Paul B's thread

I assume it is but I never mated with a Janss Pipefish so I am not sure. :eek:

I still love looking at my tank after all those years mostly because, well first of all there are no Supermodels here right now and I went to church and breakfast with my beautiful wife this morning so I looked at her for a couple of hours. Now I am looking at my tank. I love the way it is now because it is filled with the combination of fish that I find the most intriguing.
My copperband is a little larger than I would like but it is what it is. My Bangai Cardinal is way past his supposed lifespan and I have been saying for many months that he should pass away soon from old age, but he is still hanging in there. This week he stopped eating (again) but he has done that 3 or 4 times in the last 6 months so I am not sure what he is thinking but I am sure he "misses" the "Misses" who died last year, also past her life span.
I love the bluestripe pipefish. They go off ontheir own to hunt but always find each other and spend time curling around each other, a perfect pair.
My Fire clowns are like an old married couple. Fighting then mating. This has been going on for decades and they never tire of each other.

My other two pipefish, a dragon face and a Janss pipefish are always on the move. The dragon face slowly inching his way along the rocks intently starring at every grain of gravel looking for a pod and the Janss who is like a Javelin cutting through the water searching for new born brine shrimp that escaped from the feeder. At that feeder is normally the two mandarins who stay there long after they ate the last brine shrimp in the hope there is one left. Eventually they get the hint and go out looking for more productive haunts but they always circle back for a quick look at the feeder.

The other cool IMO fish are a possum wrasse that rarely comes out along with a tiny red perchlet. Those two fish really colored up on their diet of worms, new born brine shrimp and clams. They are so much brighter than they were when I got them.

Of course there are quite a few wrasses, bleenies, anthias and gobies that I also find facinating but I forget their exact names so I rarely mention them.

I love this type of tank as I always find something that comes out of hiding that I forgot I had. I forget a lot. Why did I start this? OK I remember.
I do not like tangs and angels except for a hippo tang that I have always had up to a couple of years ago. They are one of the most beautiful fish but not as interesting as some of the fish I mentioned and much more common. You see tangs in every tank and if you dive, you see thousands of them as they are one of the most common fish in the sea. I just got tired of them.

Who could resist this face!

 
I remember once I was stationed in Colorado and in Colorado they have a lot of space. I rented, or borrowed a nice Manly motorcycle and headed out in the mountains to see if I could pick up any girls. After all I thought who I was with my hair and all. :rolleyes:

So I see these two girls in a convertible so I head out in the plains after them with all my "coolness". :cool:

They finally stopped for a light and I very smoothly pulled up beside them to put my moves on them. I came to a stop, put my foot down, and my bell bottom pants got stuck on the starter pedal and I fell down right in the street next to these girls.

I stayed on the pavement until they left. That was fifty years ago. I am sure those two girls just stopped laughing last Tuesday. :confused:
 
Morning Paul, you culture live blackworms? Where can I get a culture in Boston? I suppose I can go look for them? Do you drip your newly hatched brine shrimps through a 3/16" rigid tubing? Can you show me your feeder setup? Thanks Ben


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I love my dragon face pipefish too. I love all the pipefish and seahorses. I will probably start up my seahorse tank again. Gentle animals they are!


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Ben, Good Morning. I keep the worms alive, I don't really culture them and I have no idea where to get anything in Boston except the Constitution ship and I have a few friends there, One has a Pilates studio but I am not sure what that even does.
I buy the worms in a LFS. If my LFS stops selling worms, I will have to move. :rolleyes: I don't drip the shrimp, I add them to my feeder.
You can read about the feeder here, and a lot of other things I made up.
http://www.saltwatersmarts.com/diy-target-feeder-mandarinfish-pipefish-2804/




This little Cardinal is so pregnant she doesn't know which way to go.



I just took a picture of this guy because he rarely poses. Unlike Supermodels

 
I bleached my worm tank because the worms kept turning into Jello. Maybe after so many years they get some weird bug that affects them in a way so they can't sing or do anything so they croak. I don't now. But after bleaching and filling the tank with scurvy goldfish pond water the worms seem fine. You can tell healthy worms because they stay in a clump with their heads (or tails) straight up and not laying all over the place like homeless worms. If you put your ear very close to the tank, you can hear them sing. One or two sound exactly like Pavarotti. :rolleyes:

I have been thinking very hard as to how I am going to move this tank and it is not going to be easy. I went to the new house today which is under construction and I need to add heat to that room as well as water, electric and a sewer. Those things are not a problem but this will be in the winter and fish and corals frown on getting chopped out of ice especially in the dark. I am not sure I can keep them warm and lighted until I add those things.:)
 
A couple of times a year my town has a drop off place for all the toxic liquids you have laying around that you can't or at least should not put in the garbage and they frown on you dumping it down the storm drains in the street.

