#tropical algae

[pulsethebabyoctopus]

[aroaceleovaldez]

apparently pjotv twt was being weird about book!Percy's eyes being green because they don't think the ocean can be green (???) so consider this a sequel to my Grace siblings eye colors post and here is some visual references of green water for all your Percy inspo needs:

And for reference, the water around New York-ish where Percy is usually is somewhere around this color:

or some alternatives:

or here is a nice hazel green if you want his eyes more on the brown side, which is very common in freshwater ponds and streams:

or if you want him to have totally brown eyes - water rich in tannins will appear brown, greenish-brown, or very dark brown - this is sometimes called "blackwater" due to often appearing very dark or having low visibility:

[waterskies]

40 gallon long update~

Everything is going well in this tank apart from the odd bit of algae here and there.

The new pearl gourami is getting on nicely. Though it is a bit picky and will only eat flakes. He is quite shy and is still nervous when I come up to the tank. Hopefully, he will get used to me soon!

The bamboo shrimp is growing, too! I feed it some crushed up flakes and the powder from my rapashy.

The old dominant harlequin rasbora, who got his nose torn off in a fight, is doing well. He's eating fine, and there appears to be no infection going on. So I think he's okay.

Chiggy, my peppered corydoras that was born deformed, is doing good, too. She doesn't come out much, preferring to chill amongst the Val with the other corys.

Big Mama is still big. I'm still hoping she'll give me some eggs soon, but it's been a while since I've seen any breeding action from them.

The otocinclus and siamese algae eater are doing well, too! Doing their jobs and keeping the tank tidy~

[paulpingminho]

[concertphotos]

Sargassum Seaweed Bloom in the Caribbean Sea Aerial View by David Oppenheimer Via Flickr: Sargassum seaweed algae bloom in the Caribbean Sea high altitude aerial view - photo taken on February 5, 2018 - © 2018 David Oppenheimer - Performance Impressions aerial photography archives - www.performanceimpressions.com

[addfish]

Last year I could not access my 90l tank to maintain it properly due to building work and as a result it suffered what I like to call Algaegeddon! My tank was plagued with hair algae, green spot algae and black beard algae, also resulting in a loss of a lot of shrimps, fish and snails.

So this year I have had to start over! I removed most of the badly affected leaves, but the algae still kept coming! I bought a treatment only to find out that it was harmful to shrimp and snails, luckily I realised before I used it! Then i bought another which says it was safe for fish/shrimps/snails, but only worked on one type of algae, (green water) which was no good! I finally found Colombo Algisin which treats all kinds of algae and is safe for fish, snails and shrimp! It's a long process to treat it, but it is working well!

I also used Algisin in the 30l Aquacube. I packed the tank away last year and recently restarted it, and although I bought new plants and everything was clean it developed algae from new tank syndrome. The algae is gone now after 2 doses of the treatment, so it's time to buy some more plants!

[jjspina]

Red Tide of Algae in our Fish Tank!

[alexanders-pokemon-adventure]

Sharpedo-Variant(whale shark)

“Whale Shark” Sharpedo are regional variant evolution of Carvanha found through much of the worlds open temperate and tropical oceans roughly one out of every 4000 Carvanha from these populations will evolve into this variant. Possessing a generally friendly disposition compared to their standard counterparts. They are filter feeders with a diet, consisting, mostly of algae and various phytoplankton‘s ,with a general lifespan, between 80 and 130 years. A Water/Fairy type Pokémon they generally possess the abilities, cute charm, Water veil ,or water absorb.

[tribbetherium]

'While some of the armored rattiles known as shingles live firmly on dry land, and another class, the seashingles, living entirely in the open ocean, some species dwell in the numerous inland bodies of fresh water all so abundant in the Middle Temperocene, with its ponds, lakes and streams conducive to the flourishing of an assorted diversity of life. The pond turtduck (Anatochelymys atla) is one such species of freshwater shingle, foraging at the bottom of ponds with its broad flattened snout to feed on an assortment of food, ranging from algae and aquatic plants to freshwater snails, clams, worms and other invertebrates that it stores in its cheek pouches and chews when it surfaces to breathe. Found mostly across Gestaltia's tropical regions, the pond turtduck, defended by its sturdy skeleton and protective keratinous armor plates, is largely unconcerned with enemies, feeding at its own leisurely pace--though, if an aggressor proves persistent, the sharp raking claws on its flipper-like limbs acts as an additional deterrent, particularly on land where the turtduck is clumsy and unsuited for a quick getaway.'

