#Purrling Reef

[copperbora]

🪸Purrling Reef Has (One) Coral!🪸

It's been a while since I updated you guys on the progress of my 13.5 gallon nano reef tank, Purrling Reef. Arguably you guys probably would have preferred me using this time to work on Rise Up but this was somehow nagging me more I guess. 😅

Last Tuesday on the drive back from visiting my brother K and sister-in-law E on Vancouver Island I picked up my very first corals! Yes, plural; I bought a purple and turquoise ('green') favia (likely actually favites due to taxonomy changes,) and a rasta colour morph zoanthid.

Unfortunately, I wasn't quite aware at that point that I had set up my automatic topoff (ATO) system incorrectly. For the entire life of my aquarium I had been confused at how it kept seeming to suck water out of my aquarium, which I worried was diluting its salinity.

It was.

This of course seemed to come to a head - along with some stunning lack of preparedness on my part - when I introduced the poor corals and it shamefully took me days to get my salinity from the horrible 1.018 that it was back up to 1.025 that it was suppposed to be. This past Friday I at last figured out that I needed to competely redo my ATO's hose configuration and finally, finally I had it installed correctly. No longer did the ATO's tubing have any access to my aquarium water either; at long last it could no longer remove water from my aquarium!

I made handy use of the water-side hole in my light's mounting bracket for holding the ATO's tube in place. The gunk on its interior is algae.

ATO finally fixed - and just in time for cooler fall temperatures which meant I no longer even really needed to use the damned thing, I was at last able to fix that critical salinity, yet my favia coral still appeared to be unfortunately dying.

The favia's heartbreakingly tragic progress from a beautiful vibrant coral of my dreams to just another piece of reef rock. I plan on trying again with it next spring when I may be able to source another piece of the same morph from the Lower Mainland shop that I got it from. All isn't completely lost though; while the antiparasitic dip that I treated the corals with upon their arrival almost certainly killed the vermetid snail living on the favia frag's underside, there was something else there too, which due to its biology may be okay - a mussel!

I have no idea if the mussel still lives but if it does that'd be pretty wicked honestly!

Meanwhile, I dosed the reef with calcium and magnesium; the next day, yesterday, the zoanthid coral finally opened up two of its polyps!

I believe that I may have lost one of its three polyps to my incompetence but I still have two living - if I suspect immature - polyps! I haven't secured the zoa frag in its spot yet but as I am currently kinda scared of touching the thing I think that I will give it a week or so to get acclimated before bothering it to aquarium epoxy it in place. (Most people use super glue but I don't have any at the moment. The epoxy will work too, it's just uglier.)

And yeah, the zoanthid polyps don't look like much right now, but this is what they will look like someday!

(Photo from Tidal Gardens, whose wonderful coral species spotlights on Youtube are my bible when it comes to species research. Plus the host/owner Than's voice is really soothing and ASMR-like!)

Through this whole snafu with my water chemistry - which I am still working on improving with daily dosing of Brightwell Aquatics Alkalin8.3 to bring up my aquarium's PH a point (it's at 7.3,) I also thought that I had lost one of my reef's most charismatic creatures - Captain Spook the Halloween Hermit Crab. Having found his dismembered exoskeleton, I mournfully declared him deceased, only to discover yesterday evening...

...that he was just moulting! I can't tell you how happy I was! Also I had been dead convinced that my tank had reached the ripe ol' age of six months old by now so I was berating myself as a poor reef keeper, but looking back in my reef record Purrling Reef is actually only three months old. This made me feel a lot better about myself; it's okay that my reef is looking scruffy because it is young and my research has told me that pretty much all captive reefs go through a scruffy period!

Knowing this, my confidence has returned and I'm excited to try some more corals as well as hopefully introduce a sea urchin/living lawnmower to take care of all the turf algae which has grown rampant around the reef.❤️

[womenhatslider]

*@#&*)+ NWT THE NORTH FACE Women's Beanie Purrl Stitch Knit Hat Barrier Reef Blue RARE https://ift.tt/3hjYBzO

[copperbora]

Purrling is Almost Fully Stocked!

