euromomtx
New member
Last Christmas I gave you my heart... actually I am lying now. Somebody gave me seahorses last Christmas and I gave them 150 bucks. 
I did fall in love with seahorses at that time though!
The seahorses arrived with a 29 gallon hexagon tank that quickly sprung a leak!
This was of course a great reason to upgrade to a better/bigger tank.
Texas Tropical in San Antonio ordered a custom made Marineland 60 gallon cube for me. I wanted a corner overflow rather than the standard back one (because my tank is in a corner!)
After the shadowbox turned out so nice on my 215 gallon reef I couldn't see myself going with an opaque background on the seahorse tank and a clever person from my local club (MAAST) suggested gel sheets. They are actually not gel at all. Just translucent plastic sheets that are meant for theater lighting and come in gazillions of colors.
So for the seahorse tank I went the easy route: boxless!
Two cheapo led sticks are lighting the two back sides and gel sheets with diffuser sheets (to disguise my makeshift fake mangroves in the background) create the endless look I like:
It's lit with a DIY LED fixture and I made an acrylic rack to mount my mangroves to.
I got a bunch of beautiful macros from Live-Plants
Since my seahorses are the smartest there are they also learned quickly to eat from a bowl!
There are no powerheads in the display. Water circulates through spray bars on top and bottom of the tank.
Things went great. So great in fact that I wondered what it would be like to get seahorse fry (the seahorses I got were both female) and I started bugging Abbie at Seahorse Source for a male. They eventually got so tired of me bugging them that they sold me one of their broodstock males!
The girls seemed very excited about having a male!
Then out of the blue my biggest female, Poppy, passed away.
It was horrid. I didn't even find her for several days and when I did find her her tail was still hitched around some prolifera. Even dead she still seemed perfectly intact.
I am not sure what caused her to die cut for weeks after I was paranoid about losing Patches and Paul my remaining seahorses.
Then they started their mating dance and soon Paul was pregnant! It was time to set up the rest of my seahorse system: the propagation part!
I am culturing phyto, rotifers and pods. I am also keeping live saltwater shrimp to feed to the adults.
And the actual fry system:
screen pipe to prevent fry from going down the drain:
When he's due I transfer Paul to the fry tub because I am afraid I may miss the birth in the display tank and the fry will be killed in the filters:
Three weeks ago he had his first batch of babies:
Since Reidi fry are pelagic and very small it is very difficult to raise them successfully and I lost the whole first batch.
I learned something from it though and will start over in the next few days. Paul is due to give birth on December 26th -TOMORROW.
I did fall in love with seahorses at that time though!
The seahorses arrived with a 29 gallon hexagon tank that quickly sprung a leak!
This was of course a great reason to upgrade to a better/bigger tank.
Texas Tropical in San Antonio ordered a custom made Marineland 60 gallon cube for me. I wanted a corner overflow rather than the standard back one (because my tank is in a corner!)
After the shadowbox turned out so nice on my 215 gallon reef I couldn't see myself going with an opaque background on the seahorse tank and a clever person from my local club (MAAST) suggested gel sheets. They are actually not gel at all. Just translucent plastic sheets that are meant for theater lighting and come in gazillions of colors.
So for the seahorse tank I went the easy route: boxless!
Two cheapo led sticks are lighting the two back sides and gel sheets with diffuser sheets (to disguise my makeshift fake mangroves in the background) create the endless look I like:
It's lit with a DIY LED fixture and I made an acrylic rack to mount my mangroves to.
I got a bunch of beautiful macros from Live-Plants
Since my seahorses are the smartest there are they also learned quickly to eat from a bowl!
There are no powerheads in the display. Water circulates through spray bars on top and bottom of the tank.
Things went great. So great in fact that I wondered what it would be like to get seahorse fry (the seahorses I got were both female) and I started bugging Abbie at Seahorse Source for a male. They eventually got so tired of me bugging them that they sold me one of their broodstock males!
The girls seemed very excited about having a male!
Then out of the blue my biggest female, Poppy, passed away.
It was horrid. I didn't even find her for several days and when I did find her her tail was still hitched around some prolifera. Even dead she still seemed perfectly intact.
I am not sure what caused her to die cut for weeks after I was paranoid about losing Patches and Paul my remaining seahorses.
Then they started their mating dance and soon Paul was pregnant! It was time to set up the rest of my seahorse system: the propagation part!
I am culturing phyto, rotifers and pods. I am also keeping live saltwater shrimp to feed to the adults.
And the actual fry system:
screen pipe to prevent fry from going down the drain:
When he's due I transfer Paul to the fry tub because I am afraid I may miss the birth in the display tank and the fry will be killed in the filters:
Three weeks ago he had his first batch of babies:
Since Reidi fry are pelagic and very small it is very difficult to raise them successfully and I lost the whole first batch.
I learned something from it though and will start over in the next few days. Paul is due to give birth on December 26th -TOMORROW.
