School setup Fredericksburg, VA

[Gumbies R Us]

Wow, this is cool watching students get hands-on experience with a reef tank and how it works!

 

[ReefLegends]

Nice do you guys have a bandsaw to cut corals with?

 

[gastone]

Nice do you guys have a bandsaw to cut corals with?

Hey Skyler! We don't. I did apply for a $1200 grant though and I'm reasonably sure we will be awarded it. The grant was written specifically with the goal of teaching students about reef/coral preservation via marine hobby(ist) utilizing coral propagation techniques. Right now we've got the three small tanks, 20 cube, 28 lowboy, and IM 30, so we really don't have a big grow out frag tank to justify a band saw currently.

 

[Hyphnx]

Hey Skyler! We don't. I did apply for a $1200 grant though and I'm reasonably sure we will be awarded it. The grant was written specifically with the goal of teaching students about reef/coral preservation via marine hobby(ist) utilizing coral propagation techniques. Right now we've got the three small tanks, 20 cube, 28 lowboy, and IM 30, so we really don't have a big grow out frag tank to justify a band saw currently.

Did you hear back about the grant? I have a saw I am more than happy to donate.

How are the mushrooms doing!?!?

 

[gastone]

Did you hear back about the grant? I have a saw I am more than happy to donate.

How are the mushrooms doing!?!?

Rics are doing great. I've added a few more and will grab some pics for the next update (teaser...bta's were involved).

Thank you for the offer of the band saw. That's amazing and unbelievably generous. I just don't have the volume to justify it (though I may be looking at a 6x3x1.5 frag tank). Maybe the story changes then.

 

[cdemoss01]

I've been a high school math teacher in Stafford County, Virginia, since 2002. My first saltwater tank was a 55g with a miniatus grouper in college, circa 1997. Call me clueless. I started up a new tank during my first year of teaching, thanks to RC and my local reef club, WAMAS. That tank was a drilled 42 hex, with a 20L frag tank connected, both feeding into a 100g stock tank that acted as my sump...and took up the entirety of my 1763 built row house 'pantry'. That tank came to house mostly LPS, including a massive elegance, a basketball size frogspawn that I paid $35 for, a breeding pair of GSMs, rbta, a maxima or crocea (can't remember). Anyway 2008 my then fiance (now beautiful wife) purchased our first house. Two broke teachers made reef keeping prohibitive. The tank suffered from the move and never recovered. We had our first child in 2012, next in 2014 and money became tighter still with two kids in daycare, student loans and a mortgage. We've finally become a bit more financially solvent over the last five years. About 9 months ago I told my wife I wanted to start another reef tank and to my surprise, she thought it sounded great. I purchased a waterbox 15g peninsula in early February of this year. Followed by a guy in FB basically giving away this setup:

I took the 30 to school and kept the 2 IM 20s at home. That left me with 5 nanos at home and a 30 at school.

The thirty houses a pair of black storms, two neon cabbages, a maxima, few other softies, a rbta and a red mini carpet. I had a precipitation event recently where my doser siphoned 400ml of part B into the tank. Oops. pH spiked to 9.6. Thanks to my apex I caught it quickly enough. Fridmani made a jump for it. Took his chances on the floor (didn't work out for him). Otherwise everything else was moved home and has done okay with the transition. Working on getting that tank back on track before re-introducing the inhabitants.

Long story brings us to the next adventure. I'm now a certified earth science teacher according to VDOE, which opens up the possibility of oceanography. Not today though. Today I'm working on the new setup.

My buddy gave me a 28 lowboy that he was using to quarantine corals. And I picked up a 20 fiji cube locally. Starting thinking about what I could do...

Rough plan is to setup the 28 lowboy as a Caribbean mangrove biotope. A few black mangroves (Avicennia germinans) on some tall (very subjective....the lowboy is only 10" deep) rockwork to the far left. Sand and rock sloping down to a lagoon housing rock flower anemones (Phymanthus crucifer). Probably come in with ricordea sprinkled in. As far as fish...should I stick true to the biotope? Probably. Will I? I do have three pairs of clowns that are grossly oversized for their current 10g tanks. Pairs of black storms, black extreme snowflakes, and black and white ocellaris. The black and whites (Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce thanks to my 11yo swiftie) are particularly nasty. Taylor is just a miserable clown, attacking anything that looks at her cross, let alone enters her domain. As I'll have 3 tanks setup up at school, including the 30, I will have suitable (within reason) tanks for the 3 pairs of clowns. Let's call the pair that ends up in the biotope invasive and say that some uneducated hobbyist dumped them in the tank. I drilled the lowboy for a Fiji cube overflow and two returns. First time drilling glass. No problems. As it's not a rimless tank, I had to cut away black moulding a bit to account for the overflow and returns.

