Category Archives: Pets

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).

Latest FTS.

I’ve been dosing the tank with a teaspoon of sugar for the past few days and today I did a nitrate test and I’m glad to say it’s finally come down! My nitrates are sitting at 25ppm now. I’m not 100% sure it was the Prodibio I was dosing. I’m thinking it was the sugar which caused my skimmer to go a little crazy (I’ve been pulling out a lot of smelly wet skimmate daily).

This is the Piranha Float, my new magnetic glass cleaner. I’ve been using shit ones ever since the 90’s but I read some rave reviews on this American product (due to the strength of their magnets) and I decided to splurge the crazy $68 to buy one. Turns out it’s ridiculously awesome and I doubt I’ll ever have to get the razor out to scrape algae off the glass ever again.

My camera really struggles to capture shots of anything inside the tank. This is the only macro shot that worked out of the 15 or so shots I took.

Shot looking down the right side of the tank. You can see a whole lot of cyano bacteria growing all over the place. Combination of high nitrates + too much light too perhaps.

Also, these LED’s came in the mail from eBay/Hong Kong. They’re 1.8W E27 38 LED Blue Light Spotlight Bulbs so they screw right into a lot of lights. They’re super bright and cost just $5.85 each shipped! I just need to figure out how to hang then in the hood now!

We’re still keeping Mia in her room at nights and she sleeps through the entire night but come 6am she’ll meow. Her meow is more of an “oooooooyyyyyyy!” It’s so cute that it doesn’t bother Christina and I much!

It took only 4 days for the Bysen/bsled LED’s to arrive from China.

How they sit on my stand.

The timers were impossible to figure out but with the help from this forum I’ve set them up nicely (blue lights on in the morning, white blue then white white blue then white blue and blue again at night, very nice).

They’re crazy bright, so much so that I’m not sure we can handle them (we had dinner last night with all house lights off and just the LED’s running!).

A few things: The timers look so dodgey. One of them even uses different screws to the other two. Each light has 3 manual on/off buttons on top and one of the buttons on one unit doesn’t work (but the light still works). My stand is bowing a little at the middle which was to be expected (dodgey!).

EDIT: The glare from hanging them was just too bright and I didn’t trust my stand, nor the thin cabling used to hang the lights with so I decided to whip out the jigsaw and hack up my old hood. Here’s the result:

No glare, units stay cool and away from salt water which is great considering they’re not made for this harsh environment (they are originally designed to grow plants!) and it’s a safer set-up for Mia (imagine coming home to a dead kitten in your tank?!).

Mia’s getting really good at jumping. She can now jump up onto the kitchen bench and dinner table too. Here she is about to jump up onto the box Christina’s new iMac came in.

And on top of the box, checking out the garden.

PS: Yes she’s getting bigger every day!

Algae bloom.

I did a huge 120litre water change the other day, tested my nitrates and they were still sitting at about 50ppm. Over it I decided to take some more drastic measures. I’ve read a lot into carbon dosing, basically, if you add something carbon based (such as sugar or vodka), bacteria will feed on it and their number will increase. The bacteria will be consuming more and more nitrate to build their cells and the excess bacteria in turn will be skimmed out by my skimmer, resulting in lowering my nitrate reading.

I decided to try putting one teaspoon of sugar into the tank. The next morning the entire tank was cloudy, this was a good thing as it was most likely an algae bloom and too right my skimmer went nuts and was pulling out more crap than usual. I’ve tested for nitrates again this morning and the reading is looking a little better. Sad thing is I lost my clam. Everything else is doing fine though.

I’m so over this crappy tank. I’m starting to seriously think about doing it right straight off the bat. IE: A custom tank made to my dimensions (I’d like a deeper, not taller tank), a proper weir + sump and plumbing set-up and with some serious tech equipment to boot.

chingchai’s tank.

Yerp I’ve been going a little aquarium crazy lately and I’m spending a couple of hours a day reading through tank journals. If I had a tank as amazing as this I doubt I’d ever watch TV again. High res version here.