WAMAS Tank of the Month
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It is always an Honor to be nominated TOTM even though I know it is not because of my tank, but because I am probably older than anyone here and will soon be senile and not remember anything and start to eat my brine shrimp eggs with toast so people will feel sorry for me and call me Pops. I am also not sure if anyone remembers but I was invited to speak to you guys a few years ago. I was the good looking guy in the front with the Supermodel who turned the slides. Oh Wait, the Supermodel was off that day. I started my tank in 1971, the year I came home from Viet Nam. Saltwater fish just started to come to the US although the hobby started a few years earlier in Germany. It was started in a 40 gallon tank using NSW from the East River just after it passes Manhattan. Probably not the best choice but it is what it is as that is what I had. The run off from the Frankfurter carts in the City probably added some vitamins especially from the sourkraught which resembles algae. ASW was invented but it was hard to find. I think "Lampert K's Marine Magic" was one of the first salts you could buy and you mixed it with tap water. There were no reverse osmosis or de ionization resins in those days. All we had was charcoal, from our bar be cue's and eggplant skins so tap water it was. We also didn't have salt water gravel. All we had was fresh water gravel which was various shades of pink or purple so I opted for blue driveway crushed rock from my neighbor’s driveway. I took it while they were away and they didn't notice it missing until they saw it in my tank. Of course there were no corals or inverts for sale but I did pick up crabs, worms, shrimp, lobsters and anything else I could find at the shore that seemed interesting. Some of the things lived and grew very large forcing me to either eat them, or bring them back to the sea. There was no live rock, or even dead rock so to decorate the tank I used dead, white coral that I had to buy in furniture stores. They had it on display as art works and it cost more than live corals today. The first salt water fish I had were acclimated from my brackish tank. (Probably in ten minutes) They were Figure 8 puffers, Scats, Archer fish, Mono's and bumblebee gobies. Those fish fit well into my fully salt tank. Then I added the only fish available in New York. Domino's, Sargent Majors and blue devils. Domino's are black so ich spots stand out really good on them and at first I thought they were supposed to have those spots. After they all started dying, I found out they were parasites. In those days it was called (by Robert Straughn, "The Father of Salt Water Fish Keeping") "Coral Fish Disease". It was very common and all fish had it. You bought the fish with it and so did I. Later it was called White Spot disease, then Oodinium, then ich as no one knew exactly what to call it and most of the cool names were already taken by RAP singers. I found, who I thought was a marine biologist but he could have been an accountant for Mc Donald’s and he told me about parasites and that they were killed with copper. The only copper available then was pennies. Today pennies are made out of old eight track tape machines and discarded nose rings. But they used to be copper. I didn't know the exact dose so I used 20 pennies to the gallon. I put the pennies on a spring so they would stand on their edge which provided more water movement which I assumed added more copper to the water. OK, stop laughing, it worked. The hard part was the dosage as it was hard to control because gravel removes copper from the water up to a point and the water movement determines how much copper is added. (I changed out the driveway gravel for Dolomite) The pennies stayed in the tank but I had to remove some occasionally. If the fish was lying on the bottom with sores on their sides, there were too many pennies and I had to remove some, maybe five cents. But if the fish were covered in ich, I added some, maybe eight cents. It was tricky and not the simple thing it is now with test kits, computers, Instagram, Tap a Talk, credit cards, fish forums, Tang Police etc. Eventually I got the tank stable and didn't have to add more pennies. A year or so after I started the tank I began to feed my fish live blackworms which only lived a few seconds in salt water but what a difference they made. I had seven blue devils and they all had clear tails and fins. After about ten days of feeding the worms, they got a much bluer blue and on some of them, their fins and tails turned a really nice iridescent blue. I discovered later that those were males. They started to spawn and spawned for the seven years I had them and the eggs hatched. At the time the only food available to feed baby fish was oatmeal, egg salad or toast so I could not raise them but they continued to spawn. I also discovered that I no longer had to add copper to prevent ich as none of my fish ever contracted that or any other disease right up until today. My theory about disease is to keep fish immune by purposely allowing the fish to live with parasites and diseases to keep up their immunity that they natural have in the sea. I also believe that extended periods of quarantine is probably the worst thing we can do for fish and the cause of disease forums. But enough about that. A few years’ later inverts were introduced like arrow crabs and Banded Coral shrimp. I had a Banded coral shrimp and a year or so later added a much smaller one. Immediately, the larger male "attacked" the smaller one, but he was not really attacking her if you know what I mean. They stayed together for years and spawned a few times every month until they died of, I think old age at about 7 or 8 years old. They died a few days apart, maybe they were grief stricken. I also had a pair of hermit crabs live for 12 years which died a few days apart. Maybe there is something there that we don't know about. In 1975 our Daughter was born and we moved from our small apartment to a house we bought on Long Island NY. I took the tank with me and everything in it but I bought larger glass. 