Novahobbies' 37 gallon seahorse reef thread

I've had this tank since late 2007/early 2008. This tank was a gift - when we first got it we were in the middle of a transition between a 55 gallon and a 110 gallon that was coming, so I wasn't sure what I wanted to stock in this one! My wife mentioned seahorses, so I started reading up during the cycle!

First, tank stats: This is a 37 gallon "tall cube" style tank, measuring 20x18x24 inches. It's a nice size for a few horses, the height really lets them do their mating dance properly. The first seahorses we got were a pair of H. reidi. We had them for a little less than two years before a Vibrio bacterial infection swept through the tank and claimed the horses. Here's some shots of the tank back then before the snit hit the fan....








You can also see the "tester" seahorse we first purchased here to make sure I wasn't going to kill off the $100.00 horses. She was sold to us as an H. erectus, but after research and examination of her crown I'm pretty sure she was an H. barbouri. In any case, these guys suffered a major infection that swept through the tank quickly in 2009.

The tank lay empty for a couple months, until late september when I decided to at least scrub it out and start with new dry goods. Because vibrio bacteria tend to encyst in spores, it can last a VERY long time.... so I ditched EVERYTHING in the tank - rock, sand, and treated some of the plastic things in a bleach solution for a couple weeks. The tank was scrubbed down, washed with a mild bleach solution, then with alcohol, and finally a vinegar wash and quite a few freshwater rinses. It took about 2 weeks to do all of this, but the tank was finally ready to be set up again.

 

pretty cool. Are you breeding them?

 

When I reset this tank I had been doing some thinking and experimenting with a new kind of rock setup. I came across the idea of "Live Framing" from the 2008 annual Marine Fish and Reef USA magazine (vol. 10). The short version of this rock setup includes hanging your live rock on PVC frames using smaller PVC plugs glued into each rock. By doing this you can create all sorts of caves in the PVC, shapes for the rock to take, etc. I used the Live Frame technique with my 110g tank, but I discovered that it was very time-consuming to plan out the rock this way, and IMO too much of the PVC was showing. This could have been due to poor planning on my part, but in any case I didn't want to go through that again.

On the other hand, I was also interested in the Great Stuff foam that had popped up in people's tanks recently. Some people were using it to give their back glass dimention, others were incorporating base rock into the foam wall to give it a "reef-wall" look. I like the idea, but I wanted something a little more 3-dimentional, so I took the foam idea and combined it with the live framing principle of using a PVC frame. I built a few single-column testers like these before I started in on the seahorse rock. The idea for the seahorses was to creat a three-column design that had two smaller columns curving and meeting a third larger one at different heights. Once the pvc frame was built, I used all dry tufa rock and laid the rock against the frame, then sprayed the Great Stuff foam in between the rock and the pvc. Once expanded, you can carve the foam into more "rock-like: shapes so you never see a hint of the original PVC.

Everything I used in the seahorse tank reset was dry - base rock and dry tufa rock went on the foam fram structure, and dry fiji pink sand for the sand bed. I re-used some of the "toys" from the old setup, but these would be temporary and were all treated with bleach and then dechlorinator before going in to this setup.

A shot of the tank mock-up in October '09. You can see there's no water in this tank, and the filter you see here will not be the final unit.


I found this shell while digging up my mother's garden in Rockledge, FL. I loved the colors of it, so I used it as the seahorse feeding bowl. Also, all the fake SPS branches you see here were cut from a petco toy, repainted with Krylon fusion, and had plastic rod drilled into them that I pressed into the foam on the rock structure. The goal at the time was to slowly replace these with live gorgonians and other seahorse-safe coral hitches as time and funds allowed:


One last shot of the tank before we move on. The tank stayed this way until Dec. 7th '09.....IMO it was nicer to look at this dry mock-up than a slowly algae-filling but otherwise empty wet tank!