It's now been a week since I added Moby's mate, Cousteau! Both Moby and Cousteau are clownfish of the species Amphriprion ocellaris, so in the reefing hobby we tend to just call them ocellaris clownfish. (Their other common name, false percula clownfish, is kinda dumb in my opinion given that ocellaris are prettier than percula clowns.) Ocellaris clownfish come in a huuuge range of morphs, all of which were originally found in the wild.

Because they prefer to live in mated pairs and because they don't have any trouble recognizing other ocellaris regardless of their morph, I decided to have a mismatched pair. Moby is a mocha ocellaris; his morph is a slightly darker version of the usual wild type of the species of Finding Nemo fame.

Yes, he was named for the titular character of Moby Dick by my dad.

Cousteau, meanwhile, is a fancier black snowflake. Since he is the smaller of the two he will stay a male (all clownfish are born male,) while Moby will develop into a female. (That's right, folks: clownfish are trans!🏳️‍⚧️)

Cousteau is named for the father of marine biology and scuba diving, Jacques Cousteau.

Because my fish dealer didn't have any Euphillia hammer coral in stock that were of a morph I want, I also introduced Nickel the neon blue goby (yep, she is named after the IDW II Transformer's DJD's diminutive little medic, Nickel!) Nickel the fish has been shy but thankfully not as much as my yellow watchman goby Clyde who seems determined to spend her entire existence hiding in her den. Maybe she'll come out more once I give her a pistol shrimp.

The beautiful little Nickel, whose function, just like the more famous and larger bluestreak cleaner wrasse, is parasite removal from larger fish. (This kinda makes her a medic just like her namesake!)

The singular good photo that I possess of Clyde, back before my cat Keplar scared the crap out of her somehow and she decided to constantly live in her burrow.

With the addition of Cousteau Purrling Reef's population list of fish is almost complete; the final fish to acquire will be a royal gramma basslet, to be named Amphritite. I also need to get Clyde that pistol shrimp and get a purple pincushion urchin. Then, maybe, (unless I acquire a new cleaner shrimp,) I'll be done adopting ambulatory livestock. I haven't even begun adopting corals however! Here're some of the species I'm hoping to acquire:

- Genus Euphillia: Frogspawn (Yoshi's morph which is green with indigo tentacle tips)

- Genus Euphillia: Hammer (purple with turquoise tentacle tips)

- Favia (arguably not actually Favia as many favia has been reclassified): 'green' (turquoise) and purple morph

- Blastomussa merletti: purple wine morph (it's also purple and turquoise)

- Lepastrea: I'm partial to the blueberry fields morph. I also like the one called polkaroo.

- Possibly some Acans

- Maybe some Cyphastrea. I like the morphs meteor shower, bling bling, seafoam and peppermint.

- Maybe some Duncans; I don't really like duncans though.

- Hard maybe some zoanthids (I'm worried about palytoxin and mine and Keplar's stupidity in regards to sticking parts of our bodies in the water with little thought.)

Behold, my dream hammer coral (picture by Fragbox Coral.)

In any case, things are progressing slowly but surely with Purrling Reef. I will hopefully be adding some corals next month; there's a local guy with exactly the frogspawn that I want so I might try to get a frag from him.

Skitter, my intrepid blue-eyed hermit crab bids ye adieu. (He would like you to recognize that crabs are in fact far superior to snails.)

[copperbora]

Meet Purrling Reef, aka the 13.5 gallon Fluval Evo reef aquarium that I forgot to tell you all about before: in today's episode: in which Moby scares the sh-! out of me (he's good at that.)

This is Moby, my baby Amphiprion ocellaris clownfish, who, providing that he survives my relative incompetence may live 15+ years. Clownfish are known for being quite hardy fish and people used to use them to cycle their aquariums which is now recognized by many reef aquarists as mild animal cruelty. (Therefore I cycled Purrling Reef using pure ammonia instead.) Along with my (probably female) yellow watchman goby Clyde, Moby has been in Purrling Reef for about a month now.

