Babies!

While the bird situation is under control, and we wait for further developments, I thought I'd catch up on the reef tank.

It's doing quite well. I've put the lights on a timer (something I should have done ages ago), and almost all the nuisance algae is simply gone. The glass is clear, the sheets of cyano have vanished, and the only greenery is the stuff I've allowed to stay on the very scientific basis of "it looks cool." This is some chaetomorpha macroalgae, a tough, hard algae that grows fairly slowly, and some feathery caulerpa. Caulerpa can be a pest, but if you keep it trimmed it's containable.

The zooanthids are very happy -- they spend all day open. The leather has taken to budding off little frags (chunks) of itself, whether to repair some damage or reproduce, only it knows for sure. The first bit to let loose I missed, and it drifted away into the caves. The second time I was ready; I sliced it off with a sharp knife, macgyvered (is that a verb?) a little isolation chamber for it, and it attached within days. I ended up using one of the little plastic boxes baby food comes in; it was clear, clean, and easy to make some ventilation holes in.

When I took it out and put it the rock on the sand Monday night, I noticed that the first bit had drifted out of the caves in a desperate bid for life. It even had a few polyps extended hopefully towards the light. I reset my isolation chamber, and it's looking even healthier today. Soon I'll be looking for homes for all these frags, since a tank full of leathers would be a little boring!

Quarantine

Well, I returned from Ohio to find another dead finch - Nick, the white-breasted gouldian. I wasn't surprised since Mom (who was pet-sitting for me) had told me he was fluffy on Friday, and sitting on the bottom of the cage on Saturday.

So Saturday night around 11pm I was out on the back patio hosing down the spare cage in preparation for quarantining the finches.

When one bird in a group dies, you can chalk it up to bad luck. When a second dies within a few weeks, it's time to take serious action.

First thing to do is quarantine the birds that were in the same cage. In my case, I moved them to a bathroom that could be shut off from feline access. Heat is an issue, so I'll be moving a heat lamp in there asap over the cage. They'll be in there for about a month.

Second is cleaning, and I mean everything. All cage surfaces disinfected, all bowls, perches, etc... anything wooden or otherwise porous you just throw away. Plastic and metal can just be disinfected with the rest. Every nook and cranny must be cleaned, just in case. So out went all their perches and toys, and everything was viciously attacked with cleaning products. (Be sure to use bird-safe ones!)

Next we treat the birds, even though they look fine. Birds are experts at hiding illness, so never trust how they look. You can catch them and check for dirty vents, odd-colored poop, or weight loss, but in general, you're going to treat them anyway. I chose Marvel Aid, having had good luck with it while working at the pet store. It's an antibiotic solution that you use for their drinking water -- I suspect a bacterial infection.

If you have other birds it's time to consider them. I have Merlin the cockatiel and Starbuck the african grey in the same room. Repeat the cleaning process for the other birds, and then do anything possible to boost their own immune systems; add vitamins, feed more veggies, anything you can do. In my case, I bought some rather pricey vitamins to add to soft foods/veggies and put in their water.

So now all that's left is to have a birdie funeral, and hope the badness has been contained.... I'm crossing my fingers.

RIP little birdie

I went to feed and water all my birds last night and found the little blue finch ("Scout") dead in her water bowl. I don't know why birds often die in their water bowls. I guess they feel poorly and go to drink and just keel over....

I have a horrible suspicion that when I switched foods she may have only been eating one particular kind of seed from the old seed mix, and that was missing in the new mix. But that doesn't quite add up, because she was eating millet once I isolated her. She would also spaz out and sit on the ground and stagger around, though. Probably it was something else... and I'll never know what. The other finches are just fine, hopping around and singing and eating. The last time I saw her alive she was on the window side of her cage, sleeping in the sun. She looked happy.

What's all that stuff?

I've had a few friends ask me "what does [random equipment] do anyway?". Here are the basics, in a very simplified manner.

In my reef tank, I have a submersible heater, 4 powerheads, a skimmer, and a canister filter. The first is fairly self explanatory, but I'll point out that submersible heaters are better for several reasons than the old fashioned ones that sit at a specific water level. First, if the water level drops for some reason, the old ones can shatter when exposed -- they simply overheat. Even when they survive the drop in water level, just a splash of cool water will do them in. Another benefit is that you can place them in a more efficient area of the tank -- next to a high flow spot works well, so the heat is more evenly distributed. And let's not forget aesthetics; hiding ugly equipment makes all the difference in a display.

Powerheads are simply submersible pumps. They can run filters, but for my reef tank all they are there for is moving water. This prevents algae/cyanobacteria from taking over (once you find and eliminate all the dead zones!), and helps deliver food and nutrients to the tiny little filter feeding animals among the rock. Some corals need high flow, and some fish, like clownfish, will actually play in the currents.

