Here are a few pictures we took of a batch of fry when we were raising seahorses in one of our many saltwater aquariums (if you don’t ask how many is *many* I won’t have to expose how nuts we really were).  No much to really scale the size to, think the container is 1/2 gallon, but these cute little guys were 2-3mm from head to tail in length.  We tried to count but got lost after 100 or so, all from a single birth, the poor Dad!  Fellas next time you think you have it rough, just think of what this guy went through toting these critters around!

Species: Hippocampus kellogi

A woman in a hot air balloon realizes she is lost. She lowers her altitude and spots a man fishing from a boat below. She shouts to him, “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The man consults his portable GPS and replies, “You’re in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above a ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.”

She rolls her eyes and says, “You must be a Republican!”

“I am,” replies the man. “How did you know?”

“Well,” answers the balloonist, “everything you tell me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to do with your information, and I’m still lost. Frankly, you’re not much help to me.”

The man smiles and responds, “You must be a Democrat.”

“I am,” replies the balloonist. “How did you know?”

“Well,” says the man, “You don’t know where you are or where you’re going. You’ve risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise that you have no idea how to keep, and now you expect me to solve your problem. You’re in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but, somehow, now it’s my fault.”

Shot a couple of video clips of out 180g saltwater reef tank and thought folks may enjoy watching the flurry of activity that is our pride and joy.  Converted them to .wmv format so they can be viewed with Windoze Media Player or Xine.
Full Tank

Left side

Right Side

Tank Center

Our old digital camera took a crap on us… not sure what happened.. tore it down a as many pieces as it would come and didn’t see anything obviously wrong with it… oh well too bad it was only a year and a half old. But I picked up a new one anyhows. Goofing around yesterday and managed to snap a pretty decent shot of one of our new colony of zoanthids that lives in one of our saltwater reef tanks.

Since our rather large saltwater tank loses a tremendous amount of water each day due to evaporation, the more water evaporating increases the salinity of the remaining water in the system, so after reviewing a bunch of different designs I created my own Automatic Top Off system to replace any evaporated water automatically. No more lugging 5 gallon buckets of water up from the basement each day!!

Since I’ve never seen a system designed like mine I’ve adopted the name DATO (Dakar’s Auto Top Off) for my design

Here’s a simple drawing of how it works, for more info look at the DATO thread on Captive Reefing.

Feel free to adopt my design, or adapt it to fit your own needs.