How this Geezer did it in the beginning

[divy]

'' Film is like what they make Scotch Tape out of but it is a different color and pictures stick to it''.


this sounds like a crazy old man rambling on, surely there was no such thing as this so called 'film' paul lol

i dont post much but i just had to say this was a great read paul

 

[Paul B]

i dont post much but i just had to say this was a great read paul

It ain't over till the fat lady sings and I don't hear anything yet. I just got hiome from out on the east end of Long Island for a beach party at my friends house and I also collected some water.
I will finish this tomorrow so everyone on here, Have a great night.
Even you guys that don't agree with me. :wavehand:

 

[Paul B]

There are more Geezer-ettes on here than you realize, we just don't post a lot, prob cuz we know we're right and don't need to voice it

We need more Geezerettes

My family's origin is Naples and Abruzzi,

I have good friends whose family came from Abruzi. My wife is part Napalitan. My family all came from Sciacca, a fishing village. I came from Brooklyn.

I'm setting up a new system this summer, and plan on taking some water and sand from our beach vacation. If it doesn't work out, I'll let ya know....

Water from the sea, what a novel idea. Who would have thought? :crazy1:

Paul, I understand that I eat meat, and that the shrimp was harvested and died too. Its not the death I have issue with, its the manner of death. I also know that lots of the things I eat or have don't have particularly "nice" deaths, but If I want chicken (and choose to to buy free range), I'll accept other peoples practices.

I don't think I will get into this one here, these philosophical posts could go on forever and distract from the already distracted theme that I was trying to convey when I myself distracted to the military, Sicily, Paris Hilton and God knows what else.
We are going boating today with my very pregnant Daughter and being I don't know nothing about birthing no babies we will stay in the harbor and I won't collect anything. I did collect water out east yesterday and it is warming up now.
That is actually what I should be putting on this thread. Collecting water. That is one of the things I have always done. Water, amphipods and mud, great combination. If anyone here feels you should not do that, and you know that I know that you know who you are, I have a thread on here with the title "I get yelled at a lot" You can yell at me on there for my practices.:facepalm:

http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2171862

But for this thread, these are my ideas of what me and Lincoln did in the early days.
Me and Abe would go out and collect water and he would put the amphipods in his hat. He had that big hat which was good for that. :bum:

Some other things I used to do which were probably not the best ideas was to mix local animals with the tropicals. I still do that but not as much. Now I only have local snails and amphipods but I also used to add fiddler crabs, eels, rock crabs, shrimp,lobsters, urchins and flounders.
All of those animals survive in a tropical tank but except for the snails, urchins, shrimp and amphipods, there is a reason those animals do not live in the tropics, besides the water is too warm. They eat everything.
It seems that tropical animals have specific diets but New York animals will eat anything.

Rock crab

Fiddler crab

Shrimp

I don't have a picture of those other animals but I did hatch these cool octopus. When they would wrestle a brine shrimp, they would ink.
Very cool

This is fiddler crab city, where I sometimes collect fiddler crabs and other cool things.

This is my test tank where I do experiments and keep some local animals.
This tank has been set up as long as my reef but it is sometimes empty.
The yellow and black thing on top of it is my brine shrimp hatchery and the blue bucket is my make up water from the RO/DI,which is entirely automatic.
The big red thing that says NuTone is my whole house vacuum and you don't have to pay any attention to that.

 

[Paul B]

Johnike, I have not spoken to my Army friend in Iowa since the last time I mentioned it.
I really should try to call him. We went through basic and AIT together and his name was Cookie Man. He could do one handed pushups all day even with a sand bag on his back. In basic when we had to drop and do pushups I would try to get next to him because he would start doing pushups very fast and he would yell out 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and I would just be finishing one so I would yellout "10"
And again to "20". So I actually did about 100 pushups, kind of.

you supported one another, you were there for us...Thank You. So many of you boys became men ( and so many died that finally sanity prevailed)

I think that war thing, especially combat changes a person that every facet of his/her life is vastly different. Even in respect to aquariums.
Many times people ask me something like "Aren't you afraid to put in things like beer cans, bottles and stuff from the sea?"
And I usually answer "do I look afraid?"
I have a theory and (sorry) I am going off on a tangent again (It is raining and I am going boating a little later) My theory is, and this reflects life in general, and no I am not the God of life either, but if something happens to you that you consider kind of bad, then everything that happens to you after that is no big deal. Then when something else happens that is worse, then that is a horrible thing because that is the worst thing that has happened to you.
But everything else is still no problem. But if something really bad happens, like if you were in (God forbid) the Trade Center when it fell or in some really bad combat, then probably nothing in your life will even be worse, so the rest of your life will be easy.
I was not in the Trade Center when it fell but I was near by, I watched it fall and I did have a crew working there. Unfortunately they did not make it.
But that was years after I had experienced my share of combat so I think I handled it better then most people. Of course Not that I was in any way untouched by it, that was the second worst day of my life.
But now, hopefully none of us will have tragedy's, my life should be much easier and if something silly like my tank crashing or a fish dies, it will not hardly bother me.
Also a combat Veteran can usually pick out another fellow combat Vet even from a distance away. I am not sure why.

