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.

Yesterday afternoon around 2pm I called in an order to Dr’s Foster & Smith for some ‘bloomers’ for our female Springer Spaniel. She just had a litter of pups a few months ago and is again coming into heat, so she’s getting some fancy britches to wear for a couple of weeks to ensure she’s not bred again! Yeah yeah yeah who cares, the cool thing is the order arrived at 11am this morning! For some reason they shipped FedEx Overnight (with saturday delivery), but charged me for standard ground (5-7 day) delivery. Gotta love that place, they have everything for all of our critters! Even slipped in a couple of new pumps for our saltwater reef tanks with the order. They are only a couple hundred miles from us and we have to pay sales tax on everything since they are in state, with shipping like this why bother driving?

Of the last 5 orders from them in the past 8 months or so 4 of them have been shipped overnight without my request or paying for it, but never a saturday delivery More phone/mail/net order companies should take note of this and follow suit.

After setting on a long waiting list Angel finally got her Sailfin Tang. She’s just plain gorgeous, thought I’d share a good close up picture.

and here’s a shot of her in our tank, don’t let the picture fool you about the size of things, the sailfin is a little over halfway full grown, about 8 inches long now and will get to be over a foot long. This tank is a whopping 6 feet long (180 gallon).

And yes, we are completely out of our minds… but we love it. Next tank will have to be 300+ gallons

Tonight we confirmed shipping arrangements and such for the Tank Raffle, a 4′ WallTank, thanks to our first official site sponsor Bizarre Aquariums. Thanks again Blaine! Raffle details can be found here.

You’ve probably seen this tank I’ve posted pics of it here and here on my blog here, as well as other places. Take a look at this thread on this thread for some of the detailed instructions of how I mounted it in the wall, our product review and example of an actual wall mounted installation, though not required to be mounted “in-wall” to enjoy by any means.

Come on and join in on the fun!

Couldn’t resist the urge to get the new in wall tank filled up with saltwater and get her ready to start the nitrogen cycle. The trim on the back will get finished shortly.

The sand should settle out in a couple of days and then we can start adding live rock to kick off the nitrogen cycle, 3-4 weeks and she’ll be ready for some really cool plants and shortly after that we should be ready to add our first pair of seahorses! Don’t let the picture fool you the tank is 4 feet long and almost 2 feet high, but only 6 inches deep. It’s just plain cool, it’s living in the wall between a long hallway and Angel’s office.

This is one of the tanks donated to Captive Reefing by Bizarre Aquariums. We’ll be kicking off a raffle starting this weekend for another tank just like this. Thanks Blaine!!!

The complete write up on the install and stuff can be found here

Finally was able to get some more work done on what will be our new seahorse and pipe fish display tank. This guy lives almost entirely in the wall (only 6″ wide but 4 feet long and 21″ high). Got all of the trim work done on the hallway side, today I’ll try to get all of the work done on the backside (in Angel’s office).

Thought I’d share some pictures.

For more info and details on this project take a look at the Wall Tank thread on Captive Reefing.

Again our thanks for the kindness of the folks at Bizarre Aquariums for donating this tank to us so that we could give it a great going over and write about it, additionally they donated a second one that will be raffled off on our site for members in the very near future. Want in on it? Come on in and visit with us on Captive Reefing.