Category Archives: Pets

The products for Modern Pet (a business I’m running with my sister and our other halves) are slowly coming in and we’ve just bought a cheap eBay light tent set-up to help with the product shots.

80cm light tent and lights all delivered for $130. The lights are awesome but the tent itself isn’t as white as I thought it would be, a little too thin, so thin that you can actually see the wooden floor through the tent.

My little assistant Mia couldn’t help but jump straight into the tent!

So here’s a shot un-edited. It’s not bad actually. With a more solid white floor under the products it should be a lot better (I’m thinking just white carboard will do).

And here’s a shot very roughly edited in Photoshop. No amount of levels/curves was going to work completely. I had to literally erase a lot of the shadow work by hand. I timed myself on this and it took me 10 minutes.

Nitrates are finally at 0! I don’t think they’ve ever been this low. Water is very very cloudy and smelly too. Yesterday I added a bag of carbon and the smell has gone away but the water is still cloudy. I’m hoping it’ll clear up by itself over the next few days.

My Uncle Tekky came around to test fit the hood he made.

The whole front panel opens up.

A sturdy and concealed shelf for the LED’s with bevelled edges for maximum light.

I then got busy with a screwdriver, hammer and crowbar and managed to get all the decorative trimming off.

I also ripped off that ugly black plastic corner trim for the cleaner ADA look.

Problems: The lights are sitting too far back of the tank and need to come forward about 9cm. That means he’s got to take it all apart, rip off the sides and pretty much put it all back together again. Lucky we did the test fit before painting though.

Feeling seedy and hung over Christina and I thought we’d better get some sun and yesterday we went to Botany Bay to collect some sea snails for Mr Mantis to eat.

Ouchies! Christina had a fall on the rocks.

I love rock pooling. Something Dad used to take me to do every week when I was a little kid (he’d go fishing and I’d play in the rock pools). There wasn’t much life in the rock pools though, water is still too cold.

This morning I broke out the test kits and tested my water parameters (I very rarely test it). My parameters are as follows:

Salinity: 1.027
KH: 13
pH: 8.4
Phosphate: 0.1ppm
Nitrate: 10ppm
Calcium 350ppm

They’re really quite good parameters so I’m super happy.

Also, my skimmer went nuts last night and it’s pulling out a lot of crap lately. All good signs!

In situ.

Still a mess (for now).

Live rock.

In other good news my nitrates have come down!

I’ve placed an order with Age of Aquariums for the ADA tank (a hang on back filter, led clip on lamp and a nano heater too). I’ve also added some live rock from the main display tank.

ADA Garden Mat. Basically a neoprene mat to replace ugly white foam that usually sits under a fish tank.

Whilst I set up his new home I moved Mr. Mantis into a breeder tank which just sits in my main tank. The guys on Reef Central have identified him as a male G. falcatus. Very aggressive and about as big as he’s going to get (phew!).

Ikea clip on lamp for now. Still no filter but I’m thinking of a huge Aquaclear 110 hang on back filter. I also need to find some very white and fine substrate (I knew I shouldn’t have thrown out all the substrate I recently vacuumed out of my display tank).

More updates as they come!

ADA Cube Gardens.

Christina and I dropped in to see George at Slippery Little Suckers in Kingsford today. George and his wife Michella looked after us when we set up Christina’s Dad’s ADA inspired tank a few years ago. He’s the local distributor for ADA gear (arguably the world’s most famous aquascaper and designer of the sexiest aquarium gear on earth. Visit: http://www.adana.co.jp).

I walked away with a great deal on an ADA Cube Garden tank. It’s overkill for a mantis set-up but hey I’ll at least be able to re-use it one day down the track when I want to go for a planted set-up.

ADA Cube Garden Mini L. 45x27x30cm/4mm (about 36.5 litres). I move fast (couldn’t help myself!).

Check out that detail. Made in Germany (not Japan like I had thought originally).

I could have gone for the same tank but in the Do!Aqua brand that ADA now makes (cheaper) but I had to have the best.

There’s no lid, but clips come with the tank to hold a lid. I’ll have to custom make one once I know what the dimensions of a hang on back filter are otherwise little Mia might just kill Mr. Mantis.

This is where the tank will sit (on top of the aircon/heater filter unit). More updates as they come!

