New research project

[ahiggins]

Hi everyone, been a long time since I’ve popped on here. Finishing up my masters program and I need some help designing a project.
If you don’t know me, I’ve done a decent amount of research/work with rock/flower nems in the past. I’m about 6 years into my overarching project and the next goal is to correlate (or not) color morphs to specific occurrences or parent colors.
Design:
I would like to have separate tanks that flow to a large sump area. Ideally somewhere between 6-10 smaller tanks housing selected breeding pairs of my current stock (one male and female in each). I’ve thrown around the idea of 8-10 gallon tanks that all pull from and return to one larger main “sump” if you will. These tanks will be identical to each other with lighting, flow, temperature, parameters, etc.

I envision:
I don’t have much experience with plumbing so I need ideas on how to make this work. The larger tank (40ish gallons) will house the heater/filtration/skimmer/rock/sand/cuc/fish and the smaller tanks will only have , a bit of sand, nems, and presumably the return pump equipment. Maybe a snail or two each if needed. I need to be able to turn off the flow/pumps when an “event” is happening but I haven’t worked out how yet-I’m thinking I may need to do one small pump each.
Still working on the design-if you have any constructive criticism of my ideas or have some thoughts on how I could make this work, let me know

 

[mattdg]

If you can stagger the level of each of the 8-10 individual systems, you could put 4 to 5 of them on either side of a centrally placed system (larger tank) and plumb them together so that the water flows from tank to tank and out the last two tanks, into a central sump. The sump could then return to the central system, directly above. I actually designed something like this, that I call the rack and rubble frag system. If you google it, you will find a few videos on the Craft Aquatic youtube channel. It's been in operation for 4 years now and should give you some ideas to work with. The R&R only incorporates two tanks, but the principal is similar. One thing to note is that even with shared water, connected systems all develop their own individual characteristics, based on flow / light / heating / cooling / bacterial populations, macro/micro fauna and a countless other factors. I wish you luck with your research project.

 

[bnord]

poor plumber, but a researcher and sounds like a great idea. ;one to hear more about what variables you would look at.

 

[ahiggins]

If you can stagger the level of each of the 8-10 individual systems, you could put 4 to 5 of them on either side of a centrally placed system (larger tank) and plumb them together so that the water flows from tank to tank and out the last two tanks, into a central sump. The sump could then return to the central system, directly above. I actually designed something like this, that I call the rack and rubble frag system. If you google it, you will find a few videos on the Craft Aquatic youtube channel. It's been in operation for 4 years now and should give you some ideas to work with. The R&R only incorporates two tanks, but the principal is similar. One thing to note is that even with shared water, connected systems all develop their own individual characteristics, based on flow / light / heating / cooling / bacterial populations, macro/micro fauna and a countless other factors. I wish you luck with your research project.

Thanks, I’ll take a look

 

[ahiggins]

poor plumber, but a researcher and sounds like a great idea. ;one to hear more about what variables you would look at.

I’ve been doing this for about 6 continuous years now, trying different variables. It’s fun to me plus I love seeing all the babies.

I’ve already concluded that the following, after about 14 full spawn cycles (cycle= correlated male release to female release) do not have any effect on male spawn or female release:
1. Lunar cycles
2. High temp
3. Low/high nutrients
4. High/low intensity lighting (used 30% as my baseline-what I keep my “normal” display nems at)
5. Flow*

* flow does play a part in female reception, needs very low-slight flow for best reception percentage.
**stress due to physical movement of the rock the nem is on or significant physical disturbance of the nem is linked to female polyp release with a caveat that it’s not correlated. It’s a little less than 60-40, with 40 being actual release.
***Im on the start (male release) of N16-cycle 16

What does have an effect (correlation of 95% or better)
1. Low temperature “spike”
It was actually found by accident lol but after about 8 months of testing, I was able to support the new hypothesis

There’s more in my notes but these are the bullet points

 

[ahiggins]

As for this specific project, I’m going to look strictly at color correlation between baby and parents with everything else being as constant as possible.