Michelle's Marine Diary

by Michelle Stuart of Ontario Canada
Reprinted, with permission, from her web site Fishtanksandponds.net
Aquarticles

Chapter one
All my life there have been fish in my house. I've been fascinated with them ever since I can remember. One day when I was about 12 years old, I saw a real marine tank for the very first time and I begged my mom if I could have some of those fish! Of course, she said, "NO, it's too hard and expensive!" Naturally I was disappointed but a "No" means "No". I've tried on numerous times through the years while living at home but the answer was always the same. I vowed to myself that someday I would have a marine tank, and I would get a purple fish just like one of the fish I saw in that first marine tank.

The years went by and I finally finished college, got a job and finally my own place to live. I went 6 months in my own apartment without a tank to keep me company. It was the longest I remember being without any fish around and it was driving me crazy! After six months it was too much to take not having fish around, so I decided to get myself an aquarium. It was December when I was finally able to have what I though would be enough money to set up a simple tank, so I went to the LFS and started looking around to see what they had. One of the very first display tanks that I walked by had that purple fish I had wanted so many years ago. Then and there I KNEW I was going to set up a marine tank and NOTHING was going to stop me!

The first thing I did was went to the book section and found a couple books that I thought would help me through setting up the tank and give me the knowledge that I would require to keep the tanks running smoothly. After all I had taken care of true coldwater fish when everyone kept telling me it couldn’t be done! How much more difficult could a marine tank be? The first two books I got were "The New Saltwater Aquarium Handbook" by George C. Blasiola II and " Marine Reef Aquarium Handbook" by Dr. Robert J. Goldstien.

Now when I decided to get the tank, I had only wanted to keep fish in the tank. I never expected to ever be able to keep corals. To me, corals have always been such mysterious, wondrous, amazing, fragile creatures from the depths of the ocean. So, even though I had a book about setting up a reef aquarium it was more for learning and admiring the beautiful pictures within. I read though both the books cover to cover a couple times. Then made up a list of things I thought I needed and proceeded to start looking around for equipment for the tank that I was going to get.

My list at the time was fairly basic and simple:
Salt, salinity tester, test kits (ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, pH, calcium, alkalinity and copper), nets, extension cords, crushed coral for the substrate, heater, lights, canopy, filter system, live rock, a couple new clean buckets, water conditioner, food, and a couple of small power-heads for increased water circulation. (Do you see the two things I was missing on the list that are kind of essential to setting up a brand new Aquarium?).

So, having a nice little list made up, it was time to commence striking items off the list. I was getting very pleased with myself for gathering most of the things I needed to get my tank up and running. Christmas came around and I was going home for the holidays ready to brag about how close I was to setting up my marine aquarium. Once I got back home and settled in, I went into the living room and let out this HUGE curse! Everyone in the house came running to find me staring at my cold water aquarium that I was forced to leave behind when I moved out for college. Everyone kept asking me what was wrong and that’s when I realized that I had forgotten all about having to buy a Tank and Stand! You would think it was such an obvious thing to need, but I truly had forgotten about that minor detail! I had NEVER had to buy a tank in the past, I took if for granted that I would just be able to build my own tank and there was ALWAYS something to use as a stand!

My mom had planned on driving me back to Toronto for New Year's but nothing would have been open for me to pick the tank up when she dropped me off. So we decided to come to Toronto a couple days sooner and look for a tank. I finally found what I thought would be a nice size 30 gal. tank, a stand to go with it, and an Eclipse Three Canopy system to fit the tank. We brought everything home and I was so excited. I couldn’t wait to get everything set up. I would at least be able to get the water in the tank before the New Year began! WOO HOO!

My mom and I proceeded to get everything ready to set it up. We poured 40 gallons of tap water into the buckets and containers I had purchased for the tank and added the chlorine remover. We got the tank situated where I wanted it, poured the crushed coral substrate in the tank, positioned the heater, got some extension cords to the tank and we were ready for the canopy system.

The canopy system I got was the Eclipse Three. This unit has a built in filter system with disposable carbon floss cartridges, and a bio-wheel. It was also the only canopy available at the time with dual fluorescent bulbs, which I knew I was going to need to get the proper spectrum of lighting for the live rock to thrive. I was assured that this would be a great low maintenance canopy for a marine tank.

When I opened the box to put the canopy on the tank, the worst was lying before me! The canopy was broken, not just in one small place either! I was broken all the way through one side of the canopy and was completely unusable! This was New Year's Eve, the stores were already closed and they weren’t going to be only for a whole TWO days! I was heart broken! I had wanted the tank set up with at least the water running in it so badly before the New year that I was fit to kill! Why hadn’t we checked the canopy in the store to make sure it was alright? Why did this have to happen to me when I wanted it so badly! This was the first major purchase I had made for myself and it meant the world to me. I couldn’t face starting off the New Year with this one last thing that I had waited so long for left unfinished! The only thing I can say, is that my mom was there to calm me down and attempted to explain it wasn’t the end of the world. That she would stay a few more days so we could go back to the store when it opened and exchange the canopy for a new one. That I could make getting my very own Marine tank up and running as my New Year's resolution, and that nothing will be able to stop it ever again! My hopes began to swell and I was able to face the New Year with a new determination!

January 3rd 2000, we went back to the store with the broken canopy in hand hoping to get the new one and be on our way once again. We showed the owner the broken canopy and he readily took it back, but informed me the other one that he had in stock had already been sold. He was expecting another shipment at the end of the week and I would be the first to get one from him. I was disappointed, but for some reason I still felt ecstatic about getting the tank up and running. I decided to use the time doing some more reading just to make sure that I had everything. My mom had to go home that day and she was a little disappointed she didn’t get to see the tank with all the filters and everything running. However, she knew next time she came down she would see my pride and joy up and running, and this time with at least one or two fish in it!

Thursday night I decided to get the saltwater ready for the canopy and filled it ¾ full, since I knew I was going to need room for the rock I was going to buy, and room for the filter; I could finish topping off the tank afterwards. I used the extra power-heads to keep the water circulating. The end of the week came and the storeowner dropped the canopy off at my place (as an apology for not having a good one in stock when I was there). I got the canopy on the tank and the filters turned on. Finally I was ready to start adding some life to the tank after 10 years of waiting!

Chapter two
That night I went to bed and could barely sleep, I was so excited with the tank being ready that my mind was racing with possibilities. I knew enough about keeping fish tanks that I wasn’t delusional about having a completely set-up tank on the morrow. I knew it was going to take time to get the tank established and ready for a community of fish, but at least I was going to be able to get something started.

The next morning finally dawned. I think it was one of the first times I willingly got out of bed before noon on a weekend. Indeed it was only 7a.m. when I sprang out of bed to check out the tank. I made sure all the power-heads were working, checked to see that the filter was working nicely as well, I made sure the temperature was set to 78F and that the water was clear. By this time the air bubbles that are normally found when setting up a new tank had cleared from the side of the glass walls. I also checked all the water parameters that I had test kits for. There weren’t any ammonia, nitrite or nitrates in the tank, the Salinity was steady at 1.024, the calcium level was 420 p.p.m. and the Alk. was at 4.2dKh. I remember these readings as if it was yesterday. Everything was perfect, as well it should be, considering that I had brand new saltwater in the tank with nothing available to throw any readings off. Unknown at the time, it would be a long journey with many pitfalls and lots of aggravation before I could brag about getting readings like that again!

With readings taken in the tank, confidence booming and chequebook in hand, off to the LFS I go! I was so used to everything being open long before I awoke on Saturdays, I was greatly surprised to arrive at the store and find out that it wasn’t going to be open until 9a.m., which was at least an hour left to kill! Time crawled that morning as I wandered around the empty mall with all the shops still closed. Slowly more and more people started appearing in the previously deserted halls until I couldn’t stand the wait any longer. I made my way back to the LFS and sat at the doors until they finally opened! I don’t know how I stopped myself from running to the Marine section, but I believe I made it there in record time.

Since this was my first Marine tank and since I didn’t know anyone with a marine tank to give me advice, I was left on my own to figure out what in the world this live rock stuff was. Why was it so important to my tank and how to choose the best stuff? What makes one rock better then the other and how important was it really? I wandered around looking at the tanks they had set up; especially the display tanks where they had the most live rock. Naturally, I wasn’t allowed to take any live rock from those tanks, but they had a couple of bins which I was allowed to pick and choose from.

They had two main bins and the store clerk pointed to one and said, "That bin is the one for the uncured rock and the other was the cured rock." I smiled at him and said "Thank you!" As the clerk rounded the corner I stood there dumbfounded! I had never heard of cured or uncured live rock! That part was kind of left out of the books that I had read! What do I do now?

So, finally swallowing my pride, I walked up to the manager of the saltwater department, Jake, and started talking to him about my plans to set up my very first saltwater tank. Fortunately for me, Jake was fairly knowledgeable and had been keeping his own marine tank for a couple of years. I told him what I had in the tank already and what I was planning for the future, and that I was at the store to pick up some live rock to start off my tank. I told him that I didn’t have a protein skimmer since I read that it wasn’t necessary for the first few months a tank was running and that I had plans on picking up one later. The budget was already getting tight as it was. Jake agreed that I didn’t need the protein skimmer at the moment, especially since I wasn’t considering having any corals in the tank. My lighting would be good enough with the twin fluorescent bulbs; I would just need an actinic bulb to balance out the spectrum.