Mr Nameless.

A few years ago (2-3) I was at Strictly Aquariums on King George’s road on the way home from work (I was working for Buddy club back then) and I noticed a little piece of rock moving in their display tank. It was a mantis shrimp, the hugest one I’ve ever seen and the most colourful one I’d ever seen too. It was building a burrow and I watched it for some time. It had crazy eyes which moved in all sorts of direction independent of each other (apparently they can see a lot better than we do too). I was fascinated by it and surprised they had it in a tank with so many fish.

Long story short, yesterday on the way home from JDMyard I dropped in to Strictly again and I found that their display tank was an absolute mess. They had red algae growing all over it. I spoke to the manager and he told me that the tank had been neglected but they have been working on getting it back in shape again for the past few weeks. I asked about the mantis shrimp he had in there and he said he took it out as it was killing fish. He then took me over to a bank of empty tanks and there it was! I was pretty excited. I asked if I could buy him and he said sure. I didn’t hesitate. $30 and I was on my way home.

I dug out a small tank I had in the garage and set it up as a makeshift tank for now. I’m planning on keeping him by himself in a much nicer little 1ft cube tank. Details I’m not sure of but it’ll be a very basic little set-up. I’m not sure what he’s going to eat. I’ll most likely just walk down to the rock pool at Maroubra Beach and find him food there (snails, crabs).

Filler: Mantis shrimps are crustaceans which a lot of marine tank owners fear and remove from their tanks. They usually come in the live rock people buy and they’re sometimes referred to as “thumb splitters” because of the animal’s ability to inflict painful gashes if handled. These little guys have super powerful claws that they use to attack and kill prey by stunning or dismemberment. Larger species are even capable of breaking through aquarium glass with a single strike from this weapon!

Heaps.

Ugly motherfucker.

I’m pretty sure I’ve complained about my ugly fish tank stand before. I’m going to complain about it again in any case (Christina says I’m always repeating myself. getting old for sure!).

When I ordered this tank from my Uncle John he didn’t take any notes (nor did I give him any) and when the stand rocked up I almost vomited on the spot. He thought I’d appreciate the more detailed (and more expensive) option of having routed edges and fancy hinges! Maybe if it was made of oak in a natural finish all the detailed routing could work, but in white it just looks damn ugly and it now really clashes with the newly designed kitchen, bathrooms and everything else in the house.

I asked the guys who built our kitchen if they would re-do the stand and they weren’t into the idea. I’ve been thinking about designing and ordering my dream tank but I just can’t justify the costs right now.

Enter Uncle Tekky.

Uncle Tekky’s retired and all he loves to do now is make furniture. I got him over today to check out the tank. All the fancy woodwork is just a facade that’s been attached to a very sturdy base stand underneath. My objective is to rip of all the fancy woodwork, get down to the base stand and build a very minimalist white cabinet and hood.

He’s super keen to help out and together we measured everything up, designed a hood to hold and hide my lights (hope it works?!) and also decided on using pine since it’s cheap and will be painted in a satin white finish in any case.

I want no hinges to be visible on the outside, no gaps between doors and everything to be flush, much like this photo of the guest bathroom basin.

So, pretty excited that this is all in motion. It’ll postpone my want for a new tank for some time (I hope).

I splurged out on some more advanced gear for my tank and it’s all come at once.

I’ve wanted this German made Deltec NF509 denitrator for years and some time last week I finally hit the buy now button on it. I had to buy a tiny little pump for it so I bought the Dupla Turbo Mini water pump and amazingly everything fit together perfectly and it was all super easy to set up. I bought all this gear from Age of Aquariums. A shop I’ve been buying from since the beginning.

I also got this monstrous thing. It’s an FB150 fluid bed filter which is housing 1000ml of NP Biopellets (designed to consume nitrates and phosphates). I’m using a quality Eheim 1250 Pump and putting it all together was a nightmare. I had to find a reducer as the pump hose diameter was different to the filter hose diameter and when I finally got it all going the unit leaked all over the place. Lucky for me I had just enough head space and room to get it into the sump. A good case of paying for quality. This stuff I bought from Guppy’s Aquarium Products Online who sells a lot of cheap gear (a lot of fake/replica goods).