What is your PH, and why should you care?

PH Test kit

Well if you have a marine fish tank, PH is something you should know about.  A reef tank has to be more careful than a fish only tank.

First let us look at what PH is – PH is the acidity or alkalinity of the water.  The higher the number, the more alkaline the water is, and the lower the number, the more acidic the water is.  The acceptable levels of PH is 7.7 to 8.4 for a fish only tank, and a reef tank should be between 8.0 and 8.4. Acids in your tank usually come from three main sources – excess CO2, nitric acid from biological filtration and organic acids from fish poop. As acids first work on lowering your buffers in your water, such as calcium. However, once your buffers run low, then your PH number will start to drop and the health of your tank may be in jeopardy due to poor water quality.

ph test kit 8.3

Here is a sample from The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide Demo tank. It reads 8.3, which is a very healthy reading. It is rare that your PH will go over 8.4, and it is much more common for the reading to go lower.  8.3 is a great number for a healthier habitat for your fish and corals to live.

A good practice to keeping your PH up is constant partial water changes as this refreshes natural buffers and restores trace elements into the water. The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide also recommends using a calcium reactor to help put back in trace elements and keep your PH levels at a high constant.

Not all algae is bad. The purple coralline algae is extremely beneficial to your tank in helping with the natural biological  filtration process. However, most reefers consider  green algae a nuisance and don’t want in their tank. So how do you get rid of Unwanted Green Algae? Unfortunately, there is no one simple answer as there are many different types of algae which cause many types of problems.  Many types of algae react differently to different treatments, so there is no silver bullet for algae.

hair algae

Let’s look at some Green Hair Algae. Oh, that does not look nice. Here we see the algae is growing wildly on the live rock . We want it off? What do we do?

Algae is a crafty foe, so we must do all that we can to defeat it. Instead of doing one thing, we are going to do three.  First, we are going to pull some of it off the live rock with our hands and a toothbrush.  This does three things. First, it looks a little better right away, which makes us feel like we are doing something. Next, it cuts down the competition with the protein skimmer for the waste nutrients that it lives on. Third, it cuts down the reproduction of algae, as algae begets more algae.

Next, we are going to feed the fish and corals in the tank a little less. The Algae use the fish waste and decaying uneaten fish food as food for itself.  So in this step we are looking to starve the algae, or at least not allow it the food to grow.

Hair algae is also photosynthetic, as light helps it grow. So we are going to cut back a little on the hours the lights are on in the tank.

Lettuce Nudibranch

Finally, “Release The Hounds”. This is the fun part as now you get to buy something. That is always how we like to fix things – just buy something to take care of it.

What should you buy? Inverts. Snails, crabs, shrimp. The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide has a whole section devoted to The Clean Up Crew, as some inverts we like much better than others.  Here is a picture of a Lettuce Nudibranch. These guys love to eat algae and I have found will often graze on a large patch of hair algae.

These guys are Nerite Snails.

Nerite Snails

They eat all types of algae, but our experience show that they like the top of the tank . A few of them like to go very high so that they are even partially above the  waterline .

Most dealers will put together cleaner packs – some Nerite Snail, some Nassarius Snail, a few Emerald Crabs, a few Hermit Crabs, and you have yourself  a ready made aglea eating army. We just tried out Reef Scavengers.com and were happy with the quality, price and service. They also have a great deal with shipping: free with any order over $99.

Scarlet Reef Hermit

How do they do that? Well it is two day shipping, but as most of these inverts are not as delicate as fish, so they are fine for the longer trip.

Good luck if you have an algae problem. Remember, it took a long while for the algea to grow, and it will take a long time to get rid of it. Nothing good happens quickly in a fish tank. So if you want your algae to go away, keep working at it.

Rotate Pump Parts

After months and months of use, pumps build up calcium deposits that are difficult to clean. Even if you scrub them by hand and look clean, they still have a layer of build up.  So what is the best way to clean the build up off your pumps? Soak the pumps for a few days in white vinegar.  It is cheap and extremely effective.

Soak Your Parts

However, you can’t have your main pump turned off for two days while you soak your impellers and back plates. This lack of circulation could kill off your whole tank.  So what do you do? The friction caused by the calcium deposits lessens the pump efficiency, until eventually they often won’t even start turning.