An actinic bulb? Wait a minute; what’s an actinic bulb? I guess Jake noticed my eyes glaze over at this point as I was frantically running through my mind trying to remember if I had read anything about actinic lighting. He asked me to follow him and we went over to the lighting section of the store and he showed me the different types of light bulbs available and how each bulb had a different spectrum. It was at this point that I finally remembered that the books had mentioned something along these lines and I began to breath a little easier. The actinic bulb is considered a cool bulb with a high Kelvin temperature rating and the ones they had in stock were 12,000K bulbs. This would give off a blue light. This blue light is necessary for photosynthesis in the tank, to help macro-algae to grow and enhance the colouration of the tank inhabitants. I asked him where the best placement for such a bulb would be and he told me it was up to me to experiment and find what I liked best, but he had his at the front of the tank since he found that the colours of his fish looked more pleasing to the eye. So I picked up an actinic bulb for the tank wondering how much difference one little bulb could make.

Next we went back to the live rock section of the store where Jake patiently explained the differences between cured and uncured live rock. Cured live rock is rock that had already sat in a tank for a period of time and a lot of the creatures and materials that came from the ocean had already died off leaving "clean" live rock that is generally used for mostly established aquariums. The cured live rock wouldn’t cause much of an ammonia spike in the tank. Uncured live rock came directly from the ocean and hasn’t had time for the creatures and organic material to die off. When put in the tank this would cause an ammonia spike, which would help jumpstart the cycle the tank. This rock had plenty of creatures on it and lots of bacteria growing within.

Armed with this new knowledge, I decided to get some uncured live rock for my tank and started picking out a few pieces that I thought were nice. They had some pretty pink and red stuff attached to the rock and a few neat looking branch like things sticking out as well. Now I must say, I knew that the live rock would be a large portion of my remaining budget for the tank, but I don’t think I was prepared for the reality of paying $7.99/pound. Everything I read said that I should have at least 1 to 1.5 pounds of live rock per gallon of water in the tank, so doing a quick calculation in my head, the most conservative estimate would be $240 plus 15% sales tax would bring it up to $270 worth of rock! OUCH! That definitely exceeded the remainder of my budget and I frantically searched my mind for ways I could get around that. Finally I decided that since the store also sold cured live rock, I could always come back and pick some more up in small quantities until I had enough for the tank. Satisfied with the plan I got 15 pounds of uncured live rock.

At this point I was content and ready to go home and put some rocks in the tank, however Jake then decided to guide me over to the fish section so I could gaze longingly at the wonderful selection of fish available. Now I knew enough about aquariums to know that as long as there is going to be ammonia in the water, fish would suffer. I knew that the uncured live rock would be able to provide that ammonia for me and I didn’t really want to have to get a fish right away. I listened to Jake tell me that the yellow-tailed damsels are ideal for cycling a tank because they are so hardy. I smiled and nodded but wasn’t really prepared to get any fish that day at any rate. I just wanted my live rock then I was going to worry about how to cycle the tank later and let Jake know that I wanted to learn more about the damsels before I bought any. He was satisfied with my response, so off to the cash register we went.

Since it was the middle of winter, even though it’s a short trip home for me, I was concerned about my rock getting cold on me and I hadn’t thought to bring an insulated box. The sales clerk assured me that this happens, and all they did in those cases was wrap the rock or fish or anything that needs to keep warm in newspaper. After all the rock was weighed then bagged, we wrapped it up in a few layers of newspaper and put it in a cardboard box. Satisfied with this solution I was able to get the rock home safe and sound with minimal cooling.

Once home, I unwrapped the rocks, rinsed it off in some of the extra saltwater I had made up for this purpose and placed it in the tank. I don’t know if you can imagine how puny a mere 15-pound pile of rock is but that’s the reality I was faced with. Here I spent more money on this tank so far then I had spent on anything else in my life and all I currently had to show for it was about a ¼ of a tank worth of rock! It was somewhat disappointing staring at the tank at this point, but I quickly got over that and proceeded to play in the tank for the rest of the day rearranging the rock numerous times to make this small pile look as big as possible. By the end of the day, I had created a aquascape that utilised those few rocks to the best advantage so that ¾ of the back of the tank was covered with rock even though there were huge gaps and places for the future fish to swim through. I was finally pleased with the results.

Now I it was time to play the waiting game where patience is the key factor! Would I have enough patience to make it through whatever cycle the tank was going to produce? Or would I breakdown and get a fish knowing full well that I would be putting it into a risky environment?

Chapter three
During the first week I had the live rock in my tank, I would test my water quality daily, and sometimes twice a day hoping that if I tested it more often I would see more changes occurring faster. I know it doesn’t work that way, however patience isn’t really my strong suit!

The ammonia levels began to rise and the pH had stabilized at 8.5. This has me a little concerned since I was following my book, which only stated that the pH should be at 8.2 and anything else was unsuitable for Marine fish. My knowledge of pH at this point was very limited to what I had learned in science classes and a few experiments that I had done for science fair projects. I had never measured the pH constantly with my coldwater tank and it wasn’t a big concern because the fish were being kept in the same water they were born in. My knowledge of pH could be summed up with alkaline (base) substances had a high pH, acidic substances had a low pH and water had a neutral pH of 7. When acids and bases were combined they tended towards neutrality. So with this dangerously little knowledge, I set about attempting to alter the pH of my tank to make it suitable for its future inhabitants!

Off to the LFS I go once again, looking to see what’s available to alter the pH in the tank. I came across a whole array of chemicals for manipulating water chemistry in both freshwater and saltwater varieties! I was in my glory! I had always wanted a chemistry lab and this was the next best thing! So I bought some pH Up and pH Down for marine aquariums and off I went! I carefully read the instructions and carefully measured out enough of the pH Down to what was recommended to lower the pH in a tank by .2. After about 24 hours, give or take 5 or 6 hours - well I intended to wait the full 24 hours, honestly I did - I once again measured the results and my to my horror I saw that the pH had dropped to 7.5!

My concern was growing more than a little at this point and I commenced adding the pH Up, feeling that I couldn’t wait to see what it was going to settle at since I didn’t want to kill off the 15lbs of live rock in the tank. I was going to be lucky as it was if I hadn't done irreparable harm already! Again after careful reading and measuring, I put in a little less than what it called for remembering how much of a change occurred when I used the pH Down! I didn’t want a repeat performance of that, but I didn’t know what else to do! This time I vowed I would wait for the recommended 24 hours before testing it again and use the intervening hours to pray that things would settle down again and I swore that I would be happy with an 8.5 reading.

Sigh…I have to once again admit that impatience got the best of me and I measured the pH much earlier then the allotted time span and once again the pH wasn’t to my liking. It wasn’t rising nearly as fast as I would have liked. I remember all my science projects - the reactions were sudden and very visible, which I found very satisfactory! I was definitely not prepared for the slow waiting game that is the key to Marine fish keeping. Much to my chagrin, I added a little bit more pH Up to the tank just to be sure!

When next I measured the pH of the water, I knew that I was in over my head and I needed some help. The only person I knew that had their own marine tank was Jake, so off to the LFS I went once again to explain to Jake what the problem was and what I was trying to do to rectify it. Thank goodness Jake had a lot of patience and didn’t blurt out that I was a complete idiot, although he must have thought it at some point! I explained to him that I was having a problem getting the pH in my tank to remain stable, and the steps that I had already tried to get the pH to 8.2. At this point he started bombarding me with questions pertaining to the tank and the pH measurements. The first question he asked was "What time of day I took the measurements?" My response, "What does the time of day have to do with anything? I mean shouldn’t the pH be the same no matter what time of day it was?"

Thus commenced my first lesson in water chemistry! First thing I was told to do was put away the pH adjustment products and WAIT to see how much damage I had done to the water chemistry. If after two days the pH was still way off, I would have to drain the tank and start with a fresh batch of water. That’s when I learned that as long as there is any form of life in the tank the pH in will naturally fluctuate throughout the day. The fact that I was getting any fluctuation whatsoever was a sign that there was life in the rock that I had purchased. If I had a larger tank chances are I wouldn’t have noticed any swing in the pH. This was also the first inkling I had that I may have erred getting a small 30 gal. tank, but I was too proud to admit that last part and I couldn’t afford the larger tank anymore anyway. 

Two long days passed and I checked the pH constantly, despite being told not to. (Hey, patience is NOT my redeeming virtue!) I watched as the pH slowly climbed up to 8.2 and then slowly climbed to 8.5 and slowly top off at 8.9. One thing I must say, it that if I did nothing else, I certainly sped up the process of decay on the live rock because the ammonia levels skyrocketed at that point! Unfortunately the skyrocketing ammonia levels also wreaked havoc on the water chemistry, and out of sheer frustration, I emptied the tank and put a whole new batch of water in!

I know now that I should have just left everything alone and not touched the tank for a month, but hindsight is 20-20. During my second attempt at cycling the tank I took a more familiar path. After I dumped the tank and refilled it, I went to a different LFS and picked up a Yellow Tailed Damsel. I didn’t want to tell Jake what I had done. I knew it was impatience that drove me to abandon my first attempt at fishless cycling of a tank. I knew that cycling a tank with a live fish was very hard on the fish but I was greedy and I wanted something more alive in the tank than just rock!

This time I didn’t play with the water chemistry, and I kept a close eye on the ammonia levels, never letting them get too high, and did partial water changes when the ammonia levels started to rise.

After a week into the second attempt at cycling the tank I started noticing a nice fine layer of brown dust settling in the tank. This was more like it. I was familiar with brown algae in a new set-up so I started to feel confident once again. I was enjoying watching the Damsel swimming in amongst the rocks. He was a very curious creature and always came up to my hand when I fed him.! For a while I was content to leave the tank as it was, after all I still had ammonia readings in the water! It was bad enough that I was forcing one fish to suffer through the cycle, I wasn’t prepared to add any more at that time. That week with the sole Damsel in the tank was one of the most relaxing weeks I can remember. I spent 5 or 6 hours each night just watching the fish swimming around the tank and studying the live rock. I began to notice odd things on the rock such as sponges and macro-algae mini feather dusters and a whole bunch of different things I didn’t know the names of.