The skimmer is what confuses those used to freshwater tanks. You can actually live without this piece of equipment, but it will make your life harder. It removes organic waste... and before your eyes glaze over, here's the easy example. Ever walk on the beach and see the nasty brown foam the waves leave there, especially on a windy or stormy day? Yeah. The skimmer removes that gunk from your tank. If you do enough water changes regularly, you can live without it, but it's a nice safety net for even the most conscientious of us. There are a few out there who worry that it will remove bad and good alike, and I see the point, but I certainly wouldn't tell a beginner to go without one. (There are many, many articles on the internet about skimmers. As I said, this is the short and quick version.)

The canister filter, in a tank with a ton of live rock and a protein skimmer, is probably overkill. I use it mainly for circulation, and for the ability to chuck some carbon or phosphate remover in if it becomes necessary. I could probably do quite well without it! In this kind of system, most of the filtration is actually done by the rock, which is why you shouldn't skimp on that particular purchase. (It is tempting when starting out... "It's just a pile of rock! I want fish!".)

One thing I did leave out at the beginning -- the lighting. There are a billion-ty articles about lighting out there. About the color temperature, the watts/gallon, or watts/inch depth, or the kind of bulb, etc. Many people much smarter than I have quite a lot to say on the subject. In the end, I chose power compact. It's relatively cheap, fine for most soft corals, and easy to find. To really get into the issue of lighting, though... that's a post for another day.

I was bad...

 

Well, I disregarded my own advice and plans on Wednesday; I bought my first fish, and it was indeed a maroon clownfish.

It was a moment of weakness. It all started when I packed the baby into the car and drove to Blue Planet -- one of the few saltwater stores on the south side of Atlanta. It's a small store, but all their fish and corals looked fantastic. The prices were higher than Keen Reef, but still reasonable on most items. The little one was fascinated by the shark tank, but strangely uninterested in the great dane behind the counter.

It was a choice between the maroon clown, a lawnmower blenny, a set of 3 damsels, or a little blue tang. I didn't want to spend the $60 on the tang for a "first fish" purchase, and didn't really have enough algae growth for the blenny. The damsels were tempting but then, well, you're stuck with damsels. Tiny little time-bombs set to go off the minute you shell out for the expensive fish that you fall in love with and they happen to decide to hate. So the clown it was.

He is very happy so far; he hasn't picked a home yet, but my money's on the leather coral. He is living up to his name and playing in powerhead currents and generally being cute.

I also did a 10% water change on Wednesday (before adding the clown), and the corals look very happy now. They were fine but the tests showed a slight increase in nitrate, so it was time. I'll be doing water changes at least every other week now, if not every week, based on testing.

Death comes knocking

One of my turbos died Saturday night. But the funny thing about having at least a partial ecosystem going is that death for one means a buffet for the rest. I found 5 hermit crabs cleaning up the remains Sunday morning, with the emerald crab hovering in the back hoping for a shot at an easy meal.

A lot of people, when they come upon the sight in my photo, immediately jump to the conclusion that the hermit crabs have slain a snail. They start pulling their hair out and gnashing their teeth, begin pulling every crab they can find out and tossing them in the trash.... Calm down people. This is why you bought a cleanup crew. Something happened to that snail but it wasn't death by hermit crab. Perhaps it was stressed from the transition to my tank. Maybe it was old, diseased, who knows?

I'm not saying there aren't bad critters that you do not want in your aquarium. It's just that anthropomorphizing doesn't help -- do your research and keep an eye on them before smiting. Even the guys you don't want in there are not "evil" or "bad"... they are just doing what they were born to do. They didn't get together and hatch an evil plot, they just went towards the smell of food. And some of the nastier looking ones are just fine despite your initial gut reaction.

After all, I didn't have to clean a thing.

More critters!

Wednesday I added yet more life to the reef tank!

I had heard good things about Keen Reef so I packed up the little one and headed out. I had a mission; more cleanup crew. I succeeded, in that I ended up with more snails. Astrea snails were cheap so I got a dozen -- I had ordered some with my original crew but they don't ship very well in my experience. The original set never really moved much, but these guys are happily chewing up bits of algae. I also got 5 more mexican turbo snails. (I love mexican turbos; they are eating machines!)

I didn't mean to get anything else, but the coral frags were just too tempting. I ended up with a tiny little bunch of zooanthids and a little acropora frag. They seem to be pretty happy. There were both red and green polyps on the zooanthid rock... the green ones are open all the time, but the red seem to only open in the evenings. The acropora (which I have never kept before) is also looking very healthy. Hopefully they will grow and justify my impulse buy.

The algae is fading fast, and either next week or the following one, I'm going to head out with an even more ambitious mission; to find my first fish.

(For anyone who read the last entry and is wondering, the little blue finch is still with us, but still looking scruffy and sleepy. She is eating, though, always a good sign.)

My little blue friend....

Across the way from the tarantulas lives my little finch family. They are getting a little cramped nowadays; I started with one rescue, bought her a friend, had some babies, gave some babies away, rescued one more. It's a family in constant turmoil.

