Today is a happy day: I tried to feed a piece of shrimp to the larger marine betta with a tweezer and he took it within 15 seconds. I'm so bummed that I didn't film it.
He was in his cave and didn't hide. He began opening his mouth wide repeatedly and I could see he was going to take it. I am really happy about that
I have been reading about the bennefits of having rest periods in the lighting schedule. It seems it prevents problems during the acclimation of new corals and more importantly, it prevents zooxantelle's defense mechanisms from kicking in.
I haven't implemented this lighting schedule yet, but I'm going to try it.
This is the schedule for the left aquamedic angel fixture. I decided to only introduce the rests during the high intensity period.
These rests are deeper in the white/red channels than the blue channels for 2 reasons:
- In the ocean these rests happen because of the clouds. When this happens the direct sunrays are blocked and the main source of illumination is the diffuse blue/gray skydome.
- Since the zooxantelle use radiation mainly in the blue spectrum, reducing mainly the blue channel would probably give them a better rest, but the tank looks weird when the whites are stronger than the blues.
With some new fish coming, I did a fun exercise: a calculation of the visual impact of each fish on how full the tank looks as time passes and fish grow.
When the fish arrive, I will have this:
Quantity: Number of fish
Presence level (1 - 5): an evaluation on how noticeable is a fish, based on its color, shape, how fast it swims, how much it stays hidden/in the open.
Length and height in centimeters.
Area: a rough claculation based on the area of an ellipse.
Individual impact: area of the fish × presence level
Total impact: Individual impact × Quantity
%: Visual impact of the(se) fish compared to the total.
These estimations point to the 10 threadfin cardinals being the fish that will be more noticeable in the tank by far, folowed by the flame angel and tomini tang.
I made an estimation of the fish sizes in 2 years time:
A single Majestic angel will be more noticeable than the whole group of cardinals.
More importantly, in 2 years, without adding more fish, the tank will look twice as full! (Total of 904 vs 2099).