Yep that was a wonderful week. If only it had lasted a little longer…

Chapter four
Slowly the tank began to mature and the ammonia levels kept rising in the tank. The brown algae, which I later found out was actually called brown diatoms, slowly started to disappear, same as it always had in new freshwater tanks. Everything in the tank was reacting basically the same way that it would for a freshwater tank, and I began to wonder why people considered marine tanks so very different then freshwater tanks. The basic principles seemed to be the same; the water chemistry wasn’t fluctuating nearly as much as I was lead to believe it would. Besides my pH being a little on what I considered the high side, everything else was remaining constant. At this point the nitrites in the tank were on the rise and the ammonia levels had pretty much stabilised. It was only a matter of time before the ammonia would disappear and I would be in the second phase of the cycle.

After the brown diatoms disappeared from the tank I knew that I would begin to get some green algae starting to grow and I looked forward to seeing it since that meant more life was forming in the water and the cycle would be well on its way. Within the next couple of days, sure enough the glass and substrate had a satisfying layer of green algae starting to grow. Happily I ran to the LFS and got myself a nice little scraper kit that had a flat scrub pad, a corner scrub pad, a sponge pad and a metal blade to scrape off those stubborn pockets of algae I anticipated in the near future. I guess I forgot how annoying it was to clean the glass in a tank, or how tedious the job can be. Maybe it was the magic of having a new tank, who knows, but I genuinely enjoyed being able to clean the glass on the tank those first few days! Inevitably, that joy began to fade as the green algae made a swift recovery on me and returned with a vengeance. I sometimes wonder that if I knew how persistent the ensuing battle was going to be, if I would have packed it in and took a loss on my investment then and there. Probably not, I am too proud and stubborn to just pack it in without an honest effort, and after all, I still have the tank!

The nice light dusting of green algae became a thick green layer of algae that needed cleaning on a daily basis. I was beginning to have a difficult time seeing the damsel without needing to scrape the glass. The Damsel didn’t seem to mind and even picked at the algae a bit here and there. I didn’t really believe that it was going to eat it since the Damsel is more of a carnivore then a grazer. Frantically, I went back to the LFS to find Jake and ask what I could do to help with controlling the algae bloom in the tank. He suggested a whole pack of snails at a rate of 1 per gallon of water. SNAILS!! Alarm bells are flying in my head at this point! I had visions of replacing my algae problem with a tank cursed with snails! I had done everything and anything possible to keep snails out of my tanks in the past and here I’m calmly told to add at least 30 of them! What was this guy thinking? I left the store in complete disbelief and went back home to scrape the glass once again.

I found that my attempts to merely dislodge the algae from the glass and substrate weren’t working very well and it seemed that the moment I cleaned it off, it jumped back on the glass as if saying "sucker!" I then conceived the brilliant notion of doing a partial water change immediately after I cleaned the glass to get as much of the free floating stuff out of the tank as I could. Thinking that I had found a wonderfully simplistic solution to the problem at hand I spent the next three days vigorously cleaning the glass, scooping up the now floating algae, siphoning out the bits and pieces that attached themselves to the rocks and then refilling the tank once again. This would also have the added benefit of helping keep the ammonia and nitrites low in the tank for the Damsel.

Much to my horror, the algae started getting much worse, instead of better. Now not only was I getting algae on the glass, I was getting some fuzzy algae growing on the live rock! If I had thought that the stuff on the glass was a pain, this new stuff growing on the rock was a nightmare! It didn’t come off with a gentle scrape like the stuff on the glass does. No, that would make life easy! It held on with a tenacity that I had never seen the likes of before! I spent a week pulling as much of the new fast growing hairy type algae from the tank before I remembered Jake saying that I should have snails in the tank.

Great, now I’m back to snails. I’m actually considering the possibility, with the thought of having to worry about dealing with the snail population at a latter date. At least I wouldn’t have to look at a green tank anymore! This time when I got to the LFS, Jake wasn’t around and I didn’t know any of the other sales clerks. I recognised a couple of the people there, however they only knew about freshwater fish and there really wasn’t anyone who could help all that much in the marine department. Since I was in a desperate situation I simply asked one of the people there to get me some Turbo snails for the tank. For some odd reason I thought these snails would be dirt cheap, after all, I had always considered them more of a nuisance then as anything useful! I got 15 of them that day and when I got to the cash register and was told that I now owed $40 (give or take a couple dollars!) I nearly choked! I was thinking, "Not only am I buying a potential problem to solve later, I’m paying a goodly sum of money for it as well!"

I have to admit now, that it’s a wonder any of these poor snails survived in my tank. I hadn’t yet realised how different the acclimatization methods would be between marine fish and freshwater fish, let alone having to acclimatize snails. So, I did what I had always done to get fish ready for a new tank; I floated the bag for 10 to 15 minutes to balance out the temperature and added the snails to my tank minus the water in the bag.

Those poor snails had everything going against them right from the moment I decided to purchase them. Even though the ammonia levels had dropped to zero, there were still nitrites in the tank. The levels were definitely dropping, but some were still present so the tank was still cycling. The nitrate levels in the tank were, amazingly enough, very low! I had attributed that to the partial water changes I was constantly doing to combat the algae problems in the tank. The pH in the tank was still on what I considered the high side, but at least that was stable. The calcium in the tank was stable as well, however the alkalinity was beginning to drop. I had no idea what that really meant but it still seemed to be within the basic parameters that the books had mentioned, so I wasn’t all that concerned, however I kept an eye on it anyway. Add a lack of acclimatization to the process and it’s a recipe for disaster!

Once the snails were put into the water, a few of them curled up into a small little ball. Not knowing anything about snails I chalked up their reaction to a defensive pose from the stress of transferring them to a new tank. I didn’t think much about it that day, but the next morning when a full half of them were still in the same position I began to worry that something may be wrong. The other half of the snails had spread around the tank during the night, a few were on the glass and a couple were on the rocks. The ones on the glass had left this satisfying trail behind them where once algae had stood! With spirits up, I was gunning for those snails that had not yet moved to get up and explore the new world they were in! They definitely didn’t have any food shortages here! The end of the day came and 7 snails had not changed position whatsoever. Here were the first marine animals whose lives were cut short due to my ignorance. Within the next couple of days I lost three more snails leaving me with 5 very hardy snails.

With the loss of life and newly acquired experience, I went back and re-read the books I had purchased. I realised then that although these were good books, they didn’t have all the answers. If fact a lot the small things seemed to be missing. Perhaps over time the authors forgot what it was like to start their first Marine tank. Some of the simplest things become so ingrained into you after a while, that you no longer think about them. I know I take a lot for granted now as well.

Chapter five
Having lost so many animals at once, I was a little disappointed with myself. So I needed to find out what I was doing wrong and how I could prevent the same mistake again. So off to the Library I went to see if I could find out some more information on marine snails and hair algae (since this was still running rampant in the tank!) While researching the marine snails, I stumbled across an explanation of why it’s important to carefully acclimatise all marine inverts. (I wish I could remember the name of the book, but it’s been lost, and I can’t seem to find the book or passage in the Library anymore). There is more going on when you acclimatise then just getting inverts used to the water temperature. They also need to adjust to the pH, and even more importantly the salinity in the tank. Even the slightest difference will cause a lot of problems with inverts as the salt levels in their bodies match the levels found in the outside environment. If the salt levels change drastically, then their bodies will either gain a lot of excess water or become dehydrated from water being pulled out of them into the surrounding water. This places a lot of stress on the poor animals. Some inverts can cope a lot easier then others.

Now that I knew what the problem most likely was with the snails, it was time to attack a greater nemesis; the hair algae that was running rampant in my tank! Even with some snails making huge trails through the algae in the tank, I felt like I was fighting a losing battle! The hair algae had taken over the rocks, the substrate and a lot of the glass. I was frantically pulling fistfuls of the stuff out of the tank on a daily basis. The water changes didn’t seem to be helping very much: the nitrates were only around 10 to 15 ppm, salinity was 1.024, the calcium levels were staying around 400 ppm and the alk levels were around 4.5meq/l. Everything appeared to check out nicely, but the hair alga was getting out of hand!

A month went by and I noticed that time really does fly when you are interested in what you are doing. The cycle in my tank was very nearly complete and the hair algae was still growing strongly! I got myself about ten more turbo snails and decided to try a slow acclimatisation to see if that would help them survive the initial shock. I slowly added tank water to the bag with the snail in, and removed some of the old water a little bit at a time. It took me a couple hours to get them into the tank this time, and much to my delight most of them survived, with only one casualty. I was also getting brave and decided that I wanted some of those little cute hermit crabs that I saw roaming around the tanks at the LFS. I got 5 hermits to start with and again I acclimatised them with the same method I used for the snails. All the hermits immediately disappeared in the tank.

I was finally getting life in the tank, small and not exactly easy to find all the time, but I knew there was something there! I watched the tanks for hours on end waiting for some neat new thing to appear and fretting about what to do with the hair algae. I still couldn’t figure out what the problem was and why I was being plagued with so much hair algae. I couldn’t possibly find out what was causing it because all the water readings were within the ranges that the books said they should be. I went back to Jake to find out if he could figure out what I was doing wrong or for any advice that he could give. After all he was willing to help me out before!

So, once again I made my way to the LFS to see what they had in stock and ask Jake about hair algae. Once again a new term popped into the conversation that I hadn’t considered in the past! During our conversation, I was asked about the phosphate readings in the tank. Of course, I hadn’t been measuring phosphates and didn’t even realise that they could play any part in tank maintenance. I was promptly informed that I should be testing the water for any source of phosphates and see if that was the problem. So I bought yet another test kit, adding to my rapidly growing stock of testing supplies! Cool! I still enjoyed testing the water and seeing how things change in the tank! I could handle this one as well.

