WaterNotes

Well well well.. how has six months of grass keeping flown by so quickly?? It really does amaze me how things progress when you’re willing to take the time to photo-document the progress you are (or arent in some areas) making.

Biggest things in the evolution of the tank is that I have had to give away the dwarf seahorses for now and stocked the tank with a gorgeous and friendly little yellow-headed jawfish. I love these fish! I think they are just so incredibly fascinating and they are considerably less maintenance than teeny little dwarf SH. In the future, when I’m less chaotic and more stable, I’ll be happy to jump right in with them again. For now, I’m considering whether to put large horses into a future 29gallon I’m planning or to keep simply a pair of jawfish.

As it is now, at its six month mark, the 20gallon has really done well. The jawfish settled into a burrow in a clear sand spot behind the Caulerpa jungle which was a pretty decent place for him. The C. prolifera continues to grow at an impossible pace of two to three inches per day and stargrass is rivaling that with a new bloom appearing each day on all the established rhizomes. Really amazing. I would almost call this species on the verge of being ‘weedy’ and invasive it is doing so incredibly well.

Turtlegrass looks good, its been throwing more leaves recently so I’m hoping this means that they have recovered as much as possible or they finally like the tank conditions. Some of the shoal and manatee plants that I dug up in the process of readying the tank for a jawfish had great root growth though the roots are incredibly fine, perhaps 1/2mm across and are extremely long. No wonder many of them dont transplant well, all those delicate roots are easily destroyed and ripped off the rhizome and plant.

The one thing I would really like to close with is this:

The tank I designed and spent so much time fostering, preening, fluffing and obsessing over.. works for dwarf seahorses. The flow and feeding approaches are viable, the mix of macro and real seagrass with them really does seem to encourage the most natural of behaviors. I started with eight ponies and gave away twenty eight with just two losses or the biggest adult horses during the time I had them since late July. Two and a half months of that time was spent in the ‘big tank’ from the 5gallon quaratine. I am really happy with the setup and success of the tank and attribute the success to several things, including:

– Heavy use of phytoplankton dosed to help enrich BBS as it swam about.
– Use of relatively high flow for a dwarf tank, I did use a powerhead afterall.
– Relatively low stocking density for this size tank.
– Allowing the tank to stabilize for an extended amount of time before introducing the ‘horses.
– Keeping a steady pod population by culturing harps outside of the tank in addition to heavily enriched BBS.
– Culturing grass shrimp outside of the tank and feeding larvae to adults and adding in very small juvenile grass shrimp to eat any possible hydroids.

I didnt start this tank with the intention of showing other’s methods to be false or wrong, I did it to try to see if an experimental approach to keeping the dwarfs would work. It really did so beautifully and I wouldnt hesitate to recommend this approach for those who hate tiny tanks and the insane amount of maintenance that goes along with them. While four months isnt really a marathon trial, it is something certainly.

I would really like to say that I think the current trend of sterile tanks, fake plants and coral and hitches has its place, but I feel that a tank with more natural inhabitants really does bring out the best in these fish. While a densely planted tank does make them hard to spot at all times, and is unsuitable for fry rearing in the tank itself, the increased amount of surface area gives them an immense expanse for hunting territory and gives the pods some hiding places so that they arent entirely exterminated by the SH in the first week alone.

It goes entirely to a SHorg/RC member – Insiderart (Terri)’s credit that I was able to raise any fry in this system. The ingenious idea of rigging a floating livebearer fry trap with fabric to keep both fry and BBS inside, and the flow very slow, made an immense survival difference. Fry are unable to compete in the open large tank but they thrive inside the small confines of the trap where food density is incredibly high.

Overall, a very satisfying experiment and something I will always look back on to think about the lessons I learned while running the trial. Most important of them all, dont be afraid to experiment, and to question what other people say, even if they have been claimed to be experts by others. Someone made the approach good, but invention drives this hobby, and all of us are smart enough to modify a design and make it even more successful in its new incarnation.