A marine tank is not a matter of tossing water conditioner into city water, oh, no. It’s a matter of getting a small ro\/di filter to filter gallons of tapwater into a quality exceeding what they run in your supermarket RO kiosk. A carbon block, a 1-micron filter, something else I forget, a carbon block that helps break the chloramine bond, and a di cylinder with resin to absorb other stuff…I mean, it strips water down from 900 total dissolved solids to 0. It leaves just the h’s and o’s. THEN you add the carefully compounded ocean salt, that has the right balance of minerals to represent what ocean water carries: boron and iodine, calcium, lots of calcium—the ocean continually recycles that, much as your body is constantly handling it—bone is calcium, muscle runs on it…<\/p>\n
In the marine hobby I’m constantly struck by the fact that corals are all one design: there is no structural ‘big’ difference between the tiny ‘mouth’ and tissue that comprise one pore on a stem of, say, acropora, the colored sticks—and the larger mouth and tentacles of a stony plate coral, or an anemone; or a zoa polyp; or a mushroom polyp; it’s all the same design—a mouth and sticky tentacles, large and small. Mushrooms get to have a kind of thready ‘pipe system’ conveying water about, maintaining fluid pressure—and mushrooms can walk. So can anemones, a little more complex. Take a razor to them and you have two mushrooms. Two anemones. (Woe to the novice that tries to ‘scrub’ an unwanted mushroom off a rock that is a major part of his reef structure.) And then there’s the whole array of corals that developed the trick not just of using a little calcium to power contractile tissue, but laying it down in massive amounts, as a protective casing, a skeleton…which the ocean would endlessly recycle, as it dissolves ‘old’ ‘unclaimed’ calcium into its water to fuel, yes, more movement and more skeletons…<\/p>\n
A jelly is the same structure as a nem, just upside down, and really good at sucking in water, and squirting it out.<\/p>\n
A worm is the same. Just good at wiggling through sand.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, clams, which don’t move—often—in the jellyfish mode. Their inner anatomy is very highly evolved: look them up. Star Trek never came up with anything so weird or alien as the drive-train that powers a clam’s feeding system.<\/p>\n
Crustaceans that swim and crawl—the mantis shrimp, when it strikes, literally creates a ball of plasma in the water. If that were scaled up, it’d be scary-movie stuff.<\/p>\n
Cartilaginous fish—the sharks and rays—depend on collagen, a fibrous protein, but then some cartilaginous fish discovered a deeply-buried trick and began to lay down calcium like a coral…<\/p>\n
We are ALL ultimately connected, and it’s really all one design. We started out radial and learned new chemical tricks.<\/p>\n
And all of which is to say, you learn more than plumbing doing a marine tank…<\/p>\n
But that filter that makes just h’s and o’s is giving out and I’m getting some signs I need to find some stuff to change those cylinders out…before I start prompting something to evolve in my tank that I really had rather not see. We’ve already got cyano (a nice fugitive from the Permian, that gave us our atmosphere back when various things had trashed it) —and I think I’ll change those cylinders and nip that in the bud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A marine tank is not a matter of tossing water conditioner into city water, oh, no. It’s a matter of getting a small ro\/di filter to filter gallons of tapwater into a quality exceeding what they run in your supermarket RO kiosk. A carbon block, a 1-micron filter, something else I forget, a carbon block […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":751,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/751"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}