Back home once again I read the instructions and tested for phosphates! Thinking that finally this could be it! This could be the magic key to all my problems and like magic I would then discover how to get rid of the hair algae that was the sole bane of my existence at the time! With high hopes and full of optimism and impatience, I tested the water parameters once again! Finally the results were in, but wait, this couldn’t be! The test must have failed! There was no phosphate reading in the tank! No, this couldn’t be happening to me! Everything in the tank was testing fine but I know there was something out of balance! If everything was as fine and dandy as the tests revealed then I shouldn’t be having this problem with the algae! Oh what should I do know?

After contemplating the problem I wondered 'could it be possible that the test kits were at fault?' Should I buy a new set of kits to see if I got different results? What else could I do? I went back to the LFS that day and found out the store actually does tests on water samples for customers! Yes! This would solve two potential problems at the same time! It would show weather my test kits were bad and I could see if I was performing the test accurately! I quickly brought in a sample of my tank water for Jake to test for me. I was actually praying at this point that my test kits were faulty and I was making mistakes. I was desperate to know what was going on in the tank. Much to my dismay, all the tests came back with the same readings I had got at home. With a hopeless look in my face, I inquired what else I could do to get rid of the hair algae that I was pulling out of the tank but the fistful on a daily basis! The only advice that Jake could give me was to have patience and keep pulling it out of the tank, perhaps it was because the tank was still maturing and after a couple months it should start to die back.

Downcast and resigned to the fact that I was going to keep battling the hair algae, fearing it would be my demise and push me right back out of the marine hobby, I went home to once again clear out as much algae as possible. I had to content myself with watching the snails make pretty little trails along the glass and keep an eye out for the hermit crabs! The yellow tailed damsel was still doing well and had become used to me playing in the tank! He would swim around my hand as I was pulling the algae from the tank, and even nipped at my fingers on occasion. I often just sat there and played with him and during one of these ventures I noticed what looked like a fair sized rock get up and move across the bottom of my tank! I pulled my hand out of the tank so fast that water hit the ceiling! What in the world was THAT? It turned out to be another type of hermit crab that must have come in with the rock! The outer shell was about 4 cm in diameter! It had vertical stripes on its legs and one nice sized claw, the second claw looked like it had been cut off at one point. I’d had the rock in my tank for a over a month, how could I have possibly missed that? After my heart left my throat and started beating at a normal rhythm again I decided this was an awesome addition to the tank! One more piece of diversity and one more interesting creature for me to keep an eye out for!

Days went by and a steady routine started to take hold as each day I pulled as much algae from the tank as I could. I performed the tests to try to find any sort of hint as to why I was having such a problem with the algae and I continued to watch the creatures in the tank! I hadn’t seen the small hermits that I added to the tank for a while and didn’t think much of it - after all this huge hermit was able to hide in my tank for over a month without me knowing! My venture into the marine hobby wasn’t going exactly as I planned and it was a lot more work and more frustrating than I had possibly imagined, but I still loved my tank! It was still my pride and joy, and the cycle finally showed that it was completed. Soon I would be able to add more fish!

I can’t really remember how long I stayed in the same routine - cleaning out the algae, playing with the damsel, observing the hermits, watching the snails and performing the water tests on the tank. It could have been a couple weeks to a month without any changes in the tank. I decided that it was time to add something else to the mix! I finally decided that the tank had more then enough time to stabilise and the water chemistry was constant, even if I couldn’t figure out what was off! I went to the LFS to see if they had any thing affordable that interested me. During this trip I remembered the reason I decided to set up the tank was to get a purple fish, and decided to look to see if they had any in stock I could have. I had no idea what the name of it was, but I knew what it looked like. Unfortunately, there weren’t any purple fish in any of the tanks, but there was this lovely pastel green fish that really caught my eye! I watched them in the tank for a while and they looked like a peaceful fish that got along well with their own kind! I was sold, I wanted a couple for my tank! I found out the name was a Green Chromis and off to the book section of the store I went. I did a quick search and found out they were a schooling fish and would get along well in a community tank! This was great! I picked up three of them and went home to introduce them to their new home!

Having learned my lesson with the inverts, I slowly acclimatised them and added them to the tank. I turned off the lights so they would have time to settle in and so the damsel didn’t have much light to see the new invaders in his territory! The next morning just before I turned the lights on in my tank, I saw that the green chromis and the damsel had decided to bond! I was thrilled. Finally something went right in the tank! My damsel had some friends to play with now! I spend a bit of time watching them swim together just to make sure it wasn’t all show, but I didn’t see any aggression from any fish. Now if only I could figure out what to do about the hair algae in the tank I would be all set!

Chapter six
With the addition of the new fish, my tank was starting to gain in character. The green chromis were active little fish and would take great delight in finding the tiniest little cracks that they could fit in! Unfortunately, one of them insisted in attempting to explore the inside of one of the power-heads. It wedged itself in a small opening that I didn’t realise was big enough for a fish to get into and couldn’t get out again. Saddened by this loss, I looked to find a way to prevent such an accident from occurring again. At first I used a plastic screen cover to secure to the intake of the power head. However I found that the fine plastic screen quickly became clogged from the hair algae and other fine debris particles! Although it was interesting to see how much stuff was floating around the tank, cleaning the intake on a daily basis soon got to be an unwanted chore!

While looking for a better solution for the problem, I found that there were intake baskets available for the power-heads that I had in my tank. They weren’t overly expensive so I picked a couple up and put them on the intake ports of the power-heads. Satisfied that my tank had become a little more secure for the inhabitants, I went and purchased a couple more green chromis so I could have a nice small school of fish in the tank.

With the school of green chromis came an overwhelming desire to figure out why I was having so many problems with hair algae in the tank. I had went to the library to see if I could find anything out, however there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of information regarding hair algae. Every source I could find gave three main things that it needed to thrive; light, nitrates and phosphates. I kept going over this small list of things needed and kept hitting a blank wall.

First thing on the list I pondered for a while was the lighting. I had read that as fluorescent lights get old, the spectrum shifts more towards the red, which the hair algae thrive on. I had just set up the tank and the lights on it were only a couple months old, so the spectrum shouldn’t have shifted enough so fast to cause this frustrating outbreak in my tank. However, there was always the possibility that there was something wrong with the bulbs, right? I decided that this was going to be the first thing I tackled in the tank, so I bought two brand new bulbs and installed them in the tank. I didn’t really expect overnight results and a miraculous recovery but, impatient as I am, I anticipated at least some sort of improvement within a week or two. (Well maybe I gave it a little less time than that but who’s counting?)

After a few days however, I got a fairly clear indicator that the light spectrum wasn’t really the problem or at least not the only problem! With the introduction of the new fish and a bit of time, I found that the hair algae was growing faster then ever! Thus I jumped to the next items on the list for what the stuff needed to grow, nitrates! I figured that with the introduction of more food to the system, I was introducing more organic matter that end up as nitrates. So, continuing with my determined systematic approach to the problem and attempted to find out if excessive nitrates were the cause. I tested the water for ammonia (because I added a so many new fish at once), nitrite and nitrates. I expected there to be some sort of change in the parameters since there was a larger bio-load, however, everything had still remained constant! So to sum this up, I had a higher bio-load, added more food, and no change in nitrates? The nitrate levels should have been rising a little faster between water changes. Finally, now I felt like I was getting somewhere! Now I wasn’t exactly certain what to conclude from the lack of rise or fall in the nitrate levels, but at least I had something to work with!

So, instead of the readable nitrate levels in my tank rising, I was getting a vigorous increase in hair algae growth. This meant that the nitrate readings I was getting didn’t truly reflect what my tank was producing. In essence I had way more nitrates then is healthy for the tank and the hair algae was actually doing me a favour by helping keep the nitrates low in the tank! (NO, please say it’s not true! The stuff is ugly!).

So, figuring that I had a nitrate problem that I couldn’t measure, I was left with the task of attempting to reduce nitrates in the tank. The only thing that I knew to do was to reduce the amount I fed the fish and to keep doing water changes. Considering that I had this problem before I had added the new fish, and I was doing regular water changes, I didn’t think this would solve the problem. I went back to the LFS to get some advice from Jake. He advised me that I should try growing some other types of macro-algae that would compete with the hair algae for the nitrates. This would introduce a nicer looking more manageable type of algae to the tank and one that some types of fish such as yellow tangs would eat. I considered this and thought that it really couldn’t hurt to try, so I asked where to get the macro-algae and what kind to get. It was suggested that I get some caulerpa but here was a major stumping block!

Neither of the LFS’s I frequented sold macro-algae! I was told to ask a friend for some from their tanks! What? If I had friends who had Marine tanks, I would have already picked their brains and wouldn’t have had to go to the LFS for as much information as I needed! So, I had the problem of finding some macro-algae for my tank and no-one sells it! For the next couple weeks I set out trying to find a way to get some caulerpa into my tank. I even considered having some shipped to me from the West Coast, but was informed that the macro-algae that grows in cold water wouldn’t be able to survive in my tank!

While browsing a new shipment of live rock that came into the one of the LFS’s I noticed a couple small patches of green stuff that looked like the grape caulerpa that I had seen in one of the books I had! I was excited beyond imagining and demanded that piece immediately! I hadn’t realised the size this rock would turn out to be, and the cost considerably lightened my bank account, but at least I was going to be bringing home some macro-algae so the cost was well worth it!

Now I was left with a slight problem. I had a 10lb piece of uncured live rock and a newly matured tank where I didn’t want to upset the balance by adding such a large piece of uncured material that could cause my tank to go into a cycle again!