 

Thanks! No I did not make an effort to breed them. During their stay with me the H. reidi pair produced a number of broods, but H. reidi are pelagic at birth (meaning they don't hitch) and are very small, making it extremely difficult for the amateur to raise. They're so small they can't even take BBS for food. I was finishing my last couple years of my BA, and was in no condition financially to try closing the life cycle. To be blunt, most of the fry became fish food for the big tank....just the way of nature, I guess. The southern H. erectus I have now may be easier to breed if I choose to, but that's a story for another post.....

 

In December I finally decided to officially re-start the tank. A friend of mine had a spare Tom Aquatics Rapids PS3 filter that she wasn't using. After doing some online sleuthing, I decided to give it a go and bought it off her. That's one of the things I love about this hobby - you make some great friends in the process. She sold it to me for dirt cheap, mainly because she was a seahorse fanatic like me I think. The PS3 has some drawbacks, but the biggest negative comment I ever read was it's comparative difficulty in setting up. Since I have done the HOB Thing, the Sump Thing, and many Things in between, I felt "qualified" to give this one a try. I was also excited because the filter itself fit perfectly in the limited space under the tank.

The HOB overflow. The return from the filter is also integral to the overflow in this unit, and has a siphon break between the return and the overflow itself. These are connected via airline tubing, and continue to an aqualifter that re-primes the system in the event of a power outage.


The filter itself. This is a sort of combination canister/sump with a useless limestone driven skimmer thrown in for looks. You have three baskets for filter media, bioballs, and sintered glass rings or other bio-media, then it supposedly goes through the protein skimmer before the return pump sends it on up. As I said - the skimmer is USELESS, but the rest of the filter is very effective.


And here's a shot of how it all fits in to the stand:


The obligatory "just filled" water shot:


And the special first fish, added right after the tank was filled. This is a great species, commonly known as Tankis cycleus. ;D

 

Don't you love reading build journals that are actually a few months old? It's like watching the setup in fast-forward. 8)

Anyway, while I was cleaning the tank back during the big crash, I was doing some thinking as to why the bacterial infection spread so quickly. I suspected that it was more or less my fault - I had been doing some aquascaping a few weeks before the illness hit, and I suspect that I woke "something" from deep in the rock with all the disturbance. Like Godzilla, only smaller....a lot smaller. Furthermore, I never bothered with a chiller on this tank. Seahorses run the gamut from temperate to tropical climates, and tank temps are usually recommended between 68 and 74 degrees. I never heated the tank to be sure, but my temp never got lower than 75...in fact, 76-77 was more my norm. These higher temps also encourage faster bacterial growth, and between my mucking around in the rock and these warm temps, I feel like I just may have hastened my horses' demise.

Fast forward a few weeks. When I set my new tank up, I also put in an order for a small chiller - an Ice Probe, to be exact. I know my ambient temp is around 76-77, so I only wanted a couple degrees knocked down. The probe came in the mail a few days after the tank was filled, and I had it delivered to my work. Naturally, when it came I did what anyone would do - I took my lunch break a half an hour early and ripped open the package! Funny story: while I was examining this new toy, a coworker came by and saw the box. Reading off of the label, she said "Aquarium chiller? What does THAT do??"
:
In her defense (and she needs some), it does look a little....questionable...when viewed from a certain angle.

I decided to mount this in an Aquaclear 20. I wanted the clear plastic of the Aquaclear because I was trying to minimize the visual impact of the "stuff" hanging in the tank.


It turns out the IceProbe is a fairly big piece of equipment!


I marked the bulkhead in the lid of the filter:


And drilled it out, using a dremel tool to sand out and smooth the bulkhead hole:


Once it's on the filter properly, it was clear that I wasn't going to get much else in here. I modified the filter elements a little so I could still use the foam insert for extra biological filtration, but that's all.


And here it is installed and mounted to the back of the tank, opposite the HOB overflow:


Final pic for this installment, I promise. A full tank shot of the system as it stood on 12/13/09. I think the attempt at keeping the tank free of clutter has been relatively successful so far....that Koralia is going to be moved down the road, though.