I didn't like finches for a long time. I didn't really see the point in keeping what I considered to be a rather dimwitted, tiny, wild bird. You can't hold them. They don't generally consider you to be a friend. Reach in their cage to feed them and they dart about as if it's the end of the world and you are the fourth horseman. Panic! Mayhem!

Then I met Milly. She was my first finch. The pet store I worked at couldn't sell her because she was chronically bald. After several vet visits and a few months of medicating her in the back room and pumping her full of vitamins, the management gave up and gave her to me. I promptly went online, discovered lady gouldian finches need iodine, ordered some, and after a few months of dosing she looked like new. This satisfied me that she didn't have some horrible finch disease, so when the next bird fair rolled around we went and found her a companion, Vash. They set about laying eggs in the fancy box I also bought for them, until tragedy struck.

A visiting cat managed to knock down the entire cage somehow, and Vash was fatally injured by the time we found him. Milly was shaken but recovered. She's a tough little girl, and there was some evidence Vash may have valiantly led the cats away from his fallen nest and girlfiend. Rest in peace little guy.

We learned much from this, not the least of which was that no matter how sedate and trustworthy we deem our own feline companions to be, to never take that for granted. Certainly not with a visiting kitty. It wasn't her fault. She did what cats do.

At any rate, at the next bird fair we found her a new friend. Gouldians come in several color morphs, the most common being red head/green back/yellow belly/purple breast. This guy had a white breast instead. Apparently Milly found this suitable enough and within a few months they were sitting on eggs again.

The important thing with gouldians when they have eggs is not to disturb them. What happens if you disturb them? They in turn do disturbing things, such as flinging the little hatchlings out of the nest and leaving them to die. So for the next month I did nothing but change food and water and fight the urge to peek in the box. I admit I lost this fight a few times, but on the whole I behaved, and my reward was eventually 3 little green-gray fledgelings. After they went through their first molt (a tricky time in life; some don't make it), I kept one (his name is Oy), and gave two away to a friend.

So finally we make it to the point of this post; I have 3 lady gouldian finches, and 1 more that I acquired along the way. She's a little cordon blue that I adopted because she, too, was balding. She is smaller than the gouldians, but also faster. She was doing just fine until events conspired against her.

First, the local pet store was out of their usual seed -- they like a lot of white millet, and the only stuff they had was full of the black nyjer/thistle seed. Second, Oy has only recently gained quite a bit of confidence and taken to chasing her on occasion. I noticed today while handing out the millet that she was a little fluffy, and was actually leaning against Milly -- Milly normally is not tolerant of this kind of behavior. I caught the little blue girl (alas I have never found the right name for her), and she was far lighter than she should be.

When you weigh so little to begin with, any weight loss is bad.

She also tends to fluff up and sleep more than she should. This is cause for alarm in any bird. Fluffy and lethargic is red alert time.

She is now isolated in her own cage with lots of food and millet, my current theory being that she hasn't managed to get enough food what with this new mix and Oy being such a little pain. She'll get some extra vitamins and care, and maybe her own home permanently.

I hope I haven't caught it too late, but often by the time a finch is visibly not well, they are really on death's door. I did see her eating millet, so I will stay positive.

And if you're wondering, Oy is named for the part of the spectrum he represents -- somehow, out of my normal color female and white-breasted male, he is an orange-headed male. He's gorgeous. rOYgbiv :)

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The cyano is clearing out! It tends to go as quickly as it came. I consider it just another part of cycling – next I'm sure I'll start seeing some bubble and possibly hair algae. If you can't stand the sight of algae, aquariums are not for you. It's just a fact of life. You will at some point have some algae, even if you go freshwater, although it is easier to solve in many freshwater tanks.

I also have hundreds (thousands?) of tiny copepods and amphipods beginning to swarm my glass. I'm sure they are all over the rock, but you can't really see them there. These are tiny critters that come in with rock and munch on algae and other microfauna. They are a very positive sign that the tank is healthy and progressing.

When I added the last few rocks from the old 35 gallon, I also discovered several red and brown feather dusters, a few tiny clams, and some tiny starfish all alive and well. There was a bristleworm in one of the rocks, luckily I didn't grab him... I am very allergic to their bristles. If you so much as brush against one of these they release their bristles, which embed themselves in skin. I usually don't notice until I go to wash my hands, and notice the fuzz. (This is most often followed by a stream of cursing and a frantic search for some vinegar to dissolve them.) I remove as many as I can with vinegar and tape, but the area itches like mad for a few days and tiny blisters eventually form. You would think I'd really hate the little guys, but I have a soft spot for them. They generally keep to themselves and eat only the dead and dying. I once had one that was nearly half an inch thick and as long as my tank (at least 20”). I named him Grendel and we developed a truce – I wouldn't touch him, and he wouldn't send me into anaphylactic shock.. As far as I know Grendel is alive and well in another hobbyists tank now.