In the meantime, here's the kicker, Tampa Bay Saltwater @LiverockRocks was having a giveaway here on r2r. Member @Miclmcorallover won, but decided to pass on their good fortune and I happened to win the grand prize in a redraw. This was very exciting as I was planning on a Caribbean biotope anyway. (To boot, my 42 hex that was set up some 20 years ago, was done so with a purchase from TBS!!!). Once the TBS team found out this was for a school system they kicked in more. So my first shipment (of two), arrives on June 24th! Holy time crunch.

20 fiji cube: current plan is a rock tower with some anemones, most likely the entamacea quadricolor variety. One of the pairs of clowns is being hosted by a nice little green variety at home. Not sure what else will end up in that tank. Probably some lps and zoanthids. I've always had a massive soft spot for euphyllias. Particularly frogspawns. Currently I've got a nicrew 150, for either tank and I figure I'll add another nicrew for the other. I'll also have to figure out the lighting for mangroves.

I worked on the stand this week and this is what I came up with:

I wanted the two tanks to be at the same level at the top. I need to square things up a bit but I do dig it. In the meantime, underneath is a trigger emerald 39 sump that i picked up locally (along with an overflow). Both tanks will feed into the sump. Skimmer is a ConeS Q1 that I purchased for 50% off on closeout from BRS. Next will be either a fuge or an ATS depending upon which way I want to go. The return pump is a DC hygger 800gph which should suffice. If it's too small for both tanks, I'll get another and run on separate returns instead of just the one. A lot of this has been out of pocket, though the school did kick in a pretty penny for the apex and trident for data logging purposes. Some of my local reef club members (WAMAS) have been generous, selling items at a discount, but it's till pricey. I've got to get it plumbed and water tested before the 24th and I'm writing this from the road to Hilton Head where I'll be until Thursday!

Needs: heaters and whatever other lighting I'm going with. Sand. Lots of sand. I've got some coming in from TBS, but I know I'll need more especially if I go with the fuge. Water movement. I've got a hygger gyre in the 30 and I do like it. I was thinking about two more, one for each tank. I'm going to apply for an innovative teaching grant in the fall ($1200) but even though I'm fairly sure I'll be awarded one (I was awarded one about 7 years ago for a gardening project), the funds won't be distributed immediately and I'm on a time crunch. We'll get there though. It'll happen.

In the meantime, Skyler @ReefLegends from ReefLegends has been helping get some cultures going. I won another contest here on r2r (srsly, I don't win anything) and Skyler has helped me since getting a chlorella and tetraselmis chui culture going and I've just started some pod cultures (plan to add a mandarin to the 30 and feed him all the pods he'd ever want).

Pod stations (L->R)
Tigriopus californicus
Tisbe biminiensis
2 x Apocyclops panamensis

That's where we stand. On Friday I hope to get plumbing and stand sealing taken care of. More later!

..

I live in Roanoke. Id love to take this class but sadley I don't go to that school!

 

[gastone]

Ok, so back at it. We had 4 toadstool frags. One was given to new local club (WAMAS) member, one melted (boo), and two have survived, have attached themselves to their plugs, and are putting on growth. The two frags are kept in different tank systems so it's a fun way to see if we can identify differences. Flow is fairly similar, but one of them gets a heavy dose of intense lighting, while the other is under much more moderate lighting conditions. Growth (measured by weight), was similar for both. We saw a 238% in one and a 214% increase in the other. One of the young men was able to deduce that some of the weight difference may be water weight from the plug itself as they originally attached them to dry plugs and now the plugs are saturated.



Fast forward to last week... BTA splitting time. I first saw anemones manually split at a WAMAS meeting in 2006 or so. Gave me confidence to split nems, mushrooms, rics... Entacmaea quadricolor split regularly in home aquaria. This also makes them good candidates for propagation. WAMAS member gave me 4 gbta's and about 11 rbtas. The RBTA's have split some and moved a bit. I think I currently have 11 or so from him originally. I've isolated the green btas and one of the splits of the rose anemone in a small box. Of course, two of the green guys snuck out and have now attached to rockwork....grrrr.



Alt Ed programs are very transient in nature, with a constant influx and efflux of students. Also, absenteeism. Mr. Werner, our resident Biology teacher, brought up two young men for the festivities. One was a returnee and one was a new student. We picked out to candidates for propagation, one green and one red bta. As we had a new student (he's been up a few times to my room for exposure purposes and to talk about reefs, aquaria, and propagation) we started by identifying anemone anatomy. Pedal disc (foot), column (body), and oral disc (mouth and...). Next up safety, followed up with a YouTube video on manual propagation of nems, and a thorough hand washing. The focus was on cutting through the mouth with one motion (if possible). We had a few different scalpel blades available and eventually a utility blade that I was able to located hidden in the confines of my desk.



Identifying and removing nems to be split.





We settled on a scalpel with a #23 blade. It is nice and long with a bit of a curve. Time to practice one nice, consistent slice with good pressure.





All hands on deck.





We gave up on the scalpel as we felt it wasn't working well. I found a snap off Olfa blade in my desk from my college years. Sharp and long. Perfect. Into the NSW with the two newly sliced green btas. The individual nems were starting to reform into nems just minutes after being split.





Moving on to the rose. We had some issues with the cut and I don't believe he got it though the mouth. No bueno. It looked rough immediately after going back into the water. We didn't quite have two halves... more like a 60-40 split. And the 40 side seems to be missing it's part of the mouth.





Here you can clearly see the obvious difference in size. Not ideal.





Good news first. We can say that we have clearly have 3 formed nems. The smaller slice of the rbta still appears to have live tissue. But I'm still not convinced that it has much of an oral disc with a mouth. I am fairly certain it's a goner, but not just yet. Tissue is still hanging on. The three definite (for now) survivors are doing great. They've reformed themselves and would be hard to differentiate between them and an anemone that hadn't been split recently. This was done on 10/21 so 8 days ago. I'll probably offer them so food here in the next few days to see if they are able to eat. We discussed exponential growth, given 100% survivability and one divide per month. After 12 cycles, we'd have 4096 clones of each. The students were quite impressed by that number.



Our hope is to start passing around the Phoenix anemones at WAMAS meetings and for WAMAS members.



More to come.

 

[gastone]

More fun from today (11/7/24). Added a new student. Lost a few. We started by measuring our two remaining cabbage frags. They are in separate closed systems. One of them wasn't looking hot, the other has put on obvious growth. Both are attached to their plugs. Much to my chagrin, one actually lost mass, and the other was the exact same weight. Impossible! At least visually. We didn't break out the calipers as it's encrusting over the edge of the plug and even underneath. We used the same scale, tared twice to verify.

The anemones we sliced continue to do well. I fully expected that only 1 half of the RBTA would make it as I was sure we didn't get a piece of the mouth. Both halves of the GBTA are doing well. They've attached (one of them on my lr as it has escaped containment.... grrrrr) and are both showing good feeding response.

On to today's festivities. In my previous reef keeping life, mushrooms were the bane of my existence. Some 15 years later there are some beautiful shrooms out there. In fact, I recently started a 4g pico in my son's room that is going to be a shroom tank. So I figured, let's get going on fragging these things so I can practice on some el cheapos before I look at attempting to slice up my jawbreakers. When I purchased the initial 5 tanks, to include the IM 30L, it came with a few softies. Among them was a small colony of pale green rhodactis. These things survived my overdosing event as I forgot about them when I was on my rescue mission. They were in water with a pH well north of 9 (as high as 9.6), for about 36 hours. So what harm could a razor blade do?

Talked it over with the candidates as always. Safety first. We spoke primarily of the difference between splitting anemones, where you have to include a portion of the mouth (we had evidence of what happens when you don't). With rhodactis, who most commonly multiply in our tanks via pedal laceration, which is to say they move and leave behind part of their foot. This foot develops into a new shroom. So today's goal was going to make sure we included both foot and whatever it was attached to. Tools would be scalpels and bone cutters. The students were tasked with making the slices with the scalpels before I stepped in with the bonecutters. If the shrooms were mounted to a disc it would have been fine for them to mash through them. But they were attached to a piece of thick, solid, lr, so I figured I'd take on that task myself.

This discussion of where we'd slice and why we'd slice there.



Our new contributor. First timer. Nice, bright young man. Said, "Man, we never got to do anything like this at our base school. I might have paid attention more." Don't be fooled, he's very bright and clearly paid attention in school, but Mr. Werner (my cohort), and I love getting positive (and not so positive at times) feedback.


Next up... This is our anemone killer. Of course we don't refer to him as the Anemone Killer, but his was the imperfect slice. It's okay. They are learning and though we certainly don't wish to lose any of our livestock, it's part of the process and ultimately the rbta did survive. It just lost some weight in the process. He genuinely felt bad about the anemone and was hesitant to get back in there and cut again, but we spoke of success and failure and learning. Good stuff. And he did it. And did great.


My turn to hack away.


It's 11/8 now. Didn't finish the post yesterday. The little shrooms look fine. Tissue is still viable. They are under fairly indirect lighting and not getting too much flow. We'll monitor them to see how they progress.