Things are going well; ammonia is at 0 ppm, nitrates are usually at 0 ppm, phosphates are usually at .25 ppm, salinity is stable at 1.025, and my PH hovers at a somewhat soft but okay 7-7.5. Having at last gotten through the worst of the summer heat and having finally figured out how to set up my inkbird temperature properly, Purrling Reef's waters stay a comfy 25°C (78°F,) all day and night long.

Things are going well, so naturally Moby opted to scare the crap out of me this morning by acting like he was dying.

WTF MOBY.

Terrified for his life I promptly did a water change and dosed the tank with Seachem Prime (which detoxifies ammonia as well as chemicals like chlorine,) then Seachem Stress Guard (which soothes fish.) My ammonia was at zero but I thought that the Prime was a good idea anyway.

Moby promptly stopped looking like he wanted to be crab food, so I went to work; when I came home he was back to his annoying ol' habit of chilling by the filter outflow.

WHY FISH.

After testing all of my water parameters again and finding that all seems well I turned my attention to my newest addition to my reef: Spook the Halloween Hermit crab. I actually call him Captain Spook because he is rather overwhelmingly the least useless member of my cleanup crew. Usually, since I got him he clams up at my approach, sucking as much of his body as he can into the enormous conch snail shell which he adopted as his mobile home.

Chances are he murdered the original inhabitant of this shell.

Today though Spook decided not to spook at my approach which I have two theiries for:

1. The vast anti-Keplar fortifications that I set out around the aquarium double-sided tape traps are working! Yay! (Keplar must not be scaring my aquarium inhabitants as much anymore.)

2. My water is still screwed up so Spook is feeling weird. Given that I have only been at this for like three months... yeah, I can't ignore this possibility.

It was rather remarkable getting to see his white carapace up close for once. While it reminded me that he is in fact a sea bug, but I refuse to hold this against me due to his janitorial awesomeness and the fact that he is much less anxiety inducing than Moby. (Although I live in fear of him eating one of my two puny dwarf hermit crabs.

I can't wait until I can adopt more livestock; Purrling Reef definitely has a job opening available for an emerald crab! (Captain Spook does not like salad.)

Also, here's

Also, here's Clyde the yellow watchman giby who would like me to mention her job a for a pistol shrimp; in the wild watchman gobies live with these shrimp.

If she gets a pistol shrimp friend maybe she'll coe out of her den more often.

[copperbora]

Just a few weeks before my mom passed away my 23+ year old female leopard gecko (Eublepharis macularis) Diego died too. Ever since I have been trying to figure out what to do with the enclosure that she left behind, and here are some of the ideas that I have come up with:

- Turn it back into the aquarium that it originally was; it could make for a rad freshwater species aquarium of zebra danios and beautiful blue freshwater shrimp, or it could be a second saltwater tank. Right now the thought of entering into another expensive-to-equip aquarium adventure makes me mentally hyperventilate though, especially when I still have yet to finish stocking my Fluval Evo reef tank which I've dubbed Purrling Reef. Sure the thought of a seahorse tank or an angler fish is fun but do I really want to enter into another aquatic pet like that at this time? Probably not!

- Get a small (male) snake! This is the original thing that I wanted to do but my mom wasn't on board with snakes. My dad? He's fine with it. So far the most likely species for me is the Plains Hognose (Heterodon nasicus,) Rosy Boa (Lichinura trivergata,) or the Anthill/Pygmy Python (Antaresia perthensis.) I am really not interested in Kenyan Sand Boas (Gongylophis colubrinus,) and I like that hognoses and rosy boas are both from North America - in fact the plains hognose is native to a few Canadian provinces! (Thankfully not mine though which means that hognoses are completely legal where I live, yay!) Rosy boas are unfortunately hard to find here, and so are pygmy pythons (which are from Australia, and not from the Perth region as their name seems to suggest.) Hognoses are easy to find - but only if you want a fancy colour morph, which I don't. I love the regular wild type morph of hognose but so far I haven't seen any available in Canada. (The fancy morphs are considerably more expensive, like $200+ more at least.)