Today is the day to do this so I gather all this stuff that I have accumulated in my house over the last almost 40 years I have been living here.

I got helicopter fuel, gasoline, fluorescent green paint, insect killer, sulfuric acid, hydraulic acid, Prizapro, two part epoxy, cleaning fluid, barnacle killing paint, grub poison, weed killer, grass killer, fungus killer, Godzilla Killer, carburetor cleaner, crank case oil and a number of other toxic things.

I take all this stuff and cram it into my car and bring to the beach where they will pick all this waste up. Its a beautiful day and I am enjoying the scenery to the beach.

It's a beautiful and large beach and I am now looking for the pick up point. I don't see anyone there except a girl wheeling a baby carriage. I notice there was a baby in the carriage so i am pretty sure she is not going to take this toxic waste off my hands. I drive to the water and notice the white caps as it is windy.

So I call the Town at 311 and hear the taped message. Then 1 press one for English.
"This conversation will be recorded" OK record it. "All of our operators are busy helping other residents"

Of course they are. (They only have one operator ) So finally I get this friendly sounding girl and she asks me how she can help me. I tell her I am at the beach looking for the toxic waste pick up place. She tells me to enjoy the beach because it is next month.

OK, so I screwed up by a month. Thats better than a year so I head home with all this stuff in my car.

Now I start thinking, if I, God Forbid get into an accident now. All of this stuff in the back will pour all over me. If that happens I will probably turn into Green Lantern, the Incredible Hulk, Spider Man, The Flash, The Torch, Iron Man and Batman's Penguin.
(But not Wonder Woman)

I would be also be fluorescent green, on fire and be able to fly and leap tall buildings in a single bound, but the best thing would be that I could kill bugs with my breath. :biggrin:

 
A couple of years ago we had a similar pickup the town posted to bring your toxic crap to the landfill and they would take it for disposal rather than sneak a few paint and other toxic containers it the trash as usual I decided I would take advantage of it and get rid of thirty years of the old toxic junk. I filled my pickup about 1/3 full with old paint, bug spray, solvents and you name it as I walked outside I ran into Bob my next door neighbor his house is for sale, since I was going up there "could I take a few from his garage?" Well after we cleaned out his garage you could hardly put another can in the truck, Bob lives across from me on the water with a dock that he lets me use so I can't say no to Bob. I drive up to the land fill and a young kid comes over to the truck looks at what I have and removes three or four cans of what must have been nuclear weapons grade material and hands me a small book of instructions outlining how to safely dispose of various toxic materials and sends me on my way with a truck full of this crap minus the nuclear material. Living in this town for thirty years I know the location of most of the town dumpsters and trash containers, it took some doing but I finally got my truck cleaned out.

Jim
 
Sometimes you got to do what you got to do. Our town used to have a place to dump this stuff every week. Now I think it's twice a year so you have to keep this stuff around. Some of it is very flamable so I don't want to throw it in a garbage truck
 
I took a video,not a very good video, but a video none the less. The Jans pipefish was shy but you can just about make him out at the 50 second mark.

 
I just remembered a story as I am waiting for my wife to get up. I had to do some work on my propeller and I didn't want to get into my scurvy marina water and I had my street clothes on. The boat had a sloping back and it was an I/O (inboard/outboard). I tied a rope around my feet and the other end around the steering wheel so I could reach the prop without sliding into the water. My spot in the marina was right in front of the marina bar where there were probably 100 people drinking, dancing and many of them were most likely looking at me thinking I was trying to hang myself.
I get my wrench and inch myself over the back of the boat, Inch by inch I can finally reach the prop. I pull on the wrench,,,, and the rope slips off the steering wheel and I go head first into the water, clothes and all. I stayed under the water as long as I could figuring the people on the dock are all hysterical laughing and I wanted to give them time to stop. I couldn't really swim under the dock and come up someplace else because my feet were tied together and I can't swim real good like that as I am not a manatee.
I imagined I started to turn blue so I had to pull myself up. The water wasn't too deep so I could put my feet down into the ooze at the bottom where they sunk in up to my knees.
I climbed up, not looking at the marina bar and I casually walked over to the hose so I could wash off the black mud because I am sure I looked like the Monster from the Black Lagoon.
Then I looked at the bar like I had that planned and I really wanted to go for a swim with my clothes on.
 