100 gallons. There still were no live corals so the tank had dead coral skeletons in it. Every couple of weeks those corals would be removed to soak in bleach and sometimes acid. In those days we thought algae looked horrible and we wanted our corals nice and white, directly opposite from we want now. My wife and I dove a lot and went to many tropical destinations. On my way home I always had a bunch of rock in my lap on the plane. Of course if I did that today the airline would call a SWAT team and as soon as I got off the plane they would douse me with pepper spray, put me in handcuffs, a strait jacket and send me to Sing Sing Federal Penitentiary. But then, they just looked at you funny. I also collected local rocks in the sea to add to the micro fauna already in the tank. Eventually live rock and live corals were imported and the tank grew to include LPS, SPS anemones and any crustacean and invert that I thought was interesting. The tank remained in that house for forty years until I moved to my present location, again bringing the tank and everything in it with me. (I only moved 60 miles) The glass was all scratched and the tank was built into a wall so I bought a new one a little larger. 125 gallons. I had to move out of my last house and set up the tank in one day, so besides the moving van I rented a large truck just for the tank. I brought it to my new house along with large tubs with the rocks, coral, gravel, water and fish. I put the tank in the house along with the water I had which was only enough to fill the tank about half way. Much of the water I had was so dirty that it was basically mud and I didn’t want to add it. The tank had a reverse undergravel filter in it for four decades and the space under them tends to fill with mud and worms. I then took the tubs that I transported the water in to a beach near my home and backed down the boat ramp. I had a bilge pump connected to a long garden hose and began pumping seawater into the tubs. As I was collecting water a State Trooper came up to me and asked what I was doing. I told him I was getting water for my fish tank and he said “Really”. I said “yes, why is it illegal to take seawater?” He said, Yes, if you don’t have a permit. I said, “I need a permit to take sea water”?. He said, “No”, But you need a permit to use the boat ramp. I didn’t quite move there yet and I had no permit or boat, but he let me go as he probably thought I was just nuts. I brought the water home but it was probably 50 degrees so I had to heat it up by putting hot water into large plastic containers and floated that in my vats of seawater. As it was heating I also had to filter it through my diatom filter because it was filthy, filled with bits of seaweed, hypodermic needles and sand. It was also yellow. I have 4 diatom filters and out of all of them I couldn’t get one to work. I got a pump running but the bag inside was all torn up. I found a needle and thread and sewed it up as well as I could. It still leaked so I took a Tee shirt and sewed it around the bag to get the powder to stay in the filter. This took all night and as the moving van was pulling up I got the water into the tank so it was almost filled. I couldn’t find a hydrometer or thermometer but the fish lived and are still living. I didn’t lose one fish or coral which surprised the heck out of me. Circulation is by four powerheads. Most of them are from the 70s as I don’t like the new designs with the open grills as they grow too much life and are hard to clean. The old ones required no cleaning and last forever. The lighting started off in 1971 with long skinny tungsten aquarium bulbs, and then progressed to fluorescent. Then I was working on the Plaza Hotel in NYC installing metal halide lamps and I had extra fixtures so I put them on my tank. They made the water hot so I invented an evaporative chiller that cooled the water about 3 degrees which was perfect. Eventually I wanted LED lights so I built a water cooled one out of copper tubing where fresh water flowed through it, then to a radiator to keep it cool. I also built an algae scrubber that hung over the tank that was also lit by a water cooled system with a radiator. My new house was new construction and the tank was on a new cement floor that exuded water. There was so much humidity near the tank that my home made LED fixture with exposed wiring shorted out forcing me to buy a commercially built unit. It does look better than my DIY one but I feel anyone could buy one. I would always rather build something. The filtration is still a reverse undergravel filter. I built a manifold out of a HOB filter and it has three tubes coming out of the bottom, each one going to a UG filter plate. 150 gallons of water flow through each tube under the gravel. The water is supplied from a powerhead hidden behind the rocks which also feeds the DIY, 6’ venturi skimmer and DIY algae scrubber. The algae scrubber is hanging over the tank which is behind a wall so you can’t see this (Thank God) To maintain this system I stir up the gravel twice a year where I can reach with a diatom filter. I don’t change much water, maybe 25% 4 or 5 times a year. Now I use 100% NSW. I do add amphipods and mud from the sea occasionally and I never quarantine, dip, medicate or anything else. I add some two part calcium and alk weekly and test very occasionally for that. I feed clams, which I buy live and freeze myself along with live white worms and mysis which is mainly for the Janss pipefish as that is all he eats. I also feed “PE Calinus” for the Queen Anthius and corals. The tank has enough food for the mandarins and smaller bleenies and gobies. LRS food is also used every day. The tank requires almost no maintenance except for feeding and cleaning the glass every two days. All the fish die only from old age and never get sick. I believe that is due to the not quarantining and allowing the fish to keep the immunity they come to me from the sea with. The food I use is loaded with living bacteria and parasites which I feel are necessary if you want disease free fish that never get sick. This tank has housed numerous fish over the years and I can’t remember losing any one of them to disease in over 35 years. All the paired fish always spawned continuously. The tank is 48 years old at the time of this writing and I would love it to get to fifty. At that time I will be 120 and may take it down to travel some more. I am not sure yet what I will do but it has been a wonderful asset to my life which I have had for most of my life. I have had a fish tank of some kind every day of my life and I couldn’t imagine my life without one. As for me, I am a Geezer and a Viet Nam Vet. I have two aquarium related patents, one is a seahorse feeder and the other is the “Majano Wand” I also wrote a book “The Avant Garde Marine Aquarist” which is currently out of print due to publisher problems but should be back in print soon. |
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