I really wanted that small bit of caulerpa in my tank to start using up some of the nitrates, so I decided to break a piece of the rock off and put the rest of the rock in a bucket filled with newly made saltwater and an air pump! Now all I had to do was wait some more and see if this did the trick!

Chapter seven
After finally getting the grape caulerpa in the tank, it was time to once again wait to see what happened in the tank. At this point the tank had been up and running about 4 to 4.5 months and I was extremely tired of harvesting the hair algae from the tank. The green chromis and yellow tailed damsels were doing well and I was enjoying watching them swimming around in the tank. Up until this point everything seemed to be running smoothly in the tank except hair algae, and since I had dealt with it for so long, I was beginning to despair that I would never see the end of the horrible stuff.

Around this time, I began to notice that there were some really interesting things popping out of my live rock here and there. Much to my delight I saw a few small feather dusters with white caps starting to show up here and there in the tank. I would spend hours looking around the tank to see how many there were. I believe I counted close to a dozen on the rocks and wondered what to do with them. What did they eat? Are they good or bad for the tank? The books that I had didn’t really have all that much information on these neat little creatures. The closest thing I could find was a bit of information on their larger relatives the Hawaiian feather duster. I found out they were filter feeders and ate small particles of food that float around in the tank.

Fearing that these poor creatures would starve in my tank, since I couldn’t see anything floating around in the tank, I went to the LFS to see what kind of food was available for these small creatures. Much to my delight, I found a Kent product called “Micro-Vert.” This consisted of mostly green water and fine phytoplankton particles designed for use with filter feeding inverts. Great! This was just what my creatures needed.

It was at this point that I began to have this sneaky suspicion that going to the LFS was starting to become a bad idea. They had so many animals on display and such a wonderful variety of marine fish that I wanted to take them all home with me! While browsing the marine section I spotted this absolutely wonderful, brilliantly coloured pair of percula clownfish. I instantly fell in love with them and just had to have them. The water parameters in my tank were within all the tolerable limits. They had been fairly steady for the past month so I figured, most importantly, that the cycle was complete. I figured it would be safe to add a couple more fish to the tank, so I flagged down a member of the staff to find out if Jake was in, but unfortunately he was on vacation for the next couple of weeks. They sent me to the person who was temporarily in charge of the marine section and I asked him for the clowns. He asked me how long my tank had been up and running and if I was having any problems with ammonia or nitrite. I replied that the tank had been running for over 4 months and that there hadn’t been any signs of ammonia or nitrite for over a month. He was satisfied with the answer, bagged up my two new charges and off to the cash I went.

When I got home I slowly acclimatized my new clowns and while those were being acclimatized, I decided to feed the feather dusters some of the Micro-Vert I had just picked up. Now I found the instructions on the label a little bit vague, basically saying feed as required! Having never fed feather dusters before, I found it a little difficult to know what was required. I decided to play it safe and only added a few tiny drops to the tank and see how everything reacted. The feather dusters had been in the tank over 4 months now and I hadn’t feed them anything until then, so I figured they didn’t really need all that much to go on.

When I added those few drops of the Micro-Vert, my tank just came alive! I had creatures coming out of the rocks like I never believed possible and most of them were worms and small crawling bugs of some sort. I had no idea what these things were, and why there were so many of them in the tank, and if they should even be there or not! This is definitely not what I expected! I nearly went into a panic because suddenly my tank seemed infested with bugs and I had two brand new fish nearly acclimatized for the tank. Do I still add the fish? Do I try to get rid of some of these bugs? Why did they suddenly come out of the rocks now of all times? Why couldn’t they have done this before I had gone to the LFS?

OK, time to step back and think calmly for a moment. I had a coldwater tank for a number of years prior to setting up this tank. I had played in ponds and gathered numerous bugs to feed to my coldwater fish without any problems. Although I hadn’t seen any bugs like the worms and crawly things that came out of the rocks, I did know that there was always some sort of life in lakes and ponds that the fish use as a food source. So, after thinking things through a while, I decided that these bugs could stay in the tank at least until I knew a little more about them. In the name of research though (a.k.a. another trip to the LFS) I figured that I should attempt to collect a couple of the different types of bugs as samples for my research efforts. It would be a lot easier showing someone one of these creatures than trying to describe it!

Once I decided to collect a sample of the life that was oozing out of the rock, I quickly got a spare container from the kitchen, and reached for the net. I soon found out that thinking about gathering a couple samples was a lot easier said than done! The crawling things disappeared instantly and I quickly gave up on those. However I still had a chance with the worms. They were crawling on the rock and it was nearly impossible to try to catch them with a net, so in my hand went and I grabbed one of the nice big bright red worms!

The best advice I can give is “Do NOT attempt this stunt at home!” It felt like my hand and arm were instantly lit on fire! Those small innocent looking creatures pack a nasty punch! After hopping around the apartment for a little while cursing and trying my hardest not to cry too loudly, I ran to the medicine cabinet and got out some strong disinfectant (iodine based) and proceeded to soak my hand in it for a while. I can’t tell you how much time went by before the pain started to abate, but it seemed like an eternity! Whatever you do, do NOT pick up bright red worms! They hurt! I mean a lot!

Needless to say, I abandoned my attempt to gather a couple of those worms and if they were a bad thing for the tank, then that was just too darn bad! There was no way I was going to attempt to remove them again. I released the clowns into the tank. At this point my enthusiasm for watching the tank was forgotten and the clowns had to fend for themselves for that day. I hoped they would be all right, but my mind was a little preoccupied with pain. I turned the lights out on the tank and spent the rest of the day soaking my hand in iodine.

Later I found out that the worm I had attempted to pick up was aptly called a fire worm. They are not extremely common in a marine tank, but the odd time you get lucky. There are traps that can be purchased and I would highly recommend they be used. They are one of the most potent bristle worms that you can find, and under no circumstances should they ever be touched. The best treatment for such a sting would be to use ammonia to kill the bristles and to put your hand in the hottest water you can stand for as long as you can stand it. This will kill the bristles and prevent them from working further into the skin then they already have.

Since then, I have accidentally touched some other types of bristle worms in my tank and most of them don’t hurt very much. The most common worms I have in my tank feel like you have a burr on your skin and a slight tingling, but nothing that can’t be dealt with. Use caution when you touch stuff in your tank! A lot of marine life contains some sort of toxin and you never know how you are going to react. In all honestly I should have went to the doctor's for treatment. There are some lessons you do not want to learn the hard way! I have no idea what happened to that worm, as I haven’t seen it in the tank since, nor do I really wish to dig around to find out!

Chapter 8
The next morning when I woke, I went to check on the tank and turn the lights on. I was anxious to check on the new clownfish since I hadn’t done a very good job keeping an eye on them in their first hours in the tank. When I turned the lights on, my heart gave a little lurch! One of the clowns was laying sideways on the surface of the water and the other was laying down sideways on a rock and it looked really pale. When I looked at the poor creatures I knew they weren’t doing well and may even be dead. I was extremely disappointed in myself for not caring for them properly when they were first introduced, and went to get the net to remove them from the tank before they fouled the water.

When I got back to the tank I was extremely startled to find the one that was floating on the surface had up righted itself and was swimming along perfectly normally! The one on the rock had regained a lot of its colour and was upright but still resting on the rock. I decided that I would wait a little while to see if they would somehow miraculously pull through the ordeal. Throughout the day they seemed to be adjusting well to their new home. They had staked out a little area of the tank and were interacting with the green chromis and yellow-tailed damsel in the tank. Much to my relief they were eating well and seemed to be coming around nicely! So I decided that they would live.

The next morning, when I turned the lights on once again I noticed the same thing - both the clowns looked to be on the edge of death, floating on the surface of the water or laying on the rocks. I had no idea what was wrong. Why were they acting so strange when the other tank mates weren’t? Was something happening in the night that I had no idea about? I decided to keep checking on the tank during the following night to see if I could figure out what was going on. Throughout the evening and night when the lights were off, I took out a low power flashlight and looked in the tank to see if anything unusual was happening. I couldn’t see anything wrong in the tank and when I looked in the tank I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

The next day, I decided to go to the LFS to talk to Jake about the odd behaviour of my clowns. Much to my relief and chagrin, that there wasn’t anything wrong with clowns. They were just sleeping! I had had fish for a long time, and this is the first pair of fish I’d ever seen that slept on their sides floating on the water! I wasn’t impressed, and everyday I saw them from that point on, I had moments of panic until they woke up! (Funny coming from someone who loves sleeping in as well!).

By this time, the grape caulerpa that I had introduced to the tank had started to take on a growth spurt along with the hair algae. I couldn’t tell if the caulerpa was out-performing the hair algae, but it was doing really well and added a bit of interest to the tank! I was also resigned to having hair algae in the tank and the daily chore of pulling handfuls out at a time.

I continued testing the water in the tank for nitrates and decided to test the newly mixed saltwater to see what the level was there. I really didn’t expect to get a nitrate reading with newly mixed saltwater, but much to my surprise I had a reading of 40ppm! WOW, that was the upper limits of what I should have in the tank and the water hadn’t even been in the tank yet! After so long I had finally stumbled on to something that I should have tested a long time ago! At that point I just sat down shaking my head thinking of all those months of aggravation I could have saved had I tested the newly made saltwater first! Now there were two possibilities as to why the nitrates were being introduced into the tank. First was from the salt mix which claimed to be nitrate and phosphate free, and secondly from the water I was using coming out of the tap. I didn’t have a freshwater test kit to test for nitrates in my tap water and the LFS was already closed by this time.

