The store thought they had my sand in, but didn’t. It still ended up being great, because they had rocks. Wonderful rocks. I need some more rock, because this tank is bigger. And I need spires, because damsels love to chase one another around spires, which define their ‘kingdoms.’
Damsels are wonderful for large enough marine tanks, bright, colorful—cheap—and though they can get sizeable (up to 4″) they’re still rated small, among marine fishes, and being on everybody’s menu, they never stray more than 1-2 feet from their kingdom. Perfectly suited to a 100 gallon marine tank. They have their entire livespans predator-free, each with their own kingdom, and a wonderful show of constant movement.
Too often, fish stores sell one to a guy with a 30 gallon tank, and all is well until the unsuspecting novice puts in another fish. Well, what do you think would happen? The damsel’s got a guy in his 1-2 feet, who just won’t leave. It’s like tossing a guy over the fence to meet a guard dog in a 10 foot enclosure. It’s not going to end well.
These are the kind of things I wrote the fish book to try to prevent.
And back to my rock—it’s splendid, complex shapes— I can turn this into a wonderful thing!
With lots of damsels.
And…on our fishy outing, we got some baby koi, silver and black, to replace the poor koi gotten by the cats: we have the netting in place, and right now the fish are figuring out they’re no longer on the menu.
You know, once you have moved your fish out of the current tank, you have a ready made koi nursery. Of course, if you decide to grow goldfish to koi size, it would be good for that too.
Lol—I think we’re going to have bichirs, (African rope fish), a very primitive air-breathing fish that can hike between mudholes. They’ll eat anything that fits in their mouths, so we put them with fish that won’t. They and a pleco have been quite nice together.
One expects pictures, CJ-nandi! jane is so good with the photo-stories, she should be documenting this process as well.
ARGH!!!!!
I’ll do what I can.
[CJ: and she did: here’s the link! Banichi and Jago return to the pond!] http://www.janefancher.com/HarmoniesOfTheNet/
One would offer to send some of our volcanic rock, but it seems to have a bad rep — something about Madame Pele being displeased with having it removed from her kingdom… 😀
Maybe you can get some mudskippers?
I just got my copy of Protector, my precioussss, and I am conserving it for when I am on vacation next week, to be appropriately nibbled and savored!
Lol! Alas, Mme. Pele is right to hold onto her rock: it has a high metal content which sea water aggressively dissolves—no problem at all in the great ocean, but in a wee little tank over time, —we have to stick to calcium carbonate or something at least inert. I LOVE mudskippers, but I fear we are indeed a wave without a shore—no place for those charming fellows.
We are going to have: gobies, blennies, a mandarin pair, scooter blennies, damsels of several kinds, dartfish, likely a tang (they’re easier to keep with corals than even the best-behaved angels), jawfish, various invertebrates including shrimp, might go so far as a butterfly fish, a copperband. I like little fish, not big ones—and the neat thing about the damsels and mandarins and gobies and blennies—they aren’t far-traveled. They spend their whole lives within 2 feet of the spire of rock they call home. So they act ‘normally’ in a tank. They’ll have room enough to live in a predator-free zone with enough holes to call home. As for jawfish, they’re like hobbits: they live in a hole in the sand, and simply pop out to nab something tasty, then dive back again almost faster than you can see them.
Hmmm… Photo of CJ, seated amongst rocks, as one enthroned. Photo of tank in yard. Photo of tank emplaced. Photo of somebody head down, placing rocks in sand. Photo of rocks and sand installed, with ‘natural’ drifts of pea gravel. Photos of corals being sited and tank filling. Photo of full tank. Photos of fishes being added. Photos of established tank from multiple angles. Most of these can be used as illustrations for the fish book, as well as for the amusement of fans.
Am looking forward to a play-by-play with pictures. I’d love to have an aquarium — if I had somebody to keep it for me – LOL!
How about the small fish cookbook? Just kidding. It looks like a lot of work and a lot of fun.
My Mum decided to keep rabbits. Got 2 females, but *ahem* as someone’s daughter asked, “why is one rabbit riding on the other’s back?” So she went to the library to get a book on breeding and looking after baby bunnies. Chapter 10 was called ‘Rabbit Recipes’.
Unfortunately one of the local foxes managed to find a way into the run one night. So they didn’t make it to the pot, but they did end up as dinner.
I just horrified a friend on FB by saying I was quite partial to farm-raised catfish (fried with cole slaw & hush puppies). She had just raised a small school of pretty catfish fry that she was selling back to the pet shop. Hers only grow to 2-3 inches whereas channel cat hereabouts has a lot more meat on the bones and can, if left alone in the lake or river, grow very big.
Ah, poor bunnies. It’s even worse for the fish: in our tanks, there’s just no place to get the young away from predators, who are, yes, everybody. I’ve had crabs and snails breed in the tank, and only the very smallest snails succeed, probably because they put their eggs in unreachable places. If you want to breed these guys you have to have a tank dedicated to 2 fish.
And then there are the ones we’re not going to have a lot of luck with, like tangs, which breed in huge schools, in areas of turbulence. They zip to the surface of the ocean, unload eggs or sperm according to who’s which, and zip back down again, leaving a massive cloud and a lot of now-fertilized eggs that go adrift in the current, scattering far and wide.
I understand somebody has managed to captive-breed one species of tang, and I’d like to know where and how. There are facilities in the tropics that are set in the shoreline of tropic seas where corals are brought up in protected circumstances and fish are bred, but tangs are one of the rowdiest small fishes…
I got in a couple of the UGLIEST fish (Orange Toadfish) back in my pet shop days, shipped in two different orders, so I stuck them both in the same tank to sell. They had soon set up camp at one end of the 55 gallon, and one day I came in to find EVERYTHING ELSE in that tank hiding in the far corner. Well, I rescued the other occupants and shoehorned them into one of our other marine tanks, and watched those ugly toadfish raise about 100 babies. My boss wasn’t terribly happy, but the customers found it rather interesting! I think I finally ended up selling baby toadfish at $5 each, some time after mom-n-dad went to a new home.
Why is it always the ugly ones that can survive and thrive in a pet shop (almost bare with minimal filtration!) tank, but the pretty ones are a struggle!
Beauty is where you look for it. If that weren’t so, there would have been no baby toadfish!