I hope I made sence out of that statement and I don't want to get hate mail if I didn't.

I know this was started about the history of at least my experience but it was so long ago and life was happening at the same time that my tank was evolving so I have trouble seperating the two things.

This thread says that almost 3,000 members visited here. So how do you other 2,580 people feel about this?
Do you agree with anything? Nothing? every other word? only the stuff about Supermodels? Army stuff? Your sorry you read any of this? You are sorry you read all of it, wished you stayed in bed? Hate me? completely disagree with every atom of my being? Wish that I drank poison and died?
Want to name your first born after me? Your first born clownfish?
Never want to hear my name again and will throw out your Beatle records because Paul McCartney sings on it? All of the above? :hmm5:

 

[markaren]

Ok...THATS IT!!!

I am naming my Jaw Fish (that I do not own for... a tank that has no water... from another tank that has not been bought... to mix that water with salt that still sits in a bag...and water still in the aquifer )after...


"PAUL"... Paul the Jaw Fish now you hate me for it or not ...I just named my first fish as MisLed would say "BOOM"

 

[Paul B]

He's probably going to die from mononucleosis

Wow, somebody actually reads this stuff. :wave:

 

[finfan4]

Great thread Paul. Reading this thread I now know what my kids feel like when I go on about the old days. As I strap them into their car seats they cant imagine how me and my brothers were just left to roll around the back of the station wagon, Im not even sure that thing had seatbelts, lol. Anyway, please enjoy your Memorial day weekend. From me and my family, Thank you ad ALL Veterans for your service and sacrafice. God Bless. Chuck.

 

[Seahorse NJRC]

Thanks for the read!!! I look forward to checking in on this thread.

 

[Paul B]

Im not even sure that thing had seatbelts, lol.

Seatbelts! They are a new invention for sure. (My very pregnant Daughter just got here)
My Dad used to put me in the back of his fish truck with the ice and fish. I would sit on the halibut and play with the crabs. My favorite thing was to make the lobsters have a war with the crabs. But lobsters out of the water are real mopey, crabs can run pretty fast and after a while I figured out how to pick them up without getting bit.
Main Street at that time was paved with coblestones and the truck was very old and rusty I could see the cobblestones through the holes in the floor and the thing would bounce badly on that road annoying the crabs.
I also remember once my dad brought two bushels of escargot snails to the store to sell the next day.
When we got there i the morning he was cursing like mad in Italian and I didn't know why.
Every one of the snails slithered up to the ceiling and he had to hit each one with a broom and catch it before it fell on the tile floor and cracked.
I am surprised they could do that because in those days fish stores and butcher shops had a thick layer of saw dust on the floors. Now you can't use saw dust because of course the stuff will kill you due to the bacteria. As far as I know, no one ever got hurt from saw dust but they get paid to make laws so they make laws.
Speaking of shellfish I also remember my cousin built his own house out east in the sticks. He was on TV for it (The same guy with the clams in the Oldsmobile) we went crabbing and got maybe 50 or 100 blue claw crabs. When he built the house he didn't have any money for the basement floor so it was sand, damp sand.
We put the crabs in the basement for the night and the next day they were all gone.
There was also no lights in the basement so with flashlights we had to track down every crab and dig them up.

Well it is a fish story to go with the thread.
I was thinking about wet dry's today and I remember that I always had one. Then they invented bio balls and they became more popular. Everyone had one of those cool tanks with a spray bar going around sprinkling water on the bioballs. I loved those things and spent many hours designing and building them for me and wholesalers. Wet Drys are still the best filtration but you need to couple it with a means to eliminate the nitrate. Nitrate factory is a stupid term because you want to make nitrate. If you are making nitrate, you are eliminating ammonia which is a good thing.
(Ich magnet is another stupid term)
Your fish should not get ich but that is for another thread or I will get yelled at a lot for my opinions about that. It happens a lot and if I didn't have such an old tank I most likely would not be allowed to even post on these forums.:facepalm:
I am not really afraid of critism, it gets the juices flowing. :bounce1::bounce2:

 

[jrpark22000]

This thread has taken enought bumps and corners to need seatbelts but I haven't fell through the floor boards yet. Growing up in a rural farming part of the rust belt, everything had holes in the floor boards. Sometimes big enough to be able to fred flinstone your car. I think a lack of floor boards were mandatory for all farm trucks.