Try buying a spare impeller and back plate. The

new parts

cost is about 1/3 the price of a pump, and should literally make your pumps run like new. Now you can soak the other back plate and impeller as long as you want as now there is no hurry to get them back, as you have two sets. Replacing our two BlueLine pumps impellers and back plate, took no more than half an hour. We run a 70 for our main pump and a 55 for the protein skimmer.  The water level on the protein skimmer shot way up, showing an increase in efficiency.

Now we can let the

new in, old out for a wash

old parts soak for a good long time and not have to worry about a quick return. The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide is very big on protecting your investment in your tank, and this is a good way to keep keep costs down while giving you another layer of protection for your reef tank.

Breeding Bangi Cardinals

Why has it been so long since posts in our blog? Taking care of babies! We were lucky enough to have a breeding pair of Bangi Cardinals and the amount of time it takes to care for the parents and young is quite great. First, our older son noticed a tiny little baby Bangi Cardinal at the bottom of the tank.  He was amazingly tiny, only about 1/8 inch long.  We looked at the parents and noticed that the male had a mouth full of eggs and babies.  After 1 1/2 hours and taking out 150 pound of live rock, we were finally able to catch the elusive male.  At once, we put him in a breeder held on top of the tank with a MagFloat.

Daddy Bangi in breeder

Immediately he spit out most of what he had in his mouth, both eggs and babies.  Quickly we transferred the new babies and eggs to a second breeder right next to the one with the male. After a short while the male spit out a two more babies and he was done brooding. We again, quickly transferred the babies out of the breeder with the male and put them in with the other babies.

Bangis 2 days old

After one day we had seven new little baby Bangi Cardinals.  They look like adults, only way smaller.  Now they are a shade smaller than 1/4 of an inch.  However, what did we feed them? Our local fish store does not carry food for babies, but fortunately we had ordered  Rotifers from  Reef Nutrition as we thought we were going to get Ocellaris Clown Fish babies. Those eggs did not hatch, (another story), but now we had food for the baby Bangi Cardianals.

Feeding Rotifers in a mesh breeder to tiny

Rotifers

new fish is something that must be done on faith. Yes, we could see dots in the water that must be Rotifers, and yes we could see the babies moving like they were eating, but could we see the fish actually eating? Now way!  Everything was too small and we were looking through a net! Here is the container where we keep and breed the Rotifers.  We got our live order via overnight delivery and put it in an old salt bucket with an air stone and air pump.  We add enough Rotifer Diet to keep the water green. The green is algae which the small Rotifers eat. So when the baby fish eat the Rotifers, they get vegtables (algae) and protien (the Rotifers) in a very nutritious combination. Once you have established your Rotifer colony, it will keep going as long as you feed it or don’t have a crash. You should harvest 1/3 of the Rotifers each day after 3 days.  The colony can crash from under feeding, over population, and extreme temperatures.

We also began feeding our fish brine shrimp. The size of the ones at the local

Brine Shrimp

fish store were way too big – almost bigger than the babies.  Thus, again we had to make our own food. This interesting looking contraption is a liter soda bottle upside down with the bottom cut off. We put a regular house light on it with a 60 watt bulb to help heat the water. We used the San Francisco Bay Brand Hatchery and got many good batches of brine shrimp after 36 hours. We would turn off the air pump and wait for the egg shells to float to the top, strain them off, and pour the shrimp through a fine net.  We then dumped the brine shrimp in the baby’s breeder.  This baby Bangis ate this as well. Now at this point we still had seven babies. Bangis can have broods of 20 or more, and after a week there can be a large difference in size and aggression. However, with such a small number of babies, we have not had that problem.

Baby Bangis in breeder

The Bangis like to hang out in groups and since there was no aggression between them, we have let them stay together in the one breeder.  The milky whiteness of the picture you see is the white net mesh . Here they are about one week.

Turbo Cleaning

One thing that you must do is constantly clean the breeder to keep good water flow into the breeder. Here we see a Mexican Turbo Snail making a meal out of the detritus on the breeder. However, once we the Turbo did not come back for seconds, we just changed out the whole breeder by catching the fish and moving them over.