As soon as possible, I went to the LFS and purchased a freshwater test kit for nitrates, nitrites and ammonia. I proceeded to test the water out of the tap and found that I was getting high levels of nitrates (40ppm) and no ammonia, thank goodness! Finally, I had found a huge contributing problem in the tank. I immediately went to the water store a few blocks away and purchased enough water for a 50% water change. I knew that I had just done a water change the previous day and had a slight hesitation about changing water out so soon. However I came to the conclusion that this was a one time large water change for a good reason! I changed 50% of the water in the tank and waited anxiously to see what was going to happen in the tank.

Within one day I noticed a huge change in the amount of hair algae in the tank! I barely had any algae to pull the very next day and the grape caulerpa was still growing at the same pace it had been. Within a week the transformation in the tank was absolutely stunning! Here I had stumbled onto the solution and learned a valuable lesson! There was NO way you would ever catch me using tap water in my tank again! From that point on I was using RO (Reverse Osmosis) water. I started becoming a regular patron at the water store and I would go in every week and get 5 or 10 gals. of water for my tank.

The hair algae cleared up in the tank and I continued testing for nitrates. Up until this point I wasn’t having any problems with nitrates in the water, however I noticed that finally they were starting to climb in the tank. I had a good idea by this point that the hair algae was responsible for removing the nitrates from the water, and now I only had the grape caulerpa to remove the nitrates. For some reason it wasn’t doing as good of a job as the hair algae did, but I was glad I didn’t have to pull the algae every day anymore! Since the caulerpa wasn’t removing as much nitrates from the water as the hair algae was, I ended up doing more frequent water changes. I considered this as small price to pay in comparison to pulling fistfuls of algae every day!

Finally I was really able to sit back while watching the tank and really truly enjoy my tank, with more appreciation and pride then I ever had keeping any fish! The fish I had seemed happy and they had by now gotten used to me putting my arms in the tank. They never hid on me and the clowns seemed to enjoy swimming around my hand and fingers. One even became bold enough to try to see if I was a tasty treat, but I guess he didn’t like what he got and hasn’t tried biting me anymore. The rock still had a lot of dead and white space on it, but I felt confident that it would be covered in coralline algae in good time!

Chapter nine
Now that I was able to get the hair algae under control for the first time since I set up my tank, my confidence in my ability to keep my tank grew. I was pleased with the look of the tank and felt that I had a huge accomplishment getting through the first stages of the set-up process with the only casualties being a few snails. The fish were getting along fine with each other and even my yellow-tailed damsel was a peaceful creature, despite all the warnings I got from books and fellow hobbyists I met at the LFS.

After a few blissful weeks had gone by I started getting itchy fingers and needed some change. Even though I had a small tank, I fell victim to that "just one more fish" syndrome that is the plague of a lot of hobbyists, new and old alike! While at the LFS I saw a beautiful bluish-gray damsel with a nice dark dot on the dorsal fin that I thought would fit in nicely with my other fish. I wasn't sure the name of this new fish but was told that it was a fairly peaceful damsel as far as damsels went, so I decided to get the fish. I brought him home, slowly acclimatized him, and then added him to the tank. Like all new fish in a new environment, he darted for cover so I turned off the lights to let it settle in. I picked up my books to see if I could find anything on this particular damsel but didn't have any luck so I decided that I would treat it like the yellow-tailed blue damsel that I already had in the tank.

After a few hours went by, I decided to turn the lights back on in my tank to check on the new addition and much to my horror I discovered a completely different environment within the tank. All the original fish were huddled together in a corner and the caudal fins on my yellow-tailed damsel were mutilated! The new fish was nowhere to be seen! I was fairly certain that the new addition was the cause of this odd behaviour and damage to my other damsel, but I didn't want to jump to conclusions since I hadn't seen the fish picking on anyone. I decided to feed the fish and see what happened, and out of nowhere came this streak of blue lightening! It flashed across the tank gobbled up the little bit of food I added to the tank and was gone once again! So I fed a little more food closer to the group of fish huddled together in the corner, so that they could get some this time. Once again there was a flash of blue but instead of going for the food it headed straight towards my green chromis and took a nice round out of the poor fish right in front of my eyes!

I couldn't believe how mean this supposedly peaceful fish was, and knew that it wasn't going to be staying in my tank! It had only been in the tank for five hours at most and had already damaged two fish and stressed out the rest of them, claimed the rock pile as its own and had eaten more food then the rest of the fish would have eaten! Unfortunately, by this time my LFS was already closed and I didn't really have anywhere I could put this little monster, but I knew that if I left it in the tank the other fish were doomed! I decided to mix up a small batch of new saltwater in my 2.5 gal. pails that I had dedicated to using for the tanks, find an old air pump and stone to keep the water aerated, and put in the additional heater I had for the fish. One of the old habits I have carried over from my freshwater days is allowing the water to sit a couple days before using it in the tank. This time I didn't have that kind of time to let the water cure and wasn't really sure if it was necessary or not with saltwater, so I decided to compromise by talking half the water out and replacing it with some tank water to mix it up better and ensure less of a difference in the water parameters. After all this fish had just been added to the new tank and had a stressful day already, I didn't want to harm it, just remove it from the tank! Once this was set up it was time to catch the fish.

At this point in time I didn't have all that much rock in the tank so its hiding places were very limited, but I swear I couldn't find where that fish had gone! At least when it was hiding I knew it wasn't attacking the other residents of the tank but I had to find it and get it out of the tank before I went to bed because I didn't trust it alone for one whole night! So armed with a net in each hand, the hunt began!

After carefully looking in all nooks and crannies that I knew about I still couldn't find the elusive damsel. I remembered that he was more than willing to come out of hiding when I added food to the tank, so I decided to attempt to lure him out with some more food, but I strongly believe that he was psychic and knew that he was doomed should he leave the security of his new-found secret lair! No amount of baiting would get him to show himself and I had to go into the tank for a full-out attack! Fortunately the other fish were used to me sticking my hands in there by this time, and actually came towards me as if begging for protection from the fiend that had invaded their previously safe home. I was more determined than ever not to let them down.

I commenced slowly moving the rocks around in the tank with one gloved hand (I learned my lesson with the fire worms!) while holding the net in the other hand for when I came into contact with the target. I took the top layer of rock off the pile and carefully examined all holes and crevices before moving it to the other side of the tank. With still no sign of the elusive damsel I moved on to the bottom layer of rock. I was most of the way through the pile when I spotted the quarry! It was sitting under a back ledge of the largest piece of rock in the tank, so I carefully moved the other rocks from around it andgot the second net ready to scare the fish out from under the ledge and into the larger net I was already holding. Or at least that was the plan! Everything went smoothly right up until I scared the fish out from under the ledge, and that's when the fish decided it wasn't going to co-operate. I had left a small opening between the glass and the net that was just big enough for a determined damsel to fit through and off he darted into the pile of rocks I conveniently left lying in the other side of the net for him to hid in once again! For the next hour or so I ended up playing hide and seek with a fish and much to my annoyance, the fish was winning! As time when on I eventually ended up removing the heater, power-heads, and all the rock from the tank so there was finally nowhere for the damsel to hide! It's amazing how much energy that little creature had and still he was resisting capture and continued to evade the nets at all cost. By this time I had accidentally caught all the other fish in the tank at least twice, but not that blue streak of lightning! I have never seen a fish so fast and so stubborn before! The guy at the LFS made it look easy to catch and I was having a horrible time at it! After chasing the damsel around for another ½ hour or so, I finally succeeded in capturing the fish and into the bucket he went, to await transportation back to the LFS the next day!

I replaced all the rock in the tank once again and attempted to re-create the aquascape I had before, but to no avail. There was no way I could get everything back the way it was, so I had fun spending the next hour or so playing around with the rock and coming up with a new design that I was pleased with. Afterwards I had a little more respect for the skill that people learn catching fish at the LFS and understood why they roll their eyes at me when I insist on one particular fish!

The next day when I brought the fish back to the LFS, Jake was there to take the fish back once again. He laughed at my troubles with catching the fish and then proceeded to tell me the common name of the fish was 'blue devil,' and that it was one of the most aggressive damsels around. Yep, the name definitely suited the fish! From that point on I swore I wouldn't get any fish that I didn't know the name of, and learned how important it is to do some research on the animals and their compatibility before bringing them home instead of relying on advice from the store clerks or trial and error.

Back at home I didn't have any medications for the injured fish so I had decided to look around for something while at the store. I had noticed that all the meds that I picked up were for either freshwater fish or saltwater without any inverts. I couldn't find anything to use in a tank with my snails and I didn't have an adequate system set up for a quarantine tank. So I decided to leave the fish alone and hope they pulled through everything on their own. I made sure the water quality was good and gave them food soaked in Kent Zoe vitamins to give them that extra boost. The yellow-tailed damsel was eating fine and slowly recovered from the ordeal with a small scar above one fin. The chromis that had a round taken out of it wasn't doing very well and hid in the corner all the time. It refused to come out of the corner even when food was offered. I'm sad to say that it didn't recover and I lost it a couple days later. The other two chromis and the two clownfish were fine and didn't have any lasting effects from their day of terror!

Chapter ten
After the brief encounter with the blue devil, I decided that it was time for me to expand my horizons and attempt to keep something completely different in my tank. I figured since I didn’t have much success with choosing a new fish for the tank, I was going to attempt to keep some feather dusters. I found them to be interesting creatures, and all the literature I found said they were extremely easy to keep. The LFS had a nice selection of them, and I picked out two nice big ones with colourful feathers. One had a nice black and while pattern and the other was a reddish brown that gradually changed to black the closer to the mouth of the duster it got. I asked around a bit to find out how to keep them, and everyone assured me that I should just bury the tube in the substrate and leave them alone.

