Update

A lot has come and gone since the last post. We did a water change, 600gallons. The sand filter leak was fixed. A lot of tropicals were caught, at one point I had 11 butterflyfish. But were down to 4 now. One of them is a four-eyed. The shortbig eye is growing a lot. The porgy jumped out the tank and I've yet to get another even though I built a porgy trap. Which brings me to my next point.

The tank has been truly neglected in that past few weeks. Even though I now have class time for it (40 minutes a day) stuff is falling through the cracks. Mainly its stuff outside of class time. For example: I really need to stop at the local seafood shop to get some more oyster shells, the alkalinity is low. Another thing is that I haven't been able to collect a lot of stuff recently. WHICH IS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE TANK. Low diversity of fish = boring tank. What's taking up my all my time? yeah you guessed it, senior year work. Which I've decided is the most I've had yet in high school.

Photos

Scup or Porgy

Short Big Eye and Spotfin Butterfly

Lookdown

Summer Flounder or Fluke

Tautog

Short Big Eye

Today I brought out a bunch of spotfin butterfly fish to the tank. I caught them yesterday. I now have 3 large ones and I think 8 small ones. Our orange guy I identified as a Short Big Eye fish. I don't know what the silver one above is, if anyone knows please let me know. I also released the little skate today. I couldn't get it to eat anything even when I picked it up and put a little live crab in its mouth. Chris thinks that the tank isn't cold enough for him. I put him back into the ocean. I divided the tank to see if they get use to the acrylic wall. I want to divide it to keep the black sea bass from eating everything. I don't like the look of it and will probably remove it along with the black sea bass.

I tried to fix a leak in the multi-valve of the sand filter. The main gasket that seals the valve was leaking. I disconnected the filter, moved it out from under the nursery tank enclosure, and took it apart. I put some gasket sealer on it, this reduced the leak but not by much. I'm going to try it again and put on more sealer.

The whole lower school staff came by just before I was going to leave. They were rather impressed by the whole tank and had lots of questions for me. The 2nd grade teacher was very interested in how I collected everything. She's going to try to go seining with her class to collect stuff for their classroom tank. I'm going to try to help them get their tank running. A small tank should be a lot easier after doing this one.

New Fish

Today I caught a butterfly fish down at Pondquogue. I'm not sure if its a spot-fin or a four-eyed. Its really small, probably less than 2cm. I set up a brine shrimp hatchery to feed it. Our orange friend is also still alive in the nursery tank, he will be happy to have the shrimp. Neither one were interested in mysis shrimp.

Stony Brook also gave me a skate and large flounder. All three are great additions to the tank. Today I also did the basic maintenance. I cleaned the inside and outside of the acrylic, sifted out junk from the sand bed, and did some chemistry testing. I didn't bother cleaning the algae turf scrubber.

Old Wood Enclosure

Today I expanded the wood enclosure. I built it over the bio-ball sump to hide the pipe-work, bio-balls, and autofill. The frame is made of 2x3 and the outside layer is made of old boards that washed up on the beach. I'll add photos soon. I also got some new fish. Stony Brook Southampton is closing down their fish tanks so they offered for me to take their fish. I got a few larger fish which I haven't identified, a moon snail, and a few smaller ones. Photos to come....

New Stuff

I went down to Ponquogue Bridge a few days ago and went snorkeling and seining. I got two very interesting fish (which I don't have pictures of) that could possibly be tropicals, even though it is early in the season for them. I also got a few purple Sea Urchins and a nice big Forbes Sea Star.

-Purple Sea Urchin and a Hermit Crab checking out a new shell

-Forbes Sea Star


-Hermit Crab

- Pan and Tilt Webcam

Tank Net and Air Conditioning

I ordered a nylon net to stretch across the top of the tank to prevent fish from jumping out. I installed that yesterday. The two air conditioning systems in the room are struggling to keep up with the high temperatures, they both now need to be reset every few days to keep cooling. The summer campers have collected some stuff and put them in the tank, but a lot of the stuff is really small, like pipefish, and they are either being sucked up by the filter or aren't staying alive.

Nursery Tank Fix

So I thought I was done with the nursery tank. But yesterday it started overflowing. And the school was locked up and no one was around. It overflowed so much that is flooded the floor and got to the power strip that was below the tank. Water got into the power strip, tripped the GFI outlet, and turned off the pump which stopped the leaking. So at least we didn't loose all our saltwater and the salinity didn't drop a lot (if water leaks out of the tank its replaced by freshwater through the autofill, so the salinity drops.) I watched this all unfold from my house and hour away through the pan and tilt webcam.
Today I went out there to fix this mess. I dried out the outlet strip and got that all working again. I then replaced the two 1" syphons with a 1.5" syphon. I also instead of using window screen at the end of the pipe I used the stuff people use to block leaves from getting into their gutters. This has a large hole size so more stuff gets through. I also cut the stand for the overflow box shorter so that whole box is lower relative to the tank.
My dad also built a screen for the top of the nursery tank so the fish don't get out. And I also did some repairs to the algae scrubber. I removed one layer of the mesh and repalced some zipties that were broken.