You could of come up under the dock and hang there until nightfall, the wife could have slipped you a sandwich.

Jim
 
I swim to or three times a week but 7 or 8 months ago I couldn't swim because of this pain in my chest. I figured with all the asbestos and Agent Orange I have in me I better go (real fast) to a lung Dr. or pulmonologist.

The Dr took X Rays, blood tests, MRIs, yada, yada, etc., and so on and there is nothing wrong with my lungs which is a good thing.

But I still have this pain that wraps around my ribs. There is no such thing as a rib Doctor, Or Ribologist, which surprises me, so I went to the next best thing, a bone guy or osteopath or whatever they are called.

The bone guy took X Rays, blood tests, MRIs, CAT scans Doh Ray Me's etc, and so on and told me, "well, yeah you have these stress fractures, edema, and other things from working construction all your life and you should have been an accountant or shoe salesman.

Go to a Neurologist.

I go to the Neurologist. He takes X Rays, blood tests, MRI's CAT scans, hair scans, bone scans and shows me a picture of Scandinavia where he vacations.

He sends me to a Pain Management guy. The Pain Management guy takes X Rays, MRIs, and checks me for GAC and shoots my back six times with, I think, Prizapro or Rowaphas. But it could have been something else, i am not sure. He sits you in front of an X Ray machine which he uses to guide the needles into your back near your spine, which you kind of need. He said, “See that?” I said Yeah. He said, that is your lung. If I hit that, you are in trouble. I said, No. If you hit that, “You are in trouble.” Not a real pleasant experience.

A few days went by and I still had these pains so he shot me six more times. I said, I think I need more X Rays and CAT scans.

Ho told me to go to a surgeon. I figured if I go to a surgeon, what am I going to tell him? Just make some holes in my back, dig around and see if you find anything wrong!


So I go back to my neurologist (who is a good friend of mine) He tells me, maybe I have arthritis. Go to a rhomitoligist.

So today I went to a Rhomotologist and this was my best appointment so far because the Rhomotologist is a Supermodel.

She doesn’t have much of a clue as to what is wrong with me, but who cares!

Oh, except that I have arthritis. I am quite sure everyone has arthritis but not everyone has a Supermodel arthritis Doctor.

Now I got these cool pills that make me feel like I am an electric eel with a short circuit. :D
 
My old Bangai Cardinal is still kicking but he hasn't eaten in about 2 weeks so I think he is finally dying of old age. He is living much longer than their lifespan but now I think the end is near, unless he starts eating again because he has done this twice before. He stopped eating for 2 weeks a few months ago then made up for it and almost ate my TV. He is my heaviest fish and when he goes I only have one large eater, my copperband which is by far my biggest fish. I am moving soon so I won't replace the Bangai as I am not even sure if I can move the tank. It all depends on if the new place is built at the same time I sell my house.
 
My next tank will be a combination tank with all the innovations that have come about in this hobby. For instance I want a DSB a SSB, BB along with a Undergravel filter and bio balls. This is going to be tough. I guess I will have the BB on the bottom, then a few inches up, put 7" of a DSB, then a few inches above that install the UG filter and maybe the SSB in the sump. Of course there would be bio balls in a housing suspended from the ceiling feeding the algae filter that will be both lit from above and the side and the top. The algae filter would feed the bio reactor, calcium reactor, Rowaphos, GAC, skimmer (with ozone) UV sterilizer and Kalk reactor. Lighting is easier, I would glue LEDs on to PC flourescent lamps and mount that in the same enclosure as the MH lights which would be 14,000K and 20,000K
A controller would alternately cycle all of these lights on and off a few times a second for the shimmer effect. Both a chiller and heater would be run at the same time.
Water changes would be performed every day for a year, then no changes for the next year then by monthly the next. Water would be NSW that would first be stored in an empty ASW bucket to get the benefits of both. The tank would be initially cycled with a damsel that was pickeled in ammonia. Because I don't want to offend anyone that damsel would have died of old age.
Ich will be controlled by adding cleaner shrimp, cleaner fish and manta ray fry that are filter feeders and pick paracites off whales and copperband butterflies.
The tank would be stocked with moorish Idols, twin spot gobies, orange spotted filefish and octopus.
I will report on the progress of this tank in a few years when I am sure it will be overloaded with corals and baby moorish Idols.
 
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