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[pulsethebabyoctopus]

[vixensbrainrotts]

Tr headcanons (volume ||)

Content: headcanons

Warnings: none, lmk if I’m wrong

Vixen’s two cents: this is the part two I sorta promised. Do you agree with some of my headcanons? Please do tell me some of your own I would love to hear about them!! Let me know if you enjoy this, I love hearing about it!!! Now enjoy! I’ll link the part one once I figure out how to change the link

VOLUME I

Rindou who went through a long stage of denial about having to wear glasses before he finally admitted that he can’t see jackshit without them.

Mikey who genuinely stops and stares at every rainbow he sees. No matter where, no matter what situation, if the refraction hits his eye all pretty and colorful he‘s going to take a moment to appreciate it.

Kakucho who is a bitch for crystals. Diagnose him with a clear lack of Rose-quartz and push some shiny rocks in his hands and he's happy. He melts when he's presented with personalized crystal pouches and pretty rocks that he can caress in his pockets. He doesn't really buy the whole rocks as remedies thing but he likes the stones that come with it.

Izana who has a whole Ecosystem figured out for his aquarium. He takes it super seriously and makes sure that every tropic level is sufficiently cared for. The plants are non-invasive and regenerative, he has a moss-ball for natural filtration and the algae that he does allow is probiotic. He makes sure to have a predator fish to control the exessive baby-making his Guppies do, and has shrimp as decomposers. He specifically cares to make sure he has the correct school-size for each type of fish and makes sure that there is no stress between species.

also Izana who has a log book for his aquarium where he enters all the plants and fish he's gotten, how many times he's done a water change, and whenever a creature dies. It's the most controlled part of his life.

Emma who has a single Orchid flower in her room that Shinichiro gave her for her Birthday one year. She's read books on how to care for it properly and nurtures it like a mother. She cried once when it lost its blossoms, thinking it would whither and die, but later figured out that it was just the change of seasons.

Baji who unintentionally mean-mugs people when he spaces out and stares. It's real bad because his eyebrows furrow deep and his lips fall into a frown. He doesn't mean it at all, and is kind of upset that he keeps scaring people away.

Takemichi who has really bad allergies against seasonal greens. You can't catch him outside during spring without a puffy, snotty, swollen face. Its bad-bad.

Ran who sort of lived for the buzzcut he had in juvie, and thinks about just buzzing off everything again every once in a while.

Mitsuya who has both his eyebrows pierced right where the slits are. They are (by some miracle) aligned perfectly and suit him sooo well.

German/Russian Hanma who gets frustrated whenever he forgets a word, because he doesn't only forget it in one language, but all languages he speaks. Its not like he could translate it cause he knows it in another language, no! He straight up forgets the word in every language he speaks

Hakkai who wants to be good at baking so bad but created poison whenever he tries. They aren’t even salvageable by sugar coatings, fruits or sprinkles- they’re dry and crumbly and sometimes salty. It’s sort of a shame because he tries really hard.

[waterskies]

The corys getting a good nom on some frozen brine shrimp~

[bipolar02]

✦ Shark themed NPTs. Request by @sharkfriendly

Anemone. Coral. Marine, Marina. Fin, Finn, Fynn. Riptide. Ripley. Mako. Reef. Atlas. Lorelei. Nico. Leola. Cordelia. Keto. Kai. Marco. Mori. Blue. Gray. Dylan. Wade. Marlin, Marlon. Bay. Rio. Morgan. Laiken. Delta. Angel. Pearl. Tide. Kip. Corsair. Sea, Sia. Cove. Storm. Orca. Finley. Gael, Gail, Gill. Skip, Skipper. Beach. Coast. Estuary.

Keto: "Sea monster" in greek. Goddess of sharks / whales / etc in mythology.

Sea ser. Sea seas. Wa wave. Rip riptides. Cor coral. Ti tides tidal. Rei reef. Co coast costal. Co cove. Tro tropic tropical. Shou shore. Su surf. Fi fish. Gi gill. Ke kelp. Dri drift. Nau nautic nautical. Sai sail. Dea depth. Pi pier. Ab abyss. Tre trench. Al algae. Au aqua.

