How frustrating can reefing get, and still be fun?
How frustrating can reefing get, and still be fun?
I've corrected some issues:
1 - The temp in the hatch tank is now stable.
2 - I read on another forum that live rock in the hatch tank is a bad idea (I had put it in to keep the ammonia/nitrite/nitrate down) so I removed the live rock & now I just have macroalgae (codium) in the hatch tank.
3 - I followed Matt's excellent advice. The clowns cannot resist laying on the tile. When I remove one tile with eggs on it, I replace it & they lay on that one.
I brought out & dusted off my microscope to check on the microorganisms in my cultures. I noticed that the "53 micron" mesh was too big to filter out the organisms. Obtained a 2nd seive & found the mesh was the same size. Meantime, the baby clowns were hatching and not surviving on what I was feeding them. :/ A couple of days ago, I bought a bottle of Rotifeast & put a drop of it under the scope. The rotifers in Rotifeast look nothing like what I've been growing. It appears that I have no rotifers in my rotifer culture!
So to recap, I bought a rotifer culture, a greenwater culture, a 53 micron mesh seive, had one given to me, I set up a hatch tank, a green water tank & 2 rotifer tanks (fortunately I already had the heater, air pumps, and lights for that, so no purchases required there). I have determined that I need to obtain another rotifer culture (with live rotifers in it). So far no baby clowns have survived more than a few days.
Then this morning, between the time I did my morning check of the tank and found everything OK, and the time I went back to dose some alk (about an hour later) anemone had pulled a Houdini. The only place I haven't looked yet is in the filter sock. The clowns are still hovering in the usual place, so apparently even they don't know where anemone went!
I've got one batch of eggs in the hatch tank which will probably hatch in a few days. I am completely baffled over anemone's disappearance. I have no idea whether the clowns will continue to lay if they have no anemone.
A question I ask myself now is: just because the clownfish laid eggs, why did/do I feel an obligation to hatch & raise the babies? I am not giving up, I just find my behavior fascinating.
The only way to remove that one is to take out all the corals, then the live rock. That's not happening! At least now I know they are really a serious breeding pair.