Here is the smallest frag. About 3/8" square or so.


So what's next? If we can isolate some more BTAs, we can get to work on propagating more so I can pass them out at the next WAMAS (local reef club) event, along with the cabbage frags and when they are ready, the shrooms as well. I've got copepod and phyto cultures that needs upkeep and maintenance. Not as sexy as the aquariums, but necessary components none-the-less.

 

[WhiteRabbitReefer]

This is so awesome!

 

[jabraha1]

Fellow reefer and HS teacher, though not a science class. excited to follow along and share with my science peers. I had a fw tank in my class at one point with a snail problem and we were donating snails to the science department. They did a write up in the school paper about it: https://eagleeye.news/27279/news/de...er-to-ensure-thriving-aquatic-life-on-campus/

 

[gastone]

Fellow reefer and HS teacher, though not a science class. excited to follow along and share with my science peers. I had a fw tank in my class at one point with a snail problem and we were donating snails to the science department. They did a write up in the school paper about it: https://eagleeye.news/27279/news/de...er-to-ensure-thriving-aquatic-life-on-campus/

Checking it out now

 

[gastone]

No real updates. I picked up some mushrooms for my son's shroom tank in his bedroom. OG Bounce, St. Thomas and a magic carpet. I brought them to school to settle in. His tank is fairly new and though I expect it to be stable as it was started with TBS live rock and sand from my school tanks, I don't want to chance it as this was a significant financial outlay for me.

The dual tank setup has a Trigger Emerald 39g sump, which I think is a nice piece of kit. One of the issues is that in in lieu of a standard 4" media cup holder, the sump comes with this:

Little weird to be sure. I reached out on their website and they do offer a circular 4" basket holder for the sapphire sumps which they've told me will work on the emerald sump. But I just didn't feel like spending more money. So off to school to see what I could come up with using the 3D printer we have at our disposal. I haven't used CAD software in well over 20 years so I'm sure I spend too much time on Fusion 360 designing the media baskets. It's got some issues. I didn't lay it out before slicing so the holes overlap at the long axis. Shame on me. But overall they work. I ran into the building today to add water to my ATO reservoirs and que up another print.

Two more and I'll be in business.

 

[gastone]

Oh my, no updates in forever. Our little transient reef club has continued to propagate and expose. At this point we've propagated rhodactis, Entacmaea quadricolor (btas), Sinularia brassica (cabbage leather), Antillogorgia bipinnata (purple photosynthetic gorgonian), Pachyclavularia violacea (gsp). I'm probably missing something. Any frags/colonies that are donated to the school we put back into circulation and give away during our quarterly reef club meetings (WAMAS). I'll write up some more late as we certainly have met since my last post.

In the meantime, I'm awful with cord management. The admin team at the school was giving me a heck of a hard time about the myriad of cords that were laying all over the floor. The bio teacher and I went ahead and installed some GFIs to protect the tanks and myself (I don't allow the students to put their hands in the tanks). After that I built a small cabinet to clean up the wiring issue. We also added two new tanks to my desk, both are IOAOI Coralland AIO tanks. One is set up as a shroom tank (that had a kalk overdose...grrr... damsel didn't survive the pH of 10.1+, but the shrooms seem to be okay), and the other is a clam tank, housing a maxima and a derasa at the moment.

More later, a few pics for now.

 

[PPBlimpy]

Just stumbled onto this. Pretty awesome thing you have going on. If you are still looking for a Frag tank I have a 45G 48x24x9.5 AIO that I would donate to a class. I am in Cumberland VA.

It is a heavy duty tank 3/4" acrylic, was a touch tank for starfish at a public aquarium(unsure of which)
I had been planning on setting it up as a frag tank dedicated to mushrooms/rics/yumas etc. ( my favorite corals) but my 300g just takes to much of my time.

DM me if interested

 

[gastone]

Just stumbled onto this. Pretty awesome thing you have going on. If you are still looking for a Frag tank I have a 45G 48x24x9.5 AIO that I would donate to a class. I am in Cumberland VA.

It is a heavy duty tank 3/4" acrylic, was a touch tank for starfish at a public aquarium(unsure of which)
I had been planning on setting it up as a frag tank dedicated to mushrooms/rics/yumas etc. ( my favorite corals) but my 300g just takes to much of my time.

DM me if interested

I can't believe I missed this. We left the country as soon as school ended and I spent most of the summer building legos with my son and working on my new 90 cube that I'm putting in at home. This is incredibly generous of you and an awesome opportunity, but I'm afraid my principal has had enough of my shenanigans with the tanks (I have 6 in my room and 3 in the Bio room currently). He might fire me.