My copepod sieves finally arrived today after 7 weeks, stuck in mail limbo somewhere between England and Vancouver.
stacking_sieves_1 by
Kyl, on Flickr
stacking_sieves_2 by
Kyl, on Flickr
Going to cross-post instead of re-writing from the
tigger copepod thread:
Hoping this makes things much easier, 250 / 125 / 50 micron, stack-able sieves. I wanted to be able to simply take one of these, swish it through the tank and go right into the DT. While the little shrimp net from petsmart worked, they'd get stuck in the seams and it was just a hassle. This is about as simple as you can get. Could have made something similar, but after factoring in sourcing the mesh and my time, it was worth the 15 bucks to buy a set.
More sad news, I hadn't seen the Yasha in a few days and it was usually in a spot of the small QT tank. I had done a water change in the tank on Sunday, and I'm guessing in a small window between me taking the lid off and getting the siphon tube in, it must have jumped. I found a crispy Yasha behind my desk, I guess it wasn't just meant to be with me and shrimp gobies. The crappy thing now is I already have the pistol shrimp, so kind of need to get another shrimp goby. That Yasha was on a wait list for over a year, so I may just get a more common goby to go along with it. Possibly a hi-fin, Randals.. still not sure. Fallow on the frag tank hasn't started yet, so I have a while to decide.
The good news for that tank though is the white banded possum wrasse is really starting to fatten up, though its colours are still faded.
Wetmorella_albofasciata by
Kyl, on Flickr
It's being fed small mysis soaked in selcon every day, and I'm adding just a tiny bit of PE calanus to the mix as well. Really almost the exact same behavior that my pink streak wrasse had when in my nano tank, love those buggy cryptic eyes. It's almost at therapeutic levels of copper now, 1.2ppm, but have been doing a very slow ramp of about .3 ppm per day. That's what that water change was primarily done for, to get the water as good as I could for the next four weeks of therapeutic. I have not seen any signs of flashing, scratching or any specs, but it's not worth risking my DT to short cut a few weeks.
DT PO4 is down to .04ppm, had a bit of a loose drip on the last of the dosing drips so it dropped a bit faster than I wanted, but nothing appears to be shocked. I can already tell a difference with the euphyllia in the tank, fully inflating again and the polyps on the gorgonian are super big again. It had previously been fighting off that slime film algae, thankfully I didn't lose any tissue on it.
And now the final musing, AWC. There is a DOS locally for $150 that I've already secured but haven't picked up yet. Strongly considering setting up an automatic water change system with tanks in the other closet, to the tank and running the waste line into the RO waste line on the laundry drain. I want to keep on top of water changes for the 60, about 10% weekly, and I know at least for the summer that has been put off some weeks, or pushed to later in the week, etc etc. That and the whole bucket routine doesn't play well with laminate flooring. If not, that dos was still cheap and can be put to use in other ways, but it's very tempting to give this a shot. Still need to do some more research on things, but I think it could work out very well.
