I nabbed 7 spammers during morning coffee.
And I’ve got 30 gallons of water ready. I’m now working on the next 30, which is half full. Rock is washed. Still hoping for sand.
The name of the company shipping this tank, btw, is Aqua Vim. They’re the only company doing strangely shaped tanks. And doing it very well, apparently. I was able to get mine out of the ‘specials’ section, for not a bad price for what it is. The ones they make for hotels and corporate offices, now, or for incredibly rich guys who want a major tank built into a library wall…sheesh, I don’t wanna see the price tag! But I was surprised to find that if you don’t mind taking whatever wood is available, there are some deals…I suspect because they occasionally have an order somebody doesn’t follow through with: their fabrication can be, reportedly, slow, in a crowded season, so I can see why some people might bail; but their impatience is my good fortune.
Oh, I can hardly wait!
While this is not a comment about the your reverse osmosis system, it is about a system…Your Foreigner Novel System
Not sure what happened in Protector, but it just didn’t end satisfactorily. I guess I was hoping for some “fun/misadventures” at Cajeiri’s party in the Capitol and perhaps something that spelt-out a firm linkage (association?) with the three child-visitors and Cajeiri. I was hoping/prepared for an offer for the children to be “fostered” or at least “schooled with Cajeiri” for some period of time.
I’m sure you have some idea for the course of these novels, but I was sorely disappointed a secondary storyline wasn’t set-up for Cajeiri in parallel to that of the parents,grandmother,great uncle, and of course Bren.
I see this series as a competitor for my affections with Bujold’s Vorksigan and the Honor Harrington saga. Maybe because children have been my profession for abotu 20-years, I imagine that Cajeiri is important to some of your “fan-base”.
Anyway – Glad you re taking good care of yourself with the reverse osmosis system – that way all your fans can continue to see Bren and the aidji’s clan experiencing adventures for a good long while. I’d love to see the young Dur Lord and the the young Marid Lord strike a close association that extends to Cijeiri and some young fellow in the East and Gene(altho you did offer a girl character from the East). Your books, at least for me, hit the right amount of action, wit and charm—along with a certain Japanese cultural twist. The connection between Bianchi and Haikuti was interesting, but kind of too late to really matter?
I’m not your editor – but I’d sure wish to suggest story ideas. And no, I’m not going to start writing fan fiction (-:
More is coming on that front, but I regret that it has to be a year doing so—Just turned that part in.
I’m to the point where I expect the books about a year apart.
(I also expect that nand’ Cajeiri, his aishid, and his young human associates will play some kind of critical role in taking out Assignments.)
The Hunting season song is going to have to be rewritten:
7 spammers, 3 game wardens and a full bred Guernsey cow!
Nice to see somebody else remembers Tom Lehrer.
I’ll tie them to my fender and get them home somehow…
I can’t wait to see pictures of the new tank after the microflora get settled in.
It’s going to be pretty fast, I hope: I’m bucking a lot of ‘the rules’ because the coral I have is about as tough as it gets. I’m simply arranging the rock in the new tank—and then I’m turning off the pump to the 54 gallon tank, shifting it over about 5 feet sideways (sand may come later, if it doesn’t get in by this weekend!) filling up the new tank all the way with proper new saltwater, settling the canopy and the lights—then moving over some of my corals, and then, rather like a heart-transplant, switching the hose of the incredibly dirty and biologically active sump downstairs over to the new tank.
This cuts off the ‘old’ 54 gallon tank and puts it on life support with a pot filter, with the fish.
Now I connect the ‘heart’ or sump, onto to the new tank, to pour the sump’s rather abundant microlife into the new tank.
If the first coral does what I think it will, I’m following it with more coral, until I have all the coral over to the new tank. I’ll create a pot-filter (container with floss and pump) to keep my fish ok for a few days (fish are more delicate than coral, when it comes to any potential for ammonia), and then when the insulted coral in the new tank begins to open and feed, I know it’s ok for my fish to start coming over.
That sump is has 30 gallons of highly bioactive stuff down there, with live rock and a functioning sandbed fully capable of processsing waste, so I think I’m ok.
This is NOT a gamble I’d advise in the fish book, which errs on the side of caution and methodical procedure, but I think this is going to work.
We just play ‘dance of the elephants’ as we slide one tank out of that nook, still functioning as far as fish, and slide the other in just before we start adding water and making it heavier.
It’ll be pretty even before the microflora spreads to the new rock, I think. And life will come pretty quickly.
