Interesting Facts 2

Here are some more interesting facts about tanks and animals:

  • Sea Hare are, basically, sea snails without a shell, or if they have one it is very small. They are, usually only up to a few inches long and feed mostly on algae and left over foods. They can be considered herbirvores and detrivores. They are good ad ditions to live sand filtration aquariums.
  • Most Urchins eat only algae and, as such, pose no problem to the animals in the tank. The danger is tough that they have great strength when moving around the tank and can displace large rocks. When such rocks fall, and fall on a coral, the latter can be seriously damaged. This may lead to a bacterial infection and possibly the loss of the coral itself.
  • The larger the aquarium, the deeper the "Plenum" in a Jaubert Type tank needs to be. Up to 70 or 80 gallons it is accepted that a one inch plenum is plenty. When the tank gets larger Plenum needs to get deeper as well. No one has defined exact standar ds for this depth though. At the present time hobbyists just pick a depth and live with it. Hopefully more information will become available as time goes on.
  • It is, in my opinion and that of many others, not a good idea to run a live sand tank with silica sand. The reason is that silicate will leach into the water and that soon diatoms will appear. It is much better to use carbonate based sand. Some hobbyi sts use aragonite. I do not recommend its use because it has a tendency to cement together. What I personally use is a mixture of crushed coral and crushed shells.
  • Cushion Stars eat corals. They are not reef animals.
  • Seastars can regenerate lost arms. In fact if the part that is lost is large enough, you may end up with two seastars rather than one.
  • Hymenocera picta and H. elegans, two small carnivorous shrimp, feed exclusively on seastars. If you are going to keep such shrimp you will have to be prepared to sacrifice seastars so they can feed.
  • Hydroids are related to anemones. They grow in darker places and trap food with their tentacles. They are harmless but become pests in the aquarium once they start to proliferate. Indeed, who wants hundreds of Hydroids in their tank.
  • Tunicates are forms of sea squirts. The difference is that sea squirts grow on their own whereas tunicates share common body tissue and thus appear in groups or colonies.
  • Fireworms are a form of bristleworm but are much more powerful stingers.
  • Flatworms are herbivorous and do not have the kind of frills that Nudibranchs have (usually and generally very colorful). Nudibranchs are carnivorous and have very specialized diets.
  • When changing lighting, do not put the full strength for the full photoperiod right from the beginnning. This would shock your corals. Build the intensity up gradually, say one hour extra every two days, starting with 3 hours on the first day.
  • A little arithmetic, useful when looking at low nutrient concentrations:
    1. deci = 0.1
    2. centi = 0.01
    3. milli = 0.001
    4. micro = 0.000001
    5. nano = 0.0000000001
  • Zeolites are a very large family of natural minerals, the best known of which is probably clinoptilolite, used as cat litter, animal food additive and ammonia remover. Some Zeolites though can perform other functions. The one we are interested in is t he removal of nitrate. We cannot mention the name of the particular Zeolite used to do so because the company that originated the product and still sells it, does not divulge it. Let it be known though that there are well over 125 different Zeolites. For your information here are the names of a few others:
    1. Offretite
    2. Thomsonite
    3. Mordenite
    4. Ferrierite
    5. Gonnardite
    6. Brewsterite
    7. Heulandite
    8. Stellerite
    9. Liottite
    10. Bikitaite
    11. Epistilbite
    12. Stilbite
    13. Doranite
    14. Barrerite
    15. and I could go on and on and on and on. It is easy to see that, unless one knows exactly which Zeolite to use, it is not going to remove nitrates as claimed by many products on the market, which are really nothing more than Clinoptilolite which does < I>not remove it especially not from saltwater.
  • Nitrate removal is very difficult to achieve, especially from saltwater, and only one product to our knowledge really does so.
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