Baby Bangi two weeks

Here are the babys now at two weeks.  We have started feeding them Agrent Cyclop-eeze, a frozen food that we thaw in a cup. Here we again met with success. It seems as these Bangi babies are not picky eaters. We still feed them Rotifers for two reasons. One the babies still like it and two, we have a colony now and must get rid of them some how. Rotifers are interesting. Once you start a colony, you must continue to maintain that colony.  We do this as the Cardinal pair that first bred, have already bred again. We now have them in thier own love nest in the quarantine tank, so we should be ready for the next batch. Who knows, you might be able to buy some young Bangi Cardinal fish that were raised from The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenace Guide demo tank…

Stewart The Blue Jaw Trigger

This is Stewart, the new Blue Jaw Trigger.  As most Blue Jaw Triggers, he was extremely shy when we first introduced him into the quarantine tank. We gave him plenty of pipes from Home Depot to hide in. These pipes were his haven, as he rarely came out, especially in the first few days of his quarantine. Also, for the first few days he was not a great eater, and did not like to be seen while dining.  He was very quirky,as the food would be right next to the opening of the pipe, we would leave the room and then he would eat.

How did Stewart get his name? He was a great re arranger of the quarantine

Stewart the Blue Jaw

tank.  Look at the sand in the pipes. When we put the pipes in the quarantine tank, there was no sand in them. However, look at all the home decorating Stewart did. Hence, he gets his name from Martha Stewart. To call him Martha would have been a mistake, as Stewart is a male. You can tell by the blue on his jaw. The females do not have the blue on their jaw.

We quarantined Stewart, along with a Red Firefish,  a Midas Blenny, and an Orangespot Diamond Goby for four weeks. We got the shipment from Vivid Aquariums out in Canoga Park, California. Everything about the shipment was excellent, from the packing, the phone call the night before, express delivery before 10 AM and the high quality of product.

pipes in Demo tank

When we transferred the fish over to The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide Demo tank, Stewart was extremely easy. We just lifted out the pipe and put him, along with the other fish, in our acclimation bucket (an old salt bucket). After an hour, we just put him in to the Demo tank, pipe and all. No netting and minimal stress. We left the pipes in for two days to allow Stewart to get acllimated.

Stewart the Blue Jaw

However, he did not need the pipes at all. He went exploring right away and found a nice hide out in the live rock.  In the main tank he is far more active and swims around more than he did in the little 20 gallon quarantine tank.  He is one of the few reef safe triggers. If you have always wanted a trigger but had a reef tank, or did not want to spend several hunded dollars on a Bursa Trigger, this is the fish

Stewart

for you. They get along beautifully with community fish, are fascinating to look at, and have more personality than almost any fish in the tank.

For people who have wrote in        and  said such nice things about  our pictures in our blog, we thank you for the compliments. I have been making my living for over twenty years taking pictures, both still and moving,  and this article will give you some of my tips on how to take a good picture.

There is one tip that is far more important than any of the others. It is a tip that is so simple you will think that it is silly, but it is my best tip I could give you. It is a tip every professional photographer must practice if they are to be good at their craft and will help the amateur improve immediately.

The golden rule: If you want a good picture, take a lot of them.

This sounds childishly simplistic, but it is the #1 rule to taking a good

Good pictures

picture. If you take 100 pictures of, lets say a fish, than you have 100 chances at getting a good shot of that fish.  If the fish stays away from your camera and in the live rock, and you only get two pictures of the fish, the odds go way down on you getting a good shot.  Why do you think when you see a movie premier and the stars walk by the photographers there is this huge flashbulb frenzy? Because all the pros exercise this one rule. Even though you think you have a good shot – keep clicking. Many times when you get back home and look at the shots on a big screen,  you see the imperfections. With a fish perhaps they are out of focus and the live rock behind them is in perfect focus. With a person it could be that their eyes are half closed, or they are not looking the right way.  The digital age has really made a tremendous difference in this whole concept.  When we shot film, it had to be processed and was expensive to make a mistake. Now, your mistakes cost you the time it takes for you to delete them, which is not long and does not cost any money.