I’ll be breaking down the 54 to bare, clean glass—I’d like to see it in the kitchen corner, handling Jane’s bichirs and some pretty tropical freshwaters—but first I have to get rid of all the saltwater biostuffs, because rather like Cyteen’s dieoff zones, these two sets of microfauna aren’t compatible and what you get when you mix them is nasty. So I’ll probably move a lot of the sand from the old tank over to the new tank, too, once I wash it in ‘old’ water.
Rick washed? Ohhhh…. You stonewashed the rock after rocking and rolling it, eh?
Can’t get no satisfaction from those Rolling Stones…..
But you can get a moon bike. Cheap!
You can’t always get what you want, but if you try real hard, sometimes you find you get what you need!
CJ, the 54 is in the living room, right? Is the sump in the basement with the water processing equipment? Trying to remember all the stuff you told me, and I had a wonderful time listening to you explain it. You were way ahead of me when it came to innovating a water processing system that used not only the RO filter system, but also kept the water in the main system clean.
Lu’s a rather horizontal creature loosely termed feline. Very loosely.
I really was going for a veiled “flatcar” reference, honest. To go with my post above. The pun fell flat?
Um, and I see auto-incorrect changed “Rock washed” to “Rick washed” (presumably Rick washes often) and LOL to Lu’s. Lu probably washes often too….
Uh… that brings to mind an obscene term, BCS…
Wasn’t it Heinlein who wrote the flatcat?
yep. Martian flatcats… (If they existed, they’d be sleeping on or under the rovers, depending on the local weather.)
Yep, sump is downstairs, tank is upstairs. And I may have to investigate the joists and ‘sister’ one or two of them to be sure.
I thought you might find this amusing:
http://zettepicaday.blogspot.com/2013/04/moving-books-cherryh-collection.html
That’s a few! Thank you, Zette!
And, just for the fun of it, here the books are in place:
http://zettepicaday.blogspot.com/
Perhaps an appropriate song for the arrival of the new tank:
“Tank” by Rayzd, from Cowboy Bebop.
(It’s been a while, I’ll have to give that a listen, can’t recall if it’s instrumental or has lyrics.)
I LOVE Cowboy Bebop. Now I’m going to have to pull the DVDs out. I get the feeling I won’t be doing much more writing tonight.
About strangely shaped tanks, have you ever watched the Animal Plannet show “Tanked”? It’s about a fish tank company that does massive installations all over the country. They are based in Las Vegas. They do some increadable fresh and salt water tank systemas.
‘Tanked’ has some really major flaws—one of which is the editing, which leaves out the essential steps; and a lot of people go into a fish store expecting to have a tank tomorrow. These tanks are designed to be maintained by the Tanked crew or somebody— who weekly scoops out the dead fish and put in new ones of the same size, in my worst fears: some fish-maintenance operations for large displays do exactly that. I was alarmed to note that some of the fish they were buying for one of the first tanks were carrying a very lethal parasite, marine ich, cryptocaryon irritans, and if I could spot it on television, it was really pretty obvious to anybody netting fish out of that tank. I HOPE they didn’t end up buying those fish and it was only footage for the camera crew, but the distributor’s crew shouldn’t have disturbed that tank by waving a net around and scaring the fish if they were under treatment for that infestation.
I’m particularly disturbed by the skateboard tank—strong vibration can kiil fish and it certainly causes pain. In winter, if you try to break the ice on a koi pond with a hammer, you can kill every fish you’ve got.
Their technique is pretty 1980’s: they’re using a bacterial dose to try to bring the sandbed or filter live, and at least they’re using strong filtration, but they’re also doing a fish-only. Normally we call it a FOWLR, or fish-only-with-live-rock, but they don’t have live rock or live sand. So that means somebody has to change and wash out the filter twice a week: that brings in revenue for the service company. Fish waste goes from ammonium to ammonia to nitrite to nitrate in a filter, and if it isn’t cleaned the nitrate just builds up and up, which is bad for fish and ultimately lethal. Ammonia itself is lethal even in trace amounts. So an overloaded filter is really bad news. The owners end up paying for the service twice weekly, or they have mega-filters, which are again, a big cleaning job. Mega-drip-trays, better, better still if they secretly brought with them many gallons of bacteria-laden bioballs or the like, but still a lot of work. As far as the biological dose the Tanked crew puts in, this doesn’t cycle the tank: it adds biological activity to the filters. Ultimately, in about 12 weeks, the sand and rock will get enough bacteria to start helping out, but they don’t have enough of either sand or rock in there to really carry the tank without the filters.
And, alas, many of these big tanks are only for some temporary exhibit, and the fish will go back to the distributors, and the tanks will be broken down. The phone booth tank ended up on Ebay in a couple of months, and if the owners didn’t hire the maintenance service, they likely lost all the fish within a month or so.