I brought the new tubeworms home with me and acclimatized them like I would any other invert and then buried the tube with the end of it sticking out of the crushed coral. After a couple hours, the worms started to emerge from the tube and every time they stuck their crown out, one of my fish decided to investigate and the worm would promptly retreat back into its tube. Having just had problems with aggression in the tank I began to seriously wonder if I made yet another poor choice of inhabitants and was considering the possibility that I would have to return yet another creature to the LFS. I decided to wait it out a while longer since the fish weren’t actually harassing the feather dusters; they merely appeared curious to see what these new creatures in the tank were. I decided to leave everyone alone overnight and in the morning if the feather dusters still couldn’t come out of their tubes without having some fish startle them, once again I would return them to the LFS and be happy with what I already had in the tank to date.

Much to my delight, the next morning the feather dusters were showing their plumage and weren’t even startled by the fish swimming by. I was very happy with the new additions and enjoyed watching the tubeworms popping in and out of the tubes throughout the day. It’s amazing how quickly they can retract into the tubes when startled!

Everything was going smoothly in the tank: water quality was still pretty good with the exception that the nitrates were slowly rising, and I figured that I would have to make a larger water change to get the levels down to levels within the more acceptable 20 to 30ppm range. By this time I decided that although the caulerpa added interesting plant-like growth to the tank, it wasn’t nearly as good a nitrate reducer as the hair algae was, but at least it was a lot more manageable. By this time the people at the water store were beginning to wonder about the 15 gallons of water I would go through each week. When it was time to do the larger water change I purchased my usual 15 gallons of water, brought it home, emptied it into the salt mixing container and proceeded back to the water store to refill my water jugs once again. When the clerk saw me back for another 15 gallons of water within 20 minutes of leaving the store, her curiosity got the best of her and asked if I was having a party or something at home since I already went through so much water. I told her that I was using the water for my fish tank and she looked at me like I had lost it! I began to explain about the hair algae problem I had in the tank, the contaminants found in regular tap water and how some of these things affect marine life. As I was having an intelligent conversation with her comparing the quality of water from our tap, in the oceans and in my aquarium it slowly dawned on me that 6 months ago I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what the salinity in the ocean was let alone any other water parameter. I was overcome with an awesome feeling of pride realizing what I had already learnt from my tank. Since there wasn’t anyone else in the store at the time and I obviously was interested in the water that I was purchasing for my tank, the clerk took me into the back room and showed me the different systems she had installed for just RO water, RO/DI water and the water distiller. She briefly explained how each of the systems worked, the advantages and disadvantages to the different systems.

The first unit I saw was the distiller, and I was impressed with it since it was supposed to give 100% pure water; however there was a slight downside to the system since it used copper cooling coils to change the steam back into water. Since the steam is in such a pure state, it ran the risk of dissolving copper into the water from the cooling coils. I didn’t like that idea and thought it was too risky since everything I have read about marine tanks indicated exactly how toxic copper is to marine life.

Next we went to the RO system, and I found out that the quality of RO water varied as the pre-filters and membrane aged. With a new membrane and new filters you can get water that is about 95% pure, and she changed the pre-filters every month and membrane once a year. The waste water to good water ratio on the large systems that are commonly found in water specialty stores get about a 2.5:1 ratio of waste water to good water, compared to the 4:1 ratio of smaller home sized units.

She explained to me that the DI part of the system wasn’t used all that often unless someone specifically asked for it, since it’s not a good idea to drink RO/DI water on a regular basis. However the DI portion of the water is able to remove a lot more contaminates that can make it through the RO process, giving you 95% to 99% pure water, and she thought since I was concerned about water quality in my tank I should consider using the RO/DI water instead. I inquired about the additional cost and found out it was only an extra 50 cents, so I decided to switch to RO/DI, thinking the better the water before adding salt, the better it would be for my tank.

Back at home I proceeded with a large water change in the tank, then called a friend (who doesn’t have any interest in aquariums whatsoever) and enthusiastically proceeded to tell him all about my exciting trip to the water store and everything that I had learned about water quality. He patiently waited until I was finished my excited retelling of the trip then calmly stated “That’s nice!” in that tone of voice someone uses when they think the other person is completely nuts but doesn’t really want to offend them! That’s when I realized that I had taken my hobby to a whole new level - I was becoming one of those people who bored others to tears talking about something that has little to no meaning or interest to anyone else and only another fishkeeper could understand!

After hanging up the phone with my friend who just couldn’t understand my interest in these little facets of this wonderful hobby that have seemingly no relevance to everyday life, I decided to entertain myself by feeding the feather dusters. Since I wasn’t certain if I had enough food floating around in the water column for the feather dusters to live on, I decided to attempt to target feed them with the Microvert that I had got for the smaller feather dusters on the rocks. I filled a long pipette with some of the Microvert and attempted to slowly move as close to the worms' mouth as possible to squirt some food at it. After a few failed attempts of the worms suddenly retracting, I was able entice them out of their tubes and was able to squirt a little bit of the food towards them. Much to my delight, they responded by stretching towards the food and then rapidly retracting back into the tube. After a few minutes they would come back out until I squirted a bit more food towards them once again. I think I got a little carried away that first time and used a lot more food in the tank then I should have, but it was awesome watching the worms feeding that I couldn’t stop myself! It was so interesting to watch!

Chapter eleven
The next fish that I purchased was one of the most entertaining fish I’ve had to date: a few weeks later, I stopped in at the LFS and found that they had a new shipment in with some fish that I hadn’t seen before. They were small black fish with two white stripes down their backs, closely resembling neon gobies. I had been looking for neon gobies for a while but hadn’t had any luck so I thought that these ones looked similar enough. A quick scan of the labels told me that they were referred to as eel gobies. Of course I didn’t know anything about them but I assumed that they were similar to other gobies and wouldn’t grow too large.

Unfortunately, by this time my most reliable source of information at the LFS, Jake, no longer worked for that particular LFS so I was left to rely on the other attendants who quickly assured me that the eel gobies were easy to care for and didn’t get any larger then 4 or 5 inches max. They were already 2.5 inches so I assumed that they would fit in my tank nicely and wouldn’t outgrow my tank. I asked to see if the fish were eating and the attendant quickly went and got some food for them. Most of them eagerly went for the food and they looked healthy, with dark colouring, no cloudiness in their eyes and they quickly scattered when someone put their hand in the tank. I knew that generally gobies do best in pairs or small groups so I decided that I would conveniently forget about all the lessons I learned before about getting fish that I didn’t know much about and asked for three eel gobies to add to my tank.

When I got home I slowly acclimatized them, and as they were in the drip station that I had set up for new arrivals, I attempted to find out if there was any specific information in my books about them. Alas, after scanning every page in the book I hadn’t come up with a single reference to this fish. It was around this time that I started toying with the idea of getting the Internet in order to learn more about fish, but I put it off for a while because I didn’t think it would be worth it.

When I was ready to introduce the new fish to the tank, I fed the others so they would be distracted while I introduced the newcomers. The other fish ignored the new gobies as I had hoped. The largest of the gobies seemed to be more interested in getting some of the food floating around than hiding from the other fish, so he drew the interest of my yellow-tailed damsel when he tried to grab the same piece of food the damsel was going for, but after a couple of seconds fighting everyone settled down and there were no problems with adding the new fish. After most of the food was gone, I turned the lights out leaving only the room lights to go on. The other fish headed for their own little part of the rockwork and the eel gobies started poking around one of the rocks.

The next morning I awoke to find all three of the eel gobies lying down on the crushed coral in plain view of all the other fish, and they looked like they had died during the night. Needless to say I was extremely disappointed and went to fetch the net to get them out of the tank. I easily netted one of them and was going for the second one when all three of them started moving around a bit. I was happy that they weren’t dead, but I honestly didn’t think they would last much longer and that the stress of introducing them to the tank would prove to be too much for them. Around a half hour later, I looked in the tank again and all three of them were up and actively poking around the rock that they took such interest in the night before. I was happy that they appeared to be past the difficult stage and began to think they would adjust to their new home just fine. Throughout the day, they constantly poked and prodded that one rock and I noticed that they were slowly moving some of the smaller pieces of crushed coral from under one area of the rock. It was neat to watch them working because they all worked together as a team to get things out of the way.

The only time they would stop working on what I assumed would be their new cave was when feeding time came around. They would all eagerly consume anything they could find and weren’t afraid of the other fish in the tank. Once they were done eating they were like children on caffeine and redoubled their energy clearing out from under their rock. This obsessive digging kept on for a while. Each night they would crash on the substrate (when I say crash I literally mean drop where you are and sleep like a log type crash), each day they would work at clearing rubble from under the rock. It was amazing they were able to work together and lift pieces of crushed corals that had to weigh as much as they did or more and move them across the tank.

After about a month I stopped and realized that the gobies had grown a little more then I had anticipated. After all I was told they only grew to about 4 or 5 inches and all three of them had already exceeded that estimation and didn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. Not only did they exceed their estimated size limitation but they had also started changing their colour pattern, which was something I totally did not expect. Their thin horizontal white lines were becoming thick vertical white lines and the black was becoming a little more dull/grayish. By this time they had cleared a nice hole under their rock and used that as a home base while they attacked the rest of the substrate.

Everything seemed to be going nicely in the tank and I had become used to coming home and seeing the substrate scattered around the tank and new small piles appearing in unexpected places. Overall I thought it was amusing until they decided to make a nice large pile right on top of my largest feather duster! As soon as I noticed the new pile was where my feather duster was suppose to be, I quickly went to its rescue and removed the 3 inch pile of rubble that was covering my prized feather duster. I smoothed out the substrate around the tank. I assumed that it was just a coincidence that the gobies decided to bury the duster and didn’t think much of it. Unfortunately, my eel gobies had other plans for the feather duster and buried it again the next day.

