WaterNotes

Well, the tank is finally underway, after months of planning. It will be cycling and growing plants well into the next month at the least.

Flora and Fauna
All three major species of seagrasses were included – Syringodium, Halodule, and Halophila. The epiphyte invertebrates attached to the plant leaves were left in place – I’m hoping they survived the trip. These include some encrusting sponges and bryozoans and some that look to be very small sea fans or branching gorgonians. Time will tell what they truly develop into. I somehow arrived back in Delaware with two grass shrimp in my seagrass bucket so they went into the tank as well. So far I havent fed them, but their stomachs are constantly full of green particles, so I am guessing they’re feeding on algae in the tank on the leaves or some similar source. Two third instar horseshoe crabs were also added from my previous brackish water tank. At four months old these crabs are still very small, perhaps 1/2″ across their carapace and do not do any real damage to the substrate or plants.. yet!

Substrate
I decided to use IRL mud substratum straight from the source with only a little swirl in some freshwater and a lot of ‘cleaning’. I know, sounds ridiculous, and I felt a bit ridiculous doing it. But the mud is simply that, mud. Contained in the handfuls I pulled were unwanted hitchhikers like decaying mangrove leaves, sticks, etc. All of these were pulled out since I didn’t feel that had much place in the tank. The silt fractions from the mud were retained and were the first layer put down in the tank.

What I ended up with was a slightly smelly extremely dark mud layer about 2″ thick composed mainly of oyster shell hash, fine aragonite based sand and silt built up from years of organic matter. Over the course of a few days I added Caribsea aragonite on top to make for a total bed of 4.5″. This does cut down on the actual capacity of this ten gallon quite a bit, I estimate it is capable of holding only six or seven gallons at this point. From a perspective of feeding dwarf seahorses though, this is not a terrible development since they are so small and successful keepers often refer to feeding density requirements.

Smaller tanks (or just smaller gallonage) mean higher density of food particles given the same amount at each feeding. This mud in particular was harvested from an area near Bairs Cove called Haulover Canal, which is a man made pass through between the IRL and Mosquito Lagoons. I chose this habitat to pull mud from as it supports a very large community of seagrasses, including shoal, manatee and star. Manatees are very common in this particular area and there is even an observation deck built for watching the marine mammals. In addition to the proven support of seagrasses the channel usually has a decent current running, suggesting that the mud fractions wouldn’t be too high in organic content. It seems with this tank I’m stuck between my desire to provide the grasses with enough silt to grow upon, and to avoid a disaster in having too much organic matter decomposing in the enclosed environment.

One thing to note is that there was not a whole lot of life in the mud beyond some snails and a few worms. The worms went down the drain but the snails were kept, a very small kind that I believe belongs in the Neritina genus. Hard to ID these because about ten of them could fit on a dime. Perhaps with the slight increase of temperature in the tank organisms that were hibernating or in their egg stages (and that survived the FW dip) will come out to greet me.

Here’s before and after pics between 19W PC 6500K light and 96W PC 6700K light. You can also see some growth in the stargrass if you compare the shots from the side. This is fantastic news to me. The shoal and manatee grass, while they havent exactly taken off, have definitely greened up after I trimmed some of the dead ends and have put up new leaves (esp. shoal grass). Time course from shot to shot is three days with 96W PC.

Other than monitoring the cycle I am dosing micro and macronutrients into the water column and monitoring appropriately to see how the seagrasses are responding to these supplements. I have not started to dose Flourish Excel though.. still waiting for that to arrive.