A modern FOWLR tank should have 2 pounds of rock/sand for every gallon of water in the system, and is a fully cycled tank—ie, all the sand and rock is live. Even so, it needs weekly maintenance to run well unless it has smaller fishes than most. I don’t like to run that sort because they are so much work and I hate filter cleaning, having done about 40 + years of it.
A modern reef tank has the same balance of rock/sand/water, but no filters at all, usually no lid or canopy, and for stony corals, killer lighting. You spend 4-12 weeks in preparation to have anything alive in your tank but the bacteria, and it comes in on, generally, one rock. You spent 12 weeks feeding one imaginary fish, and when the ammonia spikes up and then vanishes from the daily tests, you know it’s cycled. At that point you can add a crab or two and some snails, who work 4 more weeks to bring the sandbed up to snuff, and meanwhile your fish are in a quarantine tank to prevent the introduction of the ich parasite (and others) into your main tank, which would cause you to have to sit fishless for 12 weeks until the damned ich parasites starved and died out.
Here’s where what I’m doing veers off the model. I have a very mature sump (a processing tank, another thing the Tanked tanks don’t have), and I’m just going to attach it to this new tank. This in effect amounts to an 80% water change…you do a routine 30% water change a month, to recharge the trace elements—so it’s going to be a ‘stretch’ for the resources, but I have a fully layered sandbed (the bacteria sets up in layers within the rock and the sand) plus the microlife that helps break down waste, the small crustaceans and some you can really only see with a magnifying glass: it’s crawling with life down there, and pretty soon my dead white rock and sand upstairs will be pink and brown with life just like the refugium (live sandbed area) in the sump. Life I have down there: limpet snails, cerith snails, hermit crabs, amphipods, copepods, Pacific Bristleworms, several other species I can’t identify, living sponge, coralline algae, cheatomorpha algae, tubeworms—tons of bacteria, and so on; and I just had a ‘bloom’ of something that may be limpets or another sort of snail—several thousand of the little rascals, who will be working for a living. Anyway—all this will be processing non-existent waste from upstairs, and sending out colonists to take over the new territory. The corals can live in there; and when I see the corals start feeding, I’ll know its safe to start moving fish in.
With this sort of a conversion, the new tank can be set up enough for snails and crabs in about 5 days. But it’ll still be very delicate for the first four weeks, even 12 weeks. By then, bacteria will have permeated the new rock to its core, so it will be truly ‘live rock.’
It’s quite a process. I was never the ace student in chemistry, but this aspect of biochemistry I find fascinating. Lesson one is NH3 (ammonia: lethal) to NO2 (nitrite:lethal) to NO3 (nitrate: tolerable in small amounts) to N (nitrogen gas, which floats up and out of the tank to join the planetary atmosphere)—that’s what the sand/rock bacteria do: they support not only the bacteria that suck up ammonia and convert it to nitrite, and the ones that suck up the nitrite and convert it to nitrate —filters and rock/sandbeds both have those sorts of bacteria. But the final miracle, the conversion of nitrate to nitrogen gas, only sandbeds/rock bacteria do. Which is why reefs don’t have filters, and actually don’t do well if someone puts a filter on one.
There’s one other piece of equipment we do have to clean — the skimmer: that jets water into water, hard, causing it to froth with amino acids that may be in the water. A clever cup system skims off the foam, and it turns back to yucky green liquid, which we throw out. When you play in the ocean foam, alas, that’s what you’re dealing with. This is the ‘surf’ of a modern marine tank. 😉
Anyway, that’s the guts of how it all works. That’s my hobby. 😉
I was about to ask you about Tanked myself. My son really likes the show (mostly for the tomfoolery of the two “hosts”). My understanding is that the people buying these ridiculous tanks are NOT planning to service it themselves. I’ve also never once heard the two men talk about proper care of any of the fish – not even considerations of how much room the fish need to thrive.
Then again, they did do work for a “serious” fish tank at one point – I recall it because one of them ended up in a scuba suit. BIG tank!
Anyways, I think their particular niche is exhibition tanks. The pitch for the show seems to be “look we can make ANYTHING into a tank!”
I understand what you’re saying – in fact I’ll probably nab your post and get my son to read it. He’s not asking me for a fish tank, by the by; but I think he’d be interested to know all the bits and technical aspects that the show isn’t showing. We like that kind of thing, even if the show people would call it “boring.”
Heh, for 5 whole dollars I’m going to be selling a how to make a reef tank book, if he ever wants to do it. And HIS fish are likely to survive, thereby.