Considering my hiking hobby a snake who as an adult only needs feeding once every 1-2 weeks and a clean, topped up water dish is pretty ideal. Top entry enclosures like mine aren't ideal for snakes (reaching down to grab them is too much like a bird of prey swooping down on top of them,) but I just need to check myself over how I reach for the snake friend. All three species of consideration are relatively docile, with the hognose being likely the best. Considering Clint's Reptiles and Wickens Wicked Reptiles' enclosure size recommendations I feel confident that Diego's 20 gallon long enclosure would be just fine especially for a male hognose (which is twice the size of the 10 gallon that some recommend.)

A garter snake would fit too however a larger enclosure would be better, especially so that I could keep more than one as unlike most other snakes, garter snakes are social beings who appreciate having garter snake friends.

Why specifically a male snake? Male snakes are significantly smaller than females.

I'm not interested in a tricolour hognose (Xenodon pulcher) as they do not live long enough. (5-8 years at best is ow, especially for an animal that would cost $400+ here. Nope, hard pass.)

- Get another lizard, but not a leopard gecko (nothing against my beautiful late Diego but I simply don't want another leopard gecko.) So far my favourite option for this is the completely gorgeous Schneider's Skink (Eumaces schneider.) At first I really wasn't considering another lizard but watching Reptiliatus' videos of feeding his tokay geckos made me realize that I actually really miss feeding Diego and watching her hunt her crickets. Skinks tend to be personable and friendly; I'm still researching what other options might exist.

Bonus points for ease of care for my dad whenever I'm away. He's probably more comfortable dumping a bunch of crickets into a lizard's home than feeding dead rodents to a snake if I am gone for a long time as I would be should I succeed someday in returning to Scotland to finish the Scottish National Trail (and potentially hike the Hebridean Way.)

- Stow away the 20 gallon and get a bigger enclosure for a larger reptillian friend. I'm not going to lie, a Ball Pythons (Python regius,) would be awesome and their particularly slow metabolism would be ideal for my thruhiking hobby (some adults only eat once every three weeks.) I also really like Pueblan Milksnakes (Lambropeltis triangulum campbelli,) and Arizona Mountain Kingsnakes (Lambropeltis pyromelana)! In fact, a Pueblan Milksnake is probably my dream snake - I'd feel happy every single time that I looked at that thing.

Alternatively I could adopt a tokay gecko (Gekko gecko) because they are not only beautiful but hilarious but since they are vocal geckos I'd probably have to keep it in my room.

Downside to an animal requiring a whole bigger enclosure: I'm not... financially well at the moment. This will change eventually, but right now? Right now things are hard.

But building an enclosure from scratch woukd also be really fun!

Wait, aren't fish really high maintenance? No, not really, not when you have automated systems in place like I do already and plan to add. An automatic feeder will eventually give my fish a daily breakfast meal of mixed pellets (currently a blend of Vitalis, Piscene Energetics, Fauna Marin and Northfin carnivore/clownfish diets,) an Automatic Top Off system guards my salinity against evaporation, my lighting is programmed with a full day/night cycle and an Inkbird temperature controller regulates the temperature of my water. My USB air pump will keep running and oxygenating my water for up to 36 hours in the event of a power outtage. All the coral species which I plan to keep are photosynthetic so they don't need to be fed actual food for their survival while I am away. My fish won't get any tasty frozen food when I am gone but they will have the pellets to munch on as well as the tiny live copepods which also call my reef home. For maintaining water chemistry I have extensive rockwork and porous media for biological filtration and I will soon be introducing macroalgae to one of my filter compartments. (Plants are the original filters and will - along with my future corals - lap up my nitrates and phosphates like greedy puppies.) Additionally, I have other plans for autominously maintaining other properties of my water and I will be purchasing a chiller before next summer (because fans suck at cooling aquarium water.)