If you are shooting your family on vacation, I have used the pocket cameras with great success. They are small, light weight, inexpensive and offer very good quality, especially for the money. However, if you want to take some nicer shots of your fish tank, a single lens reflex camera is the way to go. The single lens reflex are the bigger cameras that have interchangeable lens. When you push your finger on the shutter button, the picture takes almost instantly. Where as when you use a pocket camera, you find yourself sometimes wondering if the camera is working after you have pressed the button. Zooming and focusing are far superior on an SLR camera which are crucial for shooting fish. The brand I have found most popular with the professionals, including myself, is Canon. Nikon, too, has many loyal pros and has since caught up to Canon in image quality.  There are many Nikon fans who will disagree on my choice, but they are both excellent and reliable tools.

Next we should talk about lighting. As we mentioned in The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide, your fish tank and your lighting is one of your brushes that you use to create your masterpiece.  To shoot fish in a tank, it is important to point out that fish move. And because they move, it is helpful to have more light on them, as this allows your exposure time to decrees. You want a fast exposure while shooting a moving object as to cut down on the blur.

There is also something that is important to have, and that is a good eye.

Freddie

Some people have it

right away and others have to develop it.  While we were on vacation, my older son took one of the most beautiful pictures I had ever seen. The composition was perfect, with clouds, beach, a ship & mountains. Everything just worked to make the shot great. Any professional would have been extremely proud of the shot.  However, my oldest son was six years old. My advice to him before he took the shot? “Son, don’t touch that camera, that is not a toy”.

yellow tang

There are all sorts of rules of balance, and proportion. These rules  can help but I think you can learn more by experimenting and finding out what works for you. Going back to the golden rule – take a lot of pictures.

Finally, take time to learn the camera itself. Each one has a different

clown family

manual, and each camera does somethings different. These manuals are the most boring reads on the planet. I am a professional and I dread them. But I read them because it makes sense to know your tools that you are using.

I hope you have found these tips useful. Please keep writing me and let me know what you think!

Another way to enjoy your tank’s beauty is to add a little night light.

Night Lights

Night lights not only allow  you to observe your fish, corals and inverts in a natural way at night,  but they help your scavengers who come out at night looking for a meal. These night light help your hermit crabs, shrimp and other clean up crew members  survival in seeing and finding their food.

We give high marks to Currant Lunar Link  Light System. The system is expandable, so if you want to add more light you don’t have to get a whole new system. You just buy the amount of lights

Night Lights

you want. We started with four units on The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide Demo Tank. For about a year or so this was fine. However, over time, all lights dim.  When we changed out one end, we noticed a very large difference between the old and the new.  So we would recommend you really looking at your night lights every 6-12 months to see if they need replacing. Now we have seven night lights on the demo tank and it is brighter than when we first started the tank.

green carpet florescing

We chose to use the blue light for aesthetic reasons. However,  one real treat we noticed when put in the new lights was the amount of  corals and anemones that were florescent under the blue light. Our green carpet looked even more magical at night that it did in the day! There is truly an “OH, WOW” factor added to your fish tank.

Florescent Favites

Of course, some corals don’t fluoresce at all, while others much more so. Here you can just see where around the eyes of this Favites coral there is some fluoresce.

While with this Pink and Green Tip Torch

pink & green tip torch

is very highly fluorescent. The tips of this coral move around a great deal, even at night. We had to use a tripod and time exposure to get this and many of these pictures for this article.

In conclusion, night lights are a inexpensive way to improve both the beauty and health of your tank. If you are thinking about a color for your night lights, blue might give you another magical moment to enjoy your tank.

Spawning Bubble Tip Anemone

One night I noticed that the demo tank from The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up and Maintenance Guide had very cloudy water. Upon looking further, I saw that one of the Bubble Tip Anemones was spawning, sending out a milky white substance into the tank water. It almost looked like it was smoking. I quickly checked

Spawning Bubble Tip

the parameters of the water: Ph, Nitrite, Nitrate, Amonia,

Phosphate and dkh. Everything was in a good range. The Nitrite and Amonia were each zero, Nitrate was one, Ph was 8.3, dkh was 8 and Phospahte was zero.  The fish were swimming around happily and there seemed to be no ill effects other than the cloudy water.

The demo tank from The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide is a large tank, 210 gallons with a 35 gallon sump. This is a perfect example why sometimes it is easier to keep a large tank than a small tank. When an amemome spawns,

clowdy water from spawning

it uses a lot of oxygen in the water. I have heard stories of the fish being killed in a small tank because of lack of oxygen. If you have a small tank, I recommend an immediate water change. However, in our large tank, we could easily handle the spawning just by the size of the tank. Also, we run ozone into the tank, thus increasing the oxygen in the tank.

spawning

After the spawning the Bubble Tip Anemone was noticeably smaller and a little shriveled. However, the next day he was at full size and the tank looked fine. Also by then, the protein skimmer had pulled out all the milkiness from the water.

Art in Motion

Which is more beautiful, above or below?

Wall Art

This holiday weekend my wife and I took our family to the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey.  There were vastly different sections, from several hands on kids sections to several very hands off art sections.  My wish is not to praise or put down the museum. Although they did have only one salt water reef tank that had loads of red hair algae, poor water circulation and unhealthy fish. The maintenance people of the museum could really use A Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide My wish is to point out that as far as art work there is no comparison. A well kept fish tank is infinitely more beautiful than any still painting or sculpture could hope to be.  A fish tank is ever changing, evolving, and growing. A fish tank can be watched for hours.  The display of changing colors and shapes are an absolute feast for the eyes and mind.

Real beauty on your wall

There is a living sole to a fish tank. All of the live creatures inside make each tank an amazing and special community of life. You get the tremendous privilege of viewing a beautiful slice of nature right in your own home.  The richest Kings and Queens of the world even 100 years ago never had a chance to have anything so beautiful in their homes.

Here, check out these pictures that I took of The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide demo tank. All these pictures were taken in about one minute. These are all different views the the changing art in my life.

Art in Motion

Art in Motion

Art in Motion

Art in Motion

Art in Motion

Art in Motion

Now please don’t misunderstand that I don’t think there are great paintings or works of art. There are. And the craftsmanship that can be reached is truly phenomenal. However, I think try as man can, I don’t think he can hold up in a comparison to mother nature herself.  Nature has billions of years on her side. That is why for me, a well kept reef tank is the greatest work of art any person can wish to have in their home. We are truly privileged to be living in an era that allows us this amazing opportunity to make our own work of art that has no equal.

Keith Behrle

We wanted to increase the water flow of the Demo tank from The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide.  Water flow helps give oxygen to the tank ,  helps to  remove waste and aides in the feeding of corals. In many tanks, more water flow is better. It is rare that a tank has too much water flow. How ever, if you have Seahorses and other delicate species, too much water flow is not a good thing.

Some people like to drill into the bottom of the fish tank and put returns into the bottom of the tank. I have heard that there are many fans of this method, but we feel that the less holes in the tank, the less likely bad things are to happen, such as a leak, a crack, or faulty check valve during a power outage.  Fans of below the water line tank returns might be screaming now how safe it is and how good it is for the tank, and how much neater the plumbing looks. Hey, there are many ways to set up a fish tank. There is no one correct way. This is part of the fun of having a tank. Do it the way you want! Don’t worry. Either way the tank will be fine which ever one you do, as long as you do a good job.

If you have a good pump running the return from your sump back to your tank, you might be able to increase your water flow.

Blueline

Running The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide Demo Tank we have a Blue Line 70. This is a very reliable, powerful pump, that we were not using to it’s fullest .

However, when we opened up the valve from the Blue Line 70 to the main tank returns, the water level on the tank got high, as the water was not going over the overflows quickly enough. So what did we do? We went to our tool kit and got a file, and filed the overflows to widen the space between the plastic spacers. This increased the water flow. Now we were able to turn the valve open to the tank returns from the  Blueline to allow more water to go back into the tank quicker, thus increasing our water flow.

Be careful not to knock out a large hole in your plastic overflow covers as this can cause excessive noise from the uneven rushing water. Another option to filing is drilling a hole or holes with a power drill and bit.