WaterNotes

Well well well, this tank is just swimming right along! I expect to add a small group of dwarf seahorses, Hippocampus zosterae, into the tank later this week. To update everyone on the livestock, I’ve got a small group of grass shrimp, Palaemonetes vulgaris, a few teeny little Astrea snails, all the seagrasses and a few different kinds of Caulerpa macroalgae.

In fact, my new favorite reef store (ECA) had several different morphological variants of feather-type Caulerpa and the pretty little grape Caulerpa as well. I took home a few fronds of each and stuck them into the sand bed. We’ll see if they can help to establish the bed while the grass plays catch up and settles into a more nutrient-hungry stage. The grass isnt mopping up all the nutrients as fast as it did under 9wpg.. not so surprising.

Speaking of seagrasses, I was shocked to discover that my batch of H. decipiens or paddle grass died back considerably. But that wasn’t the truly amazing thing. I was looking intently at a section that had seemed to just be very young leaves when I realized they were in fact their own rhizome, a rhizome that turned out after some ID searching to be H. johnsonii or Johnson’s seagrass. This was a little upsetting to me as its classified as a threatened species. All three of the Halophilas are holding on well so far, despite die back, so perhaps this somewhat unfortunate event will eventually become a good thing. Attempts to reestablish disrupted beds of Johnson’s seagrass have proven difficult mainly because they dont transplant well. Perhaps I will be able to come up with a good method in my own tank and be able to pass this on to the scientific community.

In an attempt to quiet my fears that the shoreline samples are biologically capable of dispersing to new areas I contacted a few seagrass biologists, just to quell my guilt. Most agreed that, while the average rhizome fragment floating in the ocean has a decent chance of submerging and becoming a new seagrass patch, Johnson’s seagrass in particular is very problematic in securing new transplants and is quite fragile. Only one in five thought the three inch, five leafed fragment I had would have survived to transplant into a new bed. So far in my tank, its hanging on by a thread, but I have plans to baby it in a seagrass ICU.