Actually, you CAN use live ‘canned’ bacteria in freshwater tanks to skip the prolonged cycling process. I’ve done it….used test strips daily to moniter for nitrogenous waste issues so I KNEW it worked. I only do that when I get access to a fish suddenly that I can’t live without and don’t have a cycled fishless tank available. In such cases, I’m working with a rather small bioload which helps and huge numbers of live plants. I’ve recently done it with a 22g cube, a 45g tank and several 5-10g setups. I am typically resistant to using squeezings from an established filter just-in-case as I’m often working with difficult to find/expensive fish and I’m minimizing risks. And, I tend to use large sponge filters and water changes rather than expensive filtration hardware or large sumps (shrug). I’ve only dabbled briefly with marine tanks way back in the 70’s during grad school so I bow down to your vast expertise in that matter.
In ‘Tanked’ I’ve seen packages that say live sand and they have mentioned using live rock and natural vs artificial sea water. But I tend to pay less attention to the marine installations (lack of interest), so may miss details. I tend to find their installations boring….especially the freshwater installations. I prefer lower bioloads, more live plants and tanks set up to promote breeding rather than just a jumble of fish. Besides, they use acrylic tanks which I don’t like much at all!
You just can’t carry a 500 gallon marine tank on 50 lbs of rock, especially with several 10″ long fish. That’s the problem.
If you have enough live rock and sand everything does what it does in the ocean, pretty much, and the end result is not ammonia or nitrate, but bubbles of nitrogen gas floating gracefully up to join the atmosphere, without there having been a filter at all.
The reason magic bacteria potions don’t do that is real simple: it takes a specific amount of time for any bacterium to proliferate through the pores of a rock. Sand is faster. But those bacteria just can’t divide any faster than they do. It’s not going to hurt you to use it, but you’ll pretty well have spent much of 20 dollars for what you already had, and it won’t get where it’s going anyway.
Then at the other end of the spectrum I get the guy online asking me “What’s wrong? I’ve been trying to cycle for 3 months. I got this dry rock and sand and they said wait 12 weeks…” In the long shot, he didn’t realize the rock wasn’t going to spontaneously generate bacteria. You hafta add a rock that’s been in a marine environment. So he’s back at square one, except his rock is now wet all the way through…
Acrylic tanks—are really a problem as reefs. Not so bad for fish-onlies, where you don’t get wild coralline growth, but if you get a lot of coralline, as in a stony reef, OMG, you get pink hard encrustation, and getting it off acrylic is a pita. And in many instances leads to scarring the tank.
I went for glass. Cost me more, but I’ll be able to see my fish.
And I’m trying this neat new trick, gluing a scraper to a mag float, so you can keep ahead of it.
Breeding fish is possible (increasingly so) in marine tanks, but you have to have a dedicated tank and a provision for getting the fry to safety asap. Since we have no weed, it is a problem. They’ve just managed to breed one variety of angel. When they manage tangs, which require a tank the size of the Seattle Aquarium dome, I’ll be amazed. But—who knows—if somebody can ultimately trick them into it, maybe with the fishy equivalent of an Endless Pool, they’ll really be in business.
Now, you want snails, I can give you snails. Those are good at reproducing. Limpets. Tube worms. Bristleworms. OMG. So we’re good at the little guys.
This is what happened when I fragged (broke up) the basketball sized hammer coral—my tank began to look like the Rose Parade. I’m going to sell off a lot of this and get more variety…there are, BTW, about 8 more fish in this tank: they seem to know when I’m taking a pic.
What is that purplish thingie off to the far right, that looks like an anemone of some type? (I can tell a humuhumunukunukuapua’a from a Moorish Idol, but the rest of the biota, not so much, actually)
That’s a crocea clam. He’s quite old, possibly more than a century old, since they max out at five inches. He eats sunlight mostly, and supplements his diet with floating stuff so fine you’d need a microscope to see it. He pretty well goes where he wants. As I said, an animal with a driveshaft, no less, —it spins— and he throws out ‘byssal threads’ to anchor himself where he wants to be. Then dissolves them and moves on. Where does a crocea clam sleep—? Just about anywhere he wants to.
He must be ‘happy as a clam’ *ducks thrown things*; after nosing about, I found that they don’t spread out like that unless they are unstressed and content. You are a good tank mother!
That just looks so cool! I’ve seen displays like that one at the Omaha Henry Doorly Zoo, and they’ve always fascinated me. I would not have the patience for this sort of thing, though.
When I read Chondrite’s note, I read it as ‘What is that PUBLISH thingie, off to the far right. . .’
Yeah, way too much time devoted to writing, books and publishing, but at least I got new things out this week!
Just scored CJ’s collected shorts at charity book resale. I may be kind of quiet for a day…