 

OK, I'm going to speed this up a bit. Between the sterile conditions of the tank setup and the chiller slowing down bacteria production, this tank took a full 6 weeks to cycle. Like everyone else, I'd been coming up with different stocklists in my head while the cycle did it's thing. When it was finally done, however, my job situation was hanging precariously by a thread - my company was in the process of shutting down, and I was one of the last people out the door. This makes for some interesting work conditions: you KNOW your time is limited, but you don't want to screw off while at work because you want to stay as long as possible. So I was suddenly not sure of how much I wanted to invest in this tank! Since seahorses are delicate, I figured I'd just start stocking the tank with seahorse-safe corals - no stinging tentacled LPS, no anemones, that sort of thing. I knew I wanted a few photosynthetic gorgonians, but I also really wanted to try a non-photosynthetic Blueberry gorgonian. In mid-January I went in tot he LFS to get water for a water change, and came out with this beautiful specimen that they had just gotten in:




Don't get too attached. I'll spoil the ending here, he didn't make it. I tried Rod's coral food, DT's oyster eggs, roti-feast, and cyclopeeze. I fed during different times of the day when I saw the polyps open. No matter what I tried, I only succeeded in increasing my nitrates. This guy just faded over the course of 4 months. I never had much of an issue with cyano, but with tissue recession and polyps just fading away. I knew the risks going in, and I commited to trying with ONE specimen. I decided if I couldn't get it to live longer than 6 months, I would not try another. They're too uncommon and too difficult for the average fishkeeper, although I know a few very advanced folkes who have managed to keep them alive in dedicated systems. Not for me, though!

Over the course of those weeks, I had been getting a few frags and corals here and there to slowly fill the tank. The next post will cover those.....

 

It's time to jump into some picture-heavy posts. I don't know about you, but I'm getting tired of hearing me blather on about the whether-to's and the why-for's. Here's some shots of a few coral aquisitions, more or less in the order that I got them. A FTS or two will be peppered in here and there as well.

A nice GSP rock:

And a closeup:


Some Watermelon Palys:

And a FTS around late January. Note that the Blueberry is still here:


A green & red zoo frag. The red zoos here eventually turned green too. The highlighted section shows the arms of a micro-serpent star:


A slightly different color green zoo frag. This one has been doing really well, much more growth here.


Orange Frilly sponge:

and a Colt soft coral:


More to come!

 

I was wondering when you were going to stop typing and add some pictures!

The tank looks awesome. Its too bad about the blueberry.

 

A small pulsing xenia frag. The rock it's on is a magnarock: a faux-rock frag rack that is held on the glass via magnets similar to a Koralia. The magnet in the "rock" is embedded in the resin itself, and you can move it up and down to whatever height you want. This prototype was painted a little to garishly for most people's tastes.


A green ricordea and a red shroom on the magnarock here. The palys were the same ones from before, and the orange monti did not make it. :-[


Hard to see here, but a Pagoda cup coral is on the top of the highest column:


Rather than bore you with individual shots of each of these as they came in, here's a pic of my Ric garden as it stands right now:


A non-pulsing xenia I purchased recently. This guy grows a lot faster than the pulsing variety - it's at least 30% bigger as in this picture than when I first got him just a month ago!


Some final pics for this post. Remember the whole gorgonian kerfuffle all of two posts ago? I finally got around to getting a couple photosynthetic gorgs when a friend turned me on to Cramer's Carribean Critters . These guys are very local to me, so they comped my shipping to less than 8 bucks. I got this guy:

And this guy:

as well as the blue Ric you see a couple pics above for something like 36 bucks including shipping. The pics here were taken right after acclimation and dipping, so they're closed up. They look like this now:



OK, that's it for now - it's lunch time. When I come back.....it's Seahorse Picture time! ;D