranchisement is a seriously-potent tool, and one which can easily keep people who shouldn't be in possession of something out nearly-entirely (that holds true for quite a few topics) but beyond that there's simply the issue of sheer numbers since breeding saltwater animals is hellish compared to freshwater.

Getting a batch of clowns or cardinals, which breed readily in our systems, post-meta is a monumental effort for first-timers and hobbiest level enthusiasts, as opposed to freshwater where you can throw 10 ricefish into a stagnant rubbermaid horse-trough and have 300 by the time it freezes over (and they'll survive the winter too).

It's an uphill climb and I don't begrudge you wanting to personally step back from it in the slightest, I'm glad to hear you won't be getting out for the time being, raising awareness can help but in the era of social media people are rightly sick of being overwhelmed by awareness, every day is proclaimed a different day for "Awareness" and it's mentally/emotionally exhausting/unproductive.
The best we can do is try to ensure those getting into the hobby get into it the right way, to encourage retailers and consumers to buy responsibly, and to make sure alternatives are available and well-known wherever we possibly can, or at least that's the best I've been able to come up with. 

[billygoat]

I suppose I should also post some pictures of the tank, since we're all here already and all. 😅

 

Glare season is back, which means it's impossible for me to take an FTS without also taking a photo of my reflection. But here you go!

 

 

 

 

 

[growsomething]

That last shot is really nice!

[billygoat]

On 5/4/2021 at 4:48 PM, growsomething said:

That last shot is really nice!

Thanks! That particular Ricordea is a freak of nature. It's hard to see from that photo angle but it actually wraps around the side of the rock on the left. It's probably almost 4" across when fully expanded.

[danistarr]

On 5/2/2021 at 8:43 AM, billygoat said:

Hello Nano-Reef friends. It's been a minute since I've posted here, but don't you worry - the biotope is still going strong. In fact there really isn't much to report. Everything is growing and I have no problems to speak of. My fish get along and the chromis still haven't killed each other. The only real "event" that's happened in past few months is the arrival of a new hermit crab. His name is Chad the Rad Crab and he is kind of a big deal.

 

 

I have no idea what kind of crab Chad is. He's got crazy fuzzy tarantula legs and weird beady eyes on long yellow stalks, and extremely long antennae. I got him from work (I work - or rather, worked; more on that later - as an aquarist at a marine livestock wholesaler), where he was imported as a halloween hermit crab. That's not what he is, of course, but all I can really tell you about him is that he's probably in the genus Dardanus and that he comes from the Philippines. This makes him the first non-canon inhabitant of my Florida biotope, but I think that's fine. He's just a hermit crab, after all.

 

Chad is a pretty large hermit. At first I was concerned that he would make a mess of my tank and leave a swathe of destruction behind him wherever he went, but so far he seems pretty docile. He moves slowly, and spends a lot of time in every place that he stops. He has shown no signs whatsoever of being interested in my fish, and he seems to eat the turf algae in my tank that nothing has ever been interested in before. I know that this innocent behavior could change in a hurry under the right circumstances, but so far Chad hasn't done anything more nefarious than trample my palythoas a little. I think he is going to fit in just fine.

 

So what am I doing getting random murder hermits and putting them into my otherwise perfectly balanced and beautiful tank? Well, I had to leave my job as an aquarist recently, and I just couldn't leave Chad behind. He had been imported as one thing and ended up being another, which means that he was classified as a misfit animal that would probably have never been sold. He'd have lived out his last days in a gross holding system, where he would have more than likely starved to death in a tiny plastic jar. I know he's just a dumb crab, but for some odd reason when it was time for me to go I couldn't leave Chad behind. So he's living in the biotope now.

 

Which brings me to something I've been meaning to talk about for awhile: I am not sure how I feel about this hobby anymore. 

 

I mentioned that I used to be an aquarist for an aquarium wholesaler. Wholesalers are the middlemen who link your local fish store with the collectors and suppliers in places like Indonesia, Bali, and the Philippines. They import fish and invertebrates and store them temporarily, usually in large systems located in warehouses near international airports, until the animals can be sold to retailers around the country. When a buyer is found the animals are put into bags, boxed up, and sent into the mail once again to arrive wherever they are destined to go. Practically every fish you will ever see in an LFS has been through this process. I am a good aquarist, and I worked diligently to give the animals in our systems the best possible care during the short time that I saw them, but after a certain point I just couldn't take it anymore. I realized that for every healthy, happy fish you see swimming in a public aquarium or in the tank of an expert hobbyist, dozens of others have died at some point along the chain of supply. I don't have any actual statistics for you, but if I had to field a guess I would say that the six month mortality rate for fish collected for eventual sale in retail stores is at least 80%, if not even higher. This isn't really a matter of husbandry, it's just an unavoidable result of the stresses applied to delicate animals taken out of their natural environment, or in some cases a by-product of the poisonous chemicals that many collectors use to stun fish for easy harvesting. By the time a wild-caught Nemo ends up on display in a tank at your LFS, it has probably spent more than 50 hours in a series of plastic bags and usually has flown on three or four different airplanes.

 

The greatest mortality occurs within the short period of time (usually a few weeks) between collection and retail sale, but even after animals run the gauntlet of importation, the survivors often don't last too long. This is beneficial for importers, because the aquarium hobby relies on high tertiary mortality in order to turn a profit: the fish that we keep in our little glass boxes can live for a very long time under the right circumstances, so if home aquarists weren't constantly killing things there wouldn't be much of a market for continued imports. When I thought about all of this for long enough I realized that the industry I had become a part of was not something that I could justify supporting. To know that my actions every day were contributing to an enterprise that is so wasteful and so fundamentally unsustainable caused me an extreme amount of cognitive dissonance. For this and other reasons I eventually decided to cease working as an aquarist, and my relationship with the hobby has fundamentally changed.

 

I have been in and around aquariums for my entire life, and I've always had a more-or-less vague understanding of what goes on behind the supply-chain curtain. But it's one thing to know about it and another thing entirely to see it with your own eyes and be paid to participate in it. So now, having seen what I've seen, I have to grapple with what to do with my own beautiful home aquarium. For awhile I wanted to break it down, but I decided that that wouldn't really make me feel any better about having had it. I am responsible for these animals; that's the way it is. Perhaps it would have been better if they had never been collected in the first place, but it's too late to do anything about that now, and the best I could do for them if I were to give them away is put them in the hands of another aquarist who, in the very best case scenario, would do as good of a job of caring for them as I do. So I decided that the biotope will remain, but that I will no longer add anything to it. I am done purchasing livestock. I have what I have and that's what I've got. Chad the Rad Crab is my last addition.

 

Please don't mistake me - I don't mean any of this as a critique or judgment of any of you other fine hobbyists out there. I just wanted to share some of my experiences and explain why I'm not as enthused about home aquaria as I used to be. And I do think there are ways to set up a beautiful home reef without supporting the death cult that is the retail aquarium trade. For example captive bred fish are a huge thing these days, and are likely to get even more popular as environmental changes combine with the stress of collection to put growing pressure on wild reefs. Sourcing coral frags from other hobbyists and avoiding wild-collected specimens is also a great way to get animals while bypassing the retail chain. And I still believe that certain livestock can be sustainably collected from the ocean and housed/transported in a more or less ethical way. Macroalgae, for example, is probably fine to harvest for ornamental purposes, although if you can get clippings of it from some other hobbyist's refugium that's even better. 

 

So that's how I'm feeling about the reef tank these days. Sorry about the wall of text there; I won't feel bad if you skip it. The TL;DR is that I used to be a professional aquarist but got burnt out and horrified by it, so now I am conflicted about my own aquarium. 😅

 

 

I have felt the same way for a few years. I compromise by buying my fish stuff from places like Amazon, places that don't sell animals, or used on Craigslist/FB and rescue fish or take in fish from cl, th, other fish groups that need a good home and give it to them. Then it is more like adopting a dog from a shelter, just taking an animal in and giving them a good life. For my reef tank, I am going to get my corals, hermit crabs, snails, and clown fish from other hobbyists who need to rehome them or who are selling/giving frags away.

[billygoat]

Check this out - this little pink thing is a small clam or similar bivalve. It's one of several in my tank (I think they have actually been reproducing over the years) and normally would be an interesting but unremarkable thing to observe, except this particular specimen decided to somehow scale the back wall of my 19" deep tank and perch itself on top of the return nozzle.

 

 

Like come on man, you are a clam, how does that even work? 😂 I'm tempted to doink it back into the water but I think I'll leave it there to see if it moves back down on its own.

 

 

[billygoat]

I like to run an ICP test once or twice a year just to make sure nothing weird is going on in my tank. Thought I'd share my recent results here, just for science! 

 

 

Everything here looks good to me, including Iodine, which is surprising because I left off dosing that more than a month ago and I'm pretty sure my tank consumes quite a bit of it. Magnesium is a bit on the low side, but that's probably because I have never dosed Mg and rely entirely on water changes to replenish it. 1200 is probably fine for Mg I think, but I'll need to keep an eye on it in case it falls any further than that.

[tassos]

The tank is looking nice! I’ve followed your threads for a while and am always impressed by your thoughtful and successful approach to this hobby. Nice work!

[DevilDuck]

On 5/17/2021 at 5:06 PM, billygoat said:

I like to run an ICP test once or twice a year just to make sure nothing weird is going on in my tank. Thought I'd share my recent results here, just for science! 

 

 

Everything here looks good to me, including Iodine, which is surprising because I left off dosing that more than a month ago and I'm pretty sure my tank consumes quite a bit of it. Magnesium is a bit on the low side, but that's probably because I have never dosed Mg and rely entirely on water changes to replenish it. 1200 is probably fine for Mg I think, but I'll need to keep an eye on it in case it falls any further than that.

What are the normal numbers for the trace elements? Does the ICP test tell you what is high or low?

[billygoat]

12 hours ago, tassos said:

The tank is looking nice! I’ve followed your threads for a while and am always impressed by your thoughtful and successful approach to this hobby. Nice work!

Thank you so much! I really appreciate your support and encouragement. Do you have a tank of your own here on N-R?

 

10 hours ago, DevilDuck said:

What are the normal numbers for the trace elements? Does the ICP test tell you what is high or low?

Yeah, it's pretty cool actually: you can select a "baseline" to compare your results to, and see how your numbers stack up the actual ocean. For example in the graphic I posted above, you can see I've got Calcium currently selected (highlighted in bright blue), so it's displaying the value for Ca in my tank (the dark blue column at the top - 414 ppm) compared to the baseline value for the ocean region I've selected (the green column at the top - Florida, 416 ppm). I chose to compare to Florida because that's where my stuff is from, but they also offer comparison values from Hawaii, Fiji, and a couple of other places, in addition to "ideal reef tank" values. If any of your elements are too high or too low, those elements are flagged in yellow on the chart.

[billygoat]

So KPA recently got their "neon blue" zoanthids back in stock. This is an item I have been waiting a couple of years to see sold, so I was quite excited! Unfortunately though, the "neon blue" zoas appear to be almost exactly the same as the "plain old blue" zoas that cost half as much...

 

"neon"

 

 

"regular"

 

I guess they're a little bit darker blue? Maybe? Well whatever, it doesn't really matter; I was kind of just amused to see how close they are to being exactly the same. 😂

 

Here are a bunch of other photos!

 

 

 

 

 

 

[debbeach13]

Sorry the color is off. At least the zoa's appear very healthy. I love all of those ricordea. One of the best ricordea gardens I have seen.

[growsomething]

Dang, I ordered the last of those last week, too.  They haven't arrived yet.  Wonder if they were sold out, even if my order went through.

[billygoat]

3 hours ago, debbeach13 said:

Sorry the color is off. At least the zoa's appear very healthy. I love all of those ricordea. One of the best ricordea gardens I have seen.

It's alright, it's like you said - the zoas still look great, and I'm sure they'll spread out and fill in very well. The color may change over time as they adjust to the lights too!

 

3 hours ago, growsomething said:

Dang, I ordered the last of those last week, too.  They haven't arrived yet.  Wonder if they were sold out, even if my order went through.

Hmm did you get a confirmation email from KP? They're usually really good about customer service, and if they mis-fill an order or aren't able to ship something on time I imagine they would let you know for sure. Definitely contact them if you haven't already!

[growsomething]

Looks like the order was canceled the same day i ordered, but I never received an email.  Probably for the best, but I used up some marital capital telling my wife that I just had to get these zoa.

[billygoat]

29 minutes ago, growsomething said:

Looks like the order was canceled the same day i ordered, but I never received an email.  Probably for the best, but I used up some marital capital telling my wife that I just had to get these zoa.

"Marital capital", I love it. 😂 Well, maybe it's for the best after all since the zoas in question don't seem to be as impressive as advertised. They're still pretty, just not really what they look like on KP's site. I think the "yellow eye" zoanthids are my favorite of their zoas so far. Lights in my tank are going down right now so it's very blue, but here's a picture of them:

 

 

Not bad at all for a wild-collected specimen I think... even if they do contain the obligatory random brown pest palythoa or two, haha.

[billygoat]

Many developments this week! Some bad, but most good! Let's break it down.

 

First and most importantly: I got a new light. This is the Kessil A360X. It is both overpriced and gorgeous. I regret nothing.

 

 

Next: as you can see from the photo above, I got some mangroves! I am not a hundred percent sure what to do with these propagules yet, so for the time being I jammed them into a piece of styrofoam and have them hanging above the sump chambers of my tank with their root-tips in the water. We'll worry about that later.

 

   

 

Also a new addition: Halimeda! One of my favorite green macros. I had success with it in my previous 18g tank, but I was always annoyed by its tendency to attract epiphytic pest algae. Now that I have Chad the Rad Crab and my cherub angelfish to eat the algae that grows on it, I anticipate a much easier time. It's a nice way to fill up some of the empty space in the back of my tank.

 

 

Also also (we're still in the Good News section here): I managed to finally identify the cool hitchhiker tube coral that came in on my original rocks two years ago! It is in the genus Cladocora. Many thanks to Julian Sprung for including Caribbean corals in his "Corals: A Quick Reference Guide" even though they aren't commonly seen in the hobby.

 

 

But speaking of that same Cladocora... we arrive at the bad news. This coral underwent a catastrophic bleaching episode, and now appears to be on the brink of death. Here's a photo of it many months ago (healthy) and a photo of it from today.

 

   

 

Not a good look, as you can see! However, there are some reasons to be hopeful. The white areas bleached out extremely rapidly - literally overnight - but since that happened the rate of color loss has essentially stalled and the coral seems to still have normal-colored flesh inside of its calyces. It still extends tentacles when food is in the water and it still appears to eat. It's also worth noting that this bizarre sudden bleaching episode happed before I installed my new light, so I can at least rule that out as a cause. I have to admit that things look pretty bleak, but I have not yet given up hope. I'll try my best to get this super cool and unique coral to pull through.

 

Okay, well, that's the news from the Florida reef! I'll leave you guys with this hazy FTS (I'm going to have to figure out a better way to take pictures with the new light). Thanks for reading!

 

[Sharbuckle]

Wow. Been a while since I’ve checked in and that tank has really grown in! It looks great. Sorry to hear about the potential coral loss. Praying to the reef gods tonight for you! 

[billygoat]

22 hours ago, Sharbuckle said:

Wow. Been a while since I’ve checked in and that tank has really grown in! It looks great. Sorry to hear about the potential coral loss. Praying to the reef gods tonight for you! 

Thank you! Yeah, overall it's been doing really well. There have been a few hiccups here and there as things get settled down, but I think I am pretty pleased with this tank so far. I'll see what I can do about that coral too! The prayers are much appreciated. 😅

[billygoat]

Update on my bleaching Cladocora colony: the coral appears to be in a state of undeath, or possibly rebirth. It looked super dire for awhile, but I've been feeding it daily and at this point I like to imagine that it's not going to die! Here's the photo from above of it all bleached out next to a photo from today:

 

    

 

Progress, right!? Maybe the situation is not as bad as it seems.

 

And since you're here, have a bonus picture of some other stuff. For your eyes.

 

[billygoat]

Gorgonians! They're all I've got, folks.

 

   

 

   

 

And an FTS... with less glare? But still plenty of glare, don't you worry.