Anyway, fish. I'll throw another question to further the thread. Of all the experiements, where there any you'd look back on and be amazed or shocked they worked out as well as they did? I'd imagine the early days had to be full of them. Also were there any accidents that turned out to be glorious revelations?

Did you and Mr. Flinstone ever cath any fish together? How different were the fish back then?

 

[Paul B]

Sorry double post:worried:

 

[Paul B]

Most of the experiments came out OK. The UG filter went through quite a few modifications with different manifolds and various flow rates until I settled on what I have now. There were also many wet drys, some that flooded the house, some of the skimmers flooded also. I built leak detectors under the tank connected to GFCIs that would shut off the pumps if water gets on the floor or if thwew skimmer fills, there is a five gallon bucket under it with an auto shut off in it.
I put a lot of this local codium seaweed (pictured) in there over the years. It looks great but only lives about 4 months then starts to get a coating of hair algae on it and fall apart. The pieces are hard to get out.
None of the experiments ever caused a loss of life that I can remember but I am sure some of them hastened it.
A few times I added too many amphipods and shrimp as they add to the bio load and I dump in loads of them. The RUGF seems to work great and make it impossable for the tank to crash due to too much livestock or bacteria. Once a large carpet anemone died and stunk but nothing happened. Another time I had 24 local NY purple urchins all spaen at the same time. The tank looked like whipped cream and stunk. The skimmer's 5 gallon bucket overflowed on the floor with about 10 gallons of water.
Nothing happened to the tank. In 2 days all was back to normal and all I did was diatom filter the water.

This picture appeared in FAMMA magazine in the late 80s or 90s, I don't remember. You can see one of the purple urchins in it. I used to collect them using SCUBA and sell them for algae control. NY urchins are not tropical so eat an awful lot of algae. I used to feed a head of lettuce to a tank of them which they would devour. I built a chilled styrofoam tank for them and I would collect fifty at a time.

 

[Paul B]

How different were the fish back then?

The fish looked the same but the selection was very limited and took many years before we have the selection we have now. I think I have kept a few of every fish available except pineconefish and flashlight fish.

 

[markaren]

This is what Paul looked like just before his Urchin dives. Mike Nelson style in Sea Hunt

( MY FAVORITE SHOW) I met Loyd Bridges at Epcot while in Mr. Holland in 1982...I digress.

Paul, what did you use on a dive to stick your finds in?

 

[Paul B]

Yes I did, how did you know?

Diving was much different in those days also. My first dive was in Australia but then I started lobster diving here in NY. The visability is measured in inches and many times zero. It's very easy to dive in the Caribbean where you can see everything but in New York with a heavy wet suit and 30lbs of weight it is much more difficult. See that picture of Mike Nelson, he carried about 5 lbs of weight, no wet suit and no BC (buoyancy compensator) which makes it easier to sink and rise. With a wet suit it is almost impossable to dive like that. The wet suit takes about 20lbs just to sink it and as you sink, it gets compressed so you sink faster. Without a BC, you would never get back to the surface unless you dropped some weight, and they are expensive to dump them everytime you dive.
Speaking of fish, on one dive in Mexico a jerk behind me swims up to a giant green moral eel which was at least 12' long. He tries to tickle him under his chin like Cousteau used to do. But the eel probably never met Mr. Cousteau and grabbed this guy's arm up to his elbow. He was shaking him back and forth for a while and there was blood all over the place. I waited a while hoping the eel would eat him completely, but he released him so then we had to rescue him and take him back for a 3 hour boat ride to a Mexican hospital and wait there 2 hours or so to get hin stitched up. That was one day of vacation wasted and the only one who had a good time, was the eel. :facepalm:
Here in NY about 30 years ago my dive partner and I were living for lobsters and the visability was about a foot. You have to dive into the current otherwise when you stop, the mud will over take you and that foot of visability will be zero. Remember we are not really swimming but pulling ourselves over the rocks, you need to be on the bottom to see it and thats where the lobsters are. We came up to a rusty wall and had to stop, then the mud covered us and we tried to go to the side, but there was a wall there and the other side, another wall. So we tried to go up, and hit another barrier. Eventually we discovered that we has swam into the boiler of an old side wheeler ship that had sunk in 1903. :eek1:

 

[Paul B]

I told you my Daughter was coming boating. She is 7 1/2 months pregnant here but I used the picture where her belly is under the table.