All right, they declared war on me and I wasn’t about to lose to a few small fish. I would be able to outsmart them, right? I thought that perhaps they just wanted the location that the feather duster was in, so I moved the duster around the tank but to no avail. No matter where I moved it they would once again bury it in the substrate. I then decided to redo the rockwork in the tank and built a small wall between the gobies' preferred cave and the location of the feather duster, but that still didn’t work. Next I attempted to place the duster up in the rocks and gently wedge it’s tube between some rocks. However the gobies still found a way to place rubble on top of it. Unfortunately, the feather duster wasn’t faring too well under this abusive treatment and started losing some of its feathers and eventually shed its crown.

I was at a loss as to what I could do to prevent the gobies from attempting to bury the duster, and I didn’t have any idea what to do with the duster once it lost its crown. There was nothing in any of the books I had that referred to these types of problems. One thing I did find out during my research was that the feathers actually served two purposes; as external gills as well as catching small food particles, which made matters worse because now I knew the worm couldn’t eat and its oxygen intake capabilities was severely compromised.

I was becoming reluctant to trust the clerks at the LFS to be able to provide me with valid information; after all these 7 inch feather duster burying gobies weren’t as peaceful or as small as the clerk estimated. I still didn’t know many people in the hobby who didn’t work for a LFS so I couldn’t really ask them what to do, so once again the idea of getting the Internet crossed my mind, this time with a little more urgency since the feather duster was in bad shape and I really didn’t want to lose it, so I started to shop around for an ISP.

Before I found an ISP that I was satisfied with, the worm had crawled out of its tube and was quickly set upon by the other fish in the tank. I was really disappointed with losing that feather duster. At least I still had the second smaller one that the gobies had left alone. Since the immediate crisis was resolved (with me losing the battle I swore I wouldn’t lose), I gave up on getting the Internet at that point in time.

Chapter twelve
A week later I went to the LFS and met up with a couple of other hobbyists, and we started discussing our tanks. The other hobbyists had a good little chuckle over my problem with the eel gobies and the feather duster. In the end I did find out that the eel gobies would stop growing between 9 to 11 inches (thank goodness) and that they never stop digging in the substrate. I also realised that I was extremely lucky that I hadn’t lost any from having rocks fall on top of them as they dig the foundation out from under the rock pile.

The advice I was given in regards to the feather duster wasn’t nearly as clear. Basically there were two differing ideas on the outcome of the health of the feather duster that was being picked on. The first option was to find a safe place for it (which obviously I couldn’t) to give it an opportunity to rebuilt its tube and eventually grow its crown again. The second opinion was that it was doomed as soon as it lost the crown since it was under great stress at that point. Over the years from personal experience and through listening to experiences from other hobbyists, I know that, the vast majority of the time, once the worm leaves its tube it will not have enough time to rebuild its tube. The main reason that a worm doesn’t live through the ordeal is that it is unprotected and is quickly preyed upon by tankmates that would otherwise leave it alone. Another reason may be that the substrate that we have in our tanks isn’t compatible for the worm to rebuild the tube that is a mixture of very fine particles and mucus.

While talking to the other hobbyists at the LFS that day, one of the most prominent questions they asked was what type of skimmer people had on my tank. It was nearly a year since I set up my aquarium and up to this point I was running the tank without a protein skimmer. When I told them that, I got some nasty looks and was promptly told that a skimmer is the most important part of keeping a marine tank. I vaguely mentioned that I was still looking for one, and of course they were more than eager to share their experiences which in the end nearly turned into a full-out war between them and my presence was quickly forgotten. I took the first opportunity to escape the debate on skimmers and quickly exited the store.

When I got home I admitted to myself that my tank was nearly a year old and that it was past time to get a skimmer for the tank. I had originally planned on getting a skimmer within a couple months of setting up the tank but somehow I seemed to constantly drain my financial resources on getting more live rock, test kits, water, salt and the million other little things that the tank required. Even though I had learned a lot about the tank in a year, I still didn’t know much about skimmers except that there were a lot of different models around and that they cost a lot. So I set a deadline to purchase one for the tank’s one-year anniversary. Looking back this deadline was probably one of the bigger mistakes I made with my tank.

So, my hunt for the perfect skimmer began! I started looking around at different skimmers, asking store clerks and other hobbyists that I met at the stores about what to look for in a skimmer. During the course of my research three things became clear to me:
- everyone had a different type of skimmer
- everyone I talked to was an expert on protein skimmers
- every skimmer, with the exception of the one owned by the person giving advice, wasn’t any good.

I quickly realized that the search for a skimmer for my tank wasn’t going to be very easy and that I hit upon a very controversial subject in the saltwater world! I knew that I was in over my head when I went into another LFS and was asking about the skimmers they had. Naturally, the clerk was able to point out the pros and cons of a few different types of skimmers he had at the store, and he showed me his most expensive models that made me want to run out of the store as fast as I could and sell my tank. I guess he saw me start to back away from him and looking towards the door when he showed me a couple other models that weren’t nearly as pricey as the first one and were more in my price range. The owner was the only one who took the time to show me how to work the skimmer and gave me a few tips on how best to get it working. His willingness to show me how to set it up as well as a working model on his display tank was like a balm to my soul.

Naturally this kind approach lead me to think that the owner knew what he was talking about, and since he was willing to take so much time to help me I started to trust him. After all I hadn’t got that level of service at many other stores. I did go to a few more stores to ask questions and see what models they had available but it seemed that no one wanted to take the time to explain anything. In the end I decided that I would go back to the first person to help me out and I purchased the skimmer that he highly recommended. All I really knew about the skimmer was that it was a Venturi style skimmer that hung on the back of the tank. When I told him that my tank had been set up for a while without a skimmer on it, he highly recommended that I do a 30% to 50% water change. This was because my tank would have a lot more protein in the water then a new skimmer would be able to handle. He assured me that I wouldn’t have any trouble setting it up and to call on him again if I needed anything else.

I was eager to get home and set up the new filtration device and I hoped to see everything in the tank magically grow that much faster and the water to be that much clearer. I carefully followed the instructions on how to set it up and plugged it in. Now I was led to believe that it would take a few days before it was able to produce any sort of foam and that I wouldn’t need to make too many adjustments, simply turn the air valve higher or lower or open/close the flow adjuster. It sounded simple enough right? Well my skimmer must not have listened to the advice I was given, because within 5 minutes I had a fountain of water and bubbles flowing out of the top of the collection cup! This thing was going nuts! I quickly unplugged it and got a bucket to put under the skimmer so I wouldn’t loose too much water. I then opened all the valves as much as they would go in hopes of having the water flow through the skimmer and back into the tank rather than out the collection cup. When I plugged it back in again, the same thing happened, a fountain of water and bubbles were streaming out the back of the tank! At this point I was extremely confused since I wasn’t expecting any bubbles for about a week and here it was overflowing as soon as it was plugged in.

I reread the instructions which naturally didn’t have any explanation for what I was experiencing, so naturally I decided to try it one more time, thinking the first two times were flukes! Of course, the skimmer didn’t want to co-operate so I unplugged it and decided to call the store back the next day to get more advice. After I called the store up, I was told that if I left it running it should calm down in a few days once it removed a lot of the protein from the water. At this point I wasn’t a really a happy camper and pointed out that just the day before he said that I shouldn’t expect any sort of action for a week or two. His reply was that I must have misunderstood him because anyone knows that a tank that was running without a skimmer for any length of time would have an excess amount of protein in the water and any skimmer would have to work overtime to remove the protein. At this point I was getting a little angry with the store clerk because I know that he never mentioned that at all! After speaking my mind to the store clerk, I hung up the phone and was determined to figure out how to get the blasted skimmer working properly without his brand of help.

I attempted to ask other hobbyists I met on occasion at the store without any luck. No one had heard of the type of skimmer I had purchased so they couldn’t help out. This is when I decided that I needed more help and the only other resource I could think of was the Internet. So I set about getting myself an Internet connection. Since I hadn’t used the net much before then I was quickly overwhelmed with it. That was an experience all on its own, but eventually I found MSN groups and one that was dedicated to helping other people learn about their saltwater tanks. Unfortunately I picked one that was abandoned by its owner and there was only one person active on the site. He mentioned that he was starting his own site and that I would get better help if I posted the questions on his new site where he spent all his time. After joining up on the new group, I described the problem I was having with my new skimmer and gave the model. Although he had never heard of the model before, he did a lot of research and together we discovered how to get it operational. The biggest problem I was facing with the skimmer was that I was only told that two types of adjustment I needed to make to the skimmer, when in actuality there were three adjustments that had to be fine-tuned. The main piece of information that I was missing was that the height of the skimmer cup played an important role. The higher I could site the cup the more solid the bubbles needed to be in order to get to the collection cup. With this last piece of knowledge and a lot of fiddling I was finally able to get the protein skimmer to work. It took nearly a month of playing and communicating online before things started going smoothly, especially since I didn’t trust the skimmer to stay on while I was away at work and turned it off every day and only had it running when I was there to carefully monitor it. Let me tell you, that first day I left it on while I went to work was probably one of the longest days of my life. All day I worried that I would go home to a flood, but in the end my worries were unfounded.

I finally had an operating protein skimmer on my tank, and indeed the water was a lot clearer and the slightly yellowish tint I didn’t even realize I had disappeared. It was a great feeling. Unfortunately though, every time I did anything to the tank from a simple water change to adding more fish, I had to fiddle with the skimmer to get it working properly again. Over the years that I've been using it I've constantly cursed it wishing that I had spent more time looking for a skimmer or found a better model. It was an expensive piece of equipment and one that you don't want to have to replace too often.

To be continued…

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