The aquatic girl. The girl that lurks (the sea). The abyssal girl. She who lurks in reefs. The girl that everyone fears. The fastest swimmer. She with many gills. The oceanic. The water-breather. The ocean-dweller. The girl of (the) deep sea. She who will bite you bite you bit

[bethanythebogwitch]

Wet Beast Wednesday: lampreys

Welcome to the first Wet Beast Wednesday covering an agnathan. What is that, you may ask? Why it means jawless fish. But they aren't really fish even though they live underwater and have gills. Taxonomy strikes again. Anyway, agnathans are more closely related to each other than to any bony or cartilaginous fish and they may represent an early stage in the evolution of vertebrates. There are only two living groups of agnathans: the hagfish (which I'll get to sometime) and the lampreys.

(Image: a pair of lampreys, one resting on rocky sediment and one swimming. They are long, green, slender fish-like animals with only dorsal and tail fins, several holes on the sides of the heads, large eyes, and no visible jaws. End ID)

Lampreys are sometimes mistakenly called eels due to their long and slender bodies. All 38 known species are elongated, scaleless animals with a funnel-shaped, jawless mouth called the buccal tunnel or buccal cavity. They do not have paired fins, only two dorsal fins and a tail fin. The head has one nostril on the top and seven pores on each side that allow water flowing over the gills to exit the body, similar to the gill slits of sharks. Adult lampreys have well-developed eyes while the larvae have weak eyes covered with skin. In addition, they have two simple parietal eyes, making lampreys the only four-eyes vertebrates. The mouth acts like a suction cup and is used to suction onto rocks or other animals. Inside the mouth is a rasping tongue that is used to scrape at food. You may think that all lampreys are parasites that feed on blood. This isn't the case, only 18 species are predatory and some of those are thought to be exclusively scavengers. The rest of the species either feed on algae by scraping it from rocks or never eat as adults, subsisting entirely on energy stores gained as a larva. The last common ancestor of all living lampreys (which is estimated to have either lived during the Jurassic or Cretaceous periods) is believed to have fed on blood as an adult. Lampreys are believed to be part of a sister group to all jawed vertebrates and are considered the most basal (closest to the ancestral form) of all vertebrates. They have cartilaginous skeletons and primitive, cartilaginous structures called arcualia instead of vertebrae. Lampreys are some of the most efficient swimmers and swim using a different method to other fish. Instead of using their fins to push themselves forward, lampreys use their fins to generate low-pressure zones in the water around their bodies to pull themselves forward. The pressure equalizing is what does most of the work of moving the lamprey, allowing them to move while expending little energy. In shallow water, the lampreys can use their suctioning abilities to crawl forward and are able to crawl over obstacles like rocks or ramps. Most lampreys are exclusively freshwater dwellers, but 9 species (all of which are carnivorous) live mostly in saltwater (though they can also live in large bodies of freshwater like lakes) and return to freshwater to breed. Of the 38 species of lamprey, only 5 species (in two families) live in the southern hemisphere. The remaining species are all members of the family Petromyzontidae and live in the northern hemisphere. No species lives in the tropics, seemingly because their larvae are not heat-tolerant.

(Image: a lamprey's mouth seen from below. It round and conical and ringed with multiple rows of sharp, yellow teeth. End ID)

The lamprey life cycle of lampreys starts in streams which adults will often migrate to reach. Adults will create nests called redds by using their suction to move rocks and expose the sediment below. Males use pheromones to attract females and the two intertwine with each other. The male presses a patch of heat-producing tissue to stimulate the female to release her eggs. The male fertilizes the eggs as they emerge. All lamprey species are semelparous, meaning they die after mating. In the case of lampreys that don't eat as adults, their adult forms exist only to mate and die, much like mayflies and some species of moth. Other species that can eat as adults spend up to 4 years feeding and growing before they mate. Larvae are called ammocoetes and once hatched, they are carried downstream to eventually settle on soft sediment. There, they burrow their rear halves into the sediment with their heads exposed. In this stage, they are filter feeders who need running water to bring plankton, algae, and bits of organic detritus to their mouths. Instead of the disc-like mouths of adult lampreys, ammocoete mouths are fleshy hood that enclose a sieve-like structures that filters particles out of the water. The lifestyle of ammocoetes is very similar to that of lancelets, which are extremely primitive chordates believed to represent some of the earliest stages of chordate evolution. Ammocoetes require water high in nutrients to survive as they capture only a small amount of water and therefore food. