Tank birthday, 47+ years

[dieselkeeper]

Saw someone here on R2R who added butterflies and angles to their SPS tank knowing they would eat some corals as food. Given the right balance and choice the coral growth might keep pace with the nibbling. Might be a way to keep some of the harder to keep fish due to diet. Just another crazy idea. You can just forget I typed anything....carry on.

SPS and LPS will probably go. So I will no longer need to maintain a calcium reactor. Less testing water too. Parameters, hopefully, be kept with water changes. I'm thinking keeping leathers, montis, mushrooms, for starters.

 

[Paul B]

Thats all I have because of time restraints.

 

[Nano_Man]

Nman, I am doing well, especially for a 75 year old Geezer.

I still walk an hour as fast as I can every morning and eat as healthy as possible. In the last 2 or 3 years I lost 30 lbs and am exactly the same weight I was when I got married 50 years ago when I was 24 so my wife is very happy about that.

This is me a few weeks ago.



This was 5 years ago when I was taking my reef apart to put in vats to move here. I was kind of chubby and 30 pounds heavier.



Of course in Viet Nam, when I was 20 and it was 100 degrees all the time and I spent 16 hours a day filling sand bags and yelling "DUCK" a lot, I was a lot skinnier. I don't know what I weighed then but I am sure it wasn't much.
I could have worked for Jenny Craig as a Spokes Model.

Some life you have had the things you have seen and learned. I lost my dad a week before Christmas but he is in a better place now due to him having vascular dementia. I think me and you had talked about it before. But good to see you looking fine. I’ve learned loads by reading your threads so thanks Paul. Head up and keep up with your walks and keeping active.

 

[Rybren]

Some life you have had the things you have seen and learned. I lost my dad a week before Christmas but he is in a better place now due to him having vascular dementia. I think me and you had talked about it before. But good to see you looking fine. I’ve learned loads by reading your threads so thanks Paul. Head up and keep up with your walks and keeping active.

Sorry to hear about your Dad. Losing a parent is so difficult.

 

[Nano_Man]

Sorry to hear about your Dad. Losing a parent is so difficult.

Thanks we don’t live forever but yes hard

 

[Paul B]

That certainly is tough. Very sorry about your Dad, I'm sure he was proud of you. My Dad died 65 years ago so I don't remember much about him as he worked 6 1/2 days a week.

Now a big concern for me is my Grand Kids. Growing up in this world now as it is will be very tough.

 

[Nano_Man]

That certainly is tough. But it's much worse for a parent if they outlive their kids. Thats the worse thing I could think of. But very sorry about your Dad, I'm sure he was proud of you. My Dad died 65 years ago so I don't remember much about him as he worked 6 1/2 days a week.

Now a big concern for me is my Grand Kids. Growing up in this world now as it is will be very tough.

At the moment the world has gone mad
Peace would be nice around the world
And at home every thing you buy is through the roof. People can not afford to feed themselves
Houses getting taken off them but the government say everything is good
We once were called Great Britain now we are just Britain. Every thing gone crazy and I don’t see it getting any better any time soon.

 

[Paul B]

I doubt it will get better in my lifetime.

 

[BeanAnimal]

But there is bacon

 

[Paul B]

My Hippo Tang has a little ich, 7 or 8 spots on either side which I feel is a good thing. That means there are active, live parasites in my tank which are keeping my fish immune. Those spots will disappear in a day or two and hopefully they will also try to attack other fish keeping all my livestock immune.

I realize many people would panic and tear the tank apart, quarantine everything for 74 days, go to church and make a Novena. Break out the copper and Prizapro and call a therapist.

This is a normal and natural thing you want to see in an old and healthy tank. If I never saw a spot on anything, Then I would panic.

 

[Kmst80]

Love your idea of fish keeping. I have a foxface that got badly injured by the purple tang in my tank and he got a pretty bad bacterial infection that ate a third of one side. Here in Australia it is impossible to get medication without a vet visit and hundreds of dollars later, so all I could do was wait and hope.
He wasn't himself for a week and stopped eating and was hiding a lot but to my surprise he started healing. 3 weeks later and all you can see are the scars of a distant memory.
How many ppl would have nuked the tank with antibiotics.

My Lfs laughs when I tell him that when I collect Nsw I can't see the bottom of the drum and he says most of his customers would faint hearing this.

I bought a porcelain crab the other day, put her in the tank hoping she'll befriend one of the anemones. She fell in love with an adhesive nem, the problem was the nem was not in love with the crab and ate it.
Expensive dinner.

Mother nature, go figure.

 

[Paul B]

Kmst80 that is totally correct. Most people see a spot, torn fin or as what happened to your fish that was attacked and reach for a medication.

For some reason many people think fish are like we are. They are not even close and in many ways much better. Our skin on the outside is dead and our skin is also waterproof.

A fishes skin is alive all the way through and semi porous. Hormones and other chemicals freely go through their skin both ways but the most important thing about fish skin that being it is alive, it heals very fast. That is because their skin is bathed in "living" slime unlike ours but I did date a girl that I think was part fish, maybe eel and had slimy skin. I think she overdosed on "Noxzema".

A fishes live skin has the ability to send white blood cells to the outer layers of their skin and antibiotics to heal any infection. When a fish heals, you normally don't see a scar because it heals perfectly. If we get a cut, our dead skin has no such "enhancements" so it doesn't heal well and we see a scar. I had 34 surgeries so I am loaded with scars.

Fish slime also has antiparasitic substances in it that gets short circuited when we add copper which causes fish to slough off slime so it is counterproductive. But that often falls on deaf ears which is why we invented disease forums.

Some day, this will all sink in and we won't reach for harmful medications at the sight of the tiniest thing.

 

[Lowell Lemon]

Kmst80 that is totally correct. Most people see a spot, torn fin or as what happened to your fish that was attacked and reach for a medication.

For some reason many people think fish are like we are. They are not even close and in many ways much better. Our skin on the outside is dead and our skin is also waterproof.

A fishes skin is alive all the way through and semi porous. Hormones and other chemicals freely go through their skin both ways but the most important thing about fish skin that being it is alive, it heals very fast. That is because their skin is bathed in "living" slime unlike ours but I did date a girl that I think was part fish, maybe eel and had slimy skin. I think she overdosed on "Noxzema".

A fishes live skin has the ability to send white blood cells to the outer layers of their skin and antibiotics to heal any infection. When a fish heals, you normally don't see a scar because it heals perfectly. If we get a cut, our dead skin has no such "enhancements" so it doesn't heal well and we see a scar. I had 34 surgeries so I am loaded with scars.

Fish slime also has antiparasitic substances in it that gets short circuited when we add copper which causes fish to slough off slime so it is counterproductive. But that often falls on deaf ears which is why we invented disease forums.

Some day, this will all sink in and we won't reach for harmful medications at the sight of the tiniest thing.

The more you know. No wonder prophylactic treatment never worked for me. I always killed more fish than cured.

 

[Paul B]

Everyone does. We use fish medications because we don't know any better and as I said, think fish are like us.
Fish are very good at healing themselves as long as we don't get in the way. Do you think my reef would be more than half a century old if I threw in medication every time I saw some silly thing?

 

[Paul B]

By the way, those spots are gone on my Hippo tang

 

[tbrown]

By the way, those spots are gone on my Hippo tang

You cleaned the glass?

 

[Paul B]

No, I cleaned my glasses.

 

[Paul B]

It rained very hard last night and the streets are full of large puddles. I almost had to break out my SCUBA gear to get through some of them. But past the puddles are earth worms. Thousands of them so I picked up a couple.

There is one place I walked through where there wasn't enough room in the street to put my foot down without crushing 3 or 4 of them.

I couldn't take to many because I had no place to put them and being I am not a red neck, I didn't want to keep them in my mouth or pocket so I kept them in my hand.

After breakfast I will cut them up into bite size pieces but not to small as I still want them to wiggle and feed them to my 3 Waspfish who are slow eaters and don't always get enough to eat.

By the time they realize all that stuff hitting them on their nose is food, all the other fish get it and the stupid waspfish starts looking for food which is all gone.

 

[Katrina71]

Probiotic food and a varied diet only for my guys.

 

[Paul B]

Katrina, the worms I collect in the street are Probiotic.