 

[Paul B]

This little tank to the right side of my workbench has always been important to the smooth running operation of my reef. I don't use it for quarantine (because I don't do that) and I really don't have much need for a hospital tank but once in a while I have something that is too small for the reef or sometimes someone gives me a fish that is near death and I don't want add it to the reef or maybe something hatches and I want to see if I can raise it. You really need another place to put stuff like that. It also houses local animals that I want to study or perform experiments. The latest one was using electricity to speed the growth of corals.
There is mostly NSW in there with snails, crabs and shrimp and I use some of that water to add to my tank periodically for the bacteria. I know we don't talk much about bacteria but without bacteria, we would not have tanks and I feel that "wild" bacteria from the sea is much different than bacteria you can buy in a bottle or bacteria from a LFS or somebody's else's tank. I also feel it must be added occasionally or it will all become one type of bacteria which may not be the best thing for nitrate conversion.
Remember that biosphere experiment years ago where they made this sealed ecosystem with rain forests, plants and sea? Eventually, ants were the dominent species in there, taking over the habitats of most of the other insects and they had to add other insects to balance it out, thats what happens in a tank, IMO of course. I feel that is the main reason people have so many problems and worry every time they add something if it wil change their parameters and havs a mini cycle (whatever that is).
A cycled tank a few years old should never experience anything and IMO, if you can get some bacteria from the sea, you don't have to be concerned with that.
Now I know some countries are large and not every one lives by the sea, (although I don't know why not ) and I can't help that but the stuff should be sold, not in a bottle because that is just silly, but in a bag like fish come in. Just a small bag of mud, great invention. No one would buy it but me, and I don't need it but if someone ever sells mud from the sea in a bag, buy it.

You can see a pipefish and that blurry thing is a northern puffer, we cal them blowfish. There is also a very tiny butterfly that I collected right in the center of the picture, it has a black verticle stripe near it's tail.
In this post I am getting into the realm of what people are going to yell at me for, as I mentioned above, there is a thread just so you can yell at me but don't do it here, these are my things and I don't advocate it to anyone, I think we should all do our own thing :wave:.

 

[spieszak]

The big red thing that says NuTone is my whole house vacuum and you don't have to pay any attention to that

But I want to pay attention to that...and it seems nothing is really OT in this thread. I've seen a few people buying these new lately. Is it an "original", or a newer purchase? Does it get used? I always thought these were a great idea... that is of course until I thought about the maintenance they might require.

On topic question now though. I agree totally with you on the front that its a good idea to have multiple strains of bacteria. Have you given any thought to how/why it is that cold water bacteria is surviving in your tank... or if it even is? I mean, its possible only the stuff that can handle the warmer water is making it... Just interested in your thoughts on it, not in challenging your thoughts on it.

 

[ERICinFL]

I always enjoy your posts Paul. I still have the bottles you sent me a couple of years ago and my friends always say how cool they look in my tank. When I tell them they were from the prohibition era and collected in NY, I always get an "Ooooooo".

I'm still not sure why I don't use NSW in my tank. I live 15min. from Cocoa Beach, so collecting it would be easy, though transporting 30-35 gallons might get my backseat wet. I could also collect snails and amphipods too, as well as hermit crabs. I suppose the fear of the unknown is what keeps me from doing it. I'm pretty sure the amphipods wouldn't hurt at all, but not knowing the specific types of snails and how they may, or may not enjoy a coral from another part of the world, is probably my biggest hang up. Not knowing the various types of hermits is a hang up too, because some of those suckers get HUGE. I tell myself they would be easy enough to pull out of the tank, should they become a nuisance, but I have yet to take the leap. Reading this thread today and thinking back to the many other threads you have started, has bolstered my courage (a little). I may take my daughters out and do some specimen collecting today. Can't really think of a better way to spend the holiday, than being outdoors with family, searching for new critters. Well, toss in a BBQ and a few beers, add some friends, then that would be icing.

Keep posting Paul, the SW community needs folks like you. It keeps us "New Age" reefers grounded and reminds us how far the hobby has come. :thumbsup:

 

[skidoctor]

Wow- I just keep thinking of the things I could've done with my tanks when I lived on the island. 5 minutes to Bayville- could have used water, rocks, sand, livestock. Never even thought of it. Too busy chasing girls and driving the strip. Now I'm in upstate NY, where experiments on my tanks prove to be, if nothing else, expensive.
But you've opened my eyes to what this hobby should really be about- experimentation and growth and fun. There is no cookie cutter philosophy, no have to's or else. I've spent the last few year learning about tanks from forums and friends. I look forward new to creating new ways to learn, hopefully without having to sell the farm to do so.