If I do adopt another reptile I will be giving it UVB as well as a bioactive setup just like Diego had. Due to Keplar's very strong prey drive and my tendancy to deeply bond with my pets rodents are not on option for me as pets. I will be fortifying the terrarium similar to how I have fortified my reef tank against Keplar being a pest to my other animals.

I also have vague plans to build or buy some taller, better stands so that he can't go nose-to-nose with my non-feline pets anymore.

(Keplar is so cute but he is such a pest to non-feline organisms.)

[copperbora]

This is my two year old baby boy Keplar, aka the mortal enemy of my marine nano aquarium Purrling Reef.

A few weeks ago I had to put fortifications around the tank because he kept attempting to hunt my Ocellaris clownfish Moby and Purrling's other inhabitants as well.

I love Keplar dearly but he also recently decided that my emergancy airline's airstone did not actually 'need' to actually be in the water. The problem is, Keplar happens to have ferociously sharp claws, which I am very well acquainted with personally thanks to the fact that he loves rearing up against my leg when he is hungry to get my attention as well as recently, hopping up on my shoulder. So, this morning I discovered that he had finally poked enough holes in the airline that not enough air was making it to the airstone in the water anymore.

Why is this important, you ask? Because should the power go out - which it does reasonably frequently here although mercifully usually only for a few hours - the regular injection of air bubbles into the water from the air stone will keep my water oxygenated, therefore keeping Purrling's beloved (and expensive) marine inhabitants alive.

(And what do I mean by expensive? Oh ho - saltwater fish are not your $5 Betta splendens or cheap $2 zebra danio of yore - my baby clownfish cost me $24 - which is cheap for a marine fish. His neighbour yellow watchman goby Clyde cost $40, and I expect my future royal gramma basslet to cost between $80-$100. I'm lucky because the fish that I can get for my little tank are actually relatively inexpensive. It's not uncommon for reef fish to cost $100-$400+ a pop.)

Lieutenant Skitter the blue eyed hermit crab was a fortunate nab: my livestock dealer gave him to me for free because he felt bad that I had driven an hour to see him and he didn't have any of the fish that I wanted in stock.

So, first thing's first: I attempted to repair the airline with black electrical tape which is both waterproof and reasonably Keplar-proof.

Unfortunately, the tube was too far gone, so I had to replace the whole thing. I armoured this in electrical tape too.

Success!

Another thing I did as an anti-Keplar measure is let the back and sides of my tank become absolutely covered in beautiful algae. The algae naturally blocks Keplar from looking in and the fish from looking out so that they only have to deal with my snuggly feline demon from one angle. (I do plan on wrapping these sides with dark construction paper in the future because the algae may disappear once I add corals and the algae no longer has those nutrients to munch on.)

While Moby and Clyde are scared of Keplar, my newest addition yellow-tailed damselfish Jewel doesn't mind him and happily watches him back. In fact, she seems less afraid of Keplar than she is of me! I hope that Moby and Clyde will learn from her brave example. A lot of people despise damselfish because a lot of them can be jerks (fun fact: clownfish are also damselfish,) but marine fish breeder ORA swears that Jewel's species is mellow. So far, ORA is right and Jewel is doing an awesome job of doing what I bought her for - being a 'dither' fish. Dither fish are fish whose confident swimming inspires calm in more nervous ones, like Moby, who I swear was getting depressed before I introduced her. Now he's eating again and swimming more readily around the aquarium!

Hopefully Jewel won't harass the royal gramma (to be named Amphritite) when I get it; I plan on buying a little pen to secure Jewel while I introduce Amphi. I doubt that Jewel will pose any issue with the introduction of Moby's future mate, Cousteau, as Cousteau should flock straight to Moby. Eventually (soon, hopefully,) I will supply Moby and Cousteau with at least a couple of LPS coral from the genus Euphillia - hammers and frogspawns, specifically. Torch corals are nastily aggressive to other corals and need lots of space so I won't be adopting any (they are horrendously expensive anyway.) Hammers and frogspawns also need space but I factored that into the design of my aquascape with a seperate little island for them.

Marine aquarium keeping is a really fun and complex learning curve; there's so much that I am still learning and perfecting! (Like temperature; I thought that I had that figured, but I don't yet. I honestly think that I need a higher wattage heater because the one I have doesn't seem to be maintaining temps well enough. I accidentally left the floor fan beside the aquarium on last night and my water temps plunged from 25°C to 18.3°C. Fortunately my temperature controller's alarm went off and I was able to quickly turn off the fan!)

I'm enjoying this very slow adventure. Every new livestock addition makes my tank so much more interesting and I can't wait to see how Purrling Reef will look a year from now!

[copperbora]

Oh gosh, my reef has changed an absolutely ridiculous amount in the past year since this post! I will definitely be writing a post about everything that has happened but suffice to say: Purrling Reef is a very different place now and if I can help it I will never not have a reef tank!❤️ It's a massive source of happiness and pride for me (even though sometimes it can be mega stressful, like my slow, painful discovery that Clyde the goby has far too much in common with her 1930s killer namesake temperament-wise.)

Meet Purrling Reef, aka the 13.5 gallon Fluval Evo reef aquarium that I forgot to tell you all about before: in today's episode: in which Moby scares the sh-! out of me (he's good at that.)

This is Moby, my baby Amphiprion ocellaris clownfish, who, providing that he survives my relative incompetence may live 15+ years. Clownfish are known for being quite hardy fish and people used to use them to cycle their aquariums which is now recognized by many reef aquarists as mild animal cruelty. (Therefore I cycled Purrling Reef using pure ammonia instead.) Along with my (probably female) yellow watchman goby Clyde, Moby has been in Purrling Reef for about a month now.

Things are going well; ammonia is at 0 ppm, nitrates are usually at 0 ppm, phosphates are usually at .25 ppm, salinity is stable at 1.025, and my PH hovers at a somewhat soft but okay 7-7.5. Having at last gotten through the worst of the summer heat and having finally figured out how to set up my inkbird temperature properly, Purrling Reef's waters stay a comfy 25°C (78°F,) all day and night long.

Things are going well, so naturally Moby opted to scare the crap out of me this morning by acting like he was dying.

WTF MOBY.

Terrified for his life I promptly did a water change and dosed the tank with Seachem Prime (which detoxifies ammonia as well as chemicals like chlorine,) then Seachem Stress Guard (which soothes fish.) My ammonia was at zero but I thought that the Prime was a good idea anyway.

Moby promptly stopped looking like he wanted to be crab food, so I went to work; when I came home he was back to his annoying ol' habit of chilling by the filter outflow.

WHY FISH.

After testing all of my water parameters again and finding that all seems well I turned my attention to my newest addition to my reef: Spook the Halloween Hermit crab. I actually call him Captain Spook because he is rather overwhelmingly the least useless member of my cleanup crew. Usually, since I got him he clams up at my approach, sucking as much of his body as he can into the enormous conch snail shell which he adopted as his mobile home.

Chances are he murdered the original inhabitant of this shell.

Today though Spook decided not to spook at my approach which I have two theiries for:

1. The vast anti-Keplar fortifications that I set out around the aquarium double-sided tape traps are working! Yay! (Keplar must not be scaring my aquarium inhabitants as much anymore.)

2. My water is still screwed up so Spook is feeling weird. Given that I have only been at this for like three months... yeah, I can't ignore this possibility.

It was rather remarkable getting to see his white carapace up close for once. While it reminded me that he is in fact a sea bug, but I refuse to hold this against me due to his janitorial awesomeness and the fact that he is much less anxiety inducing than Moby. (Although I live in fear of him eating one of my two puny dwarf hermit crabs.

I can't wait until I can adopt more livestock; Purrling Reef definitely has a job opening available for an emerald crab! (Captain Spook does not like salad.)

Also, here's

Also, here's Clyde the yellow watchman giby who would like me to mention her job a for a pistol shrimp; in the wild watchman gobies live with these shrimp.

If she gets a pistol shrimp friend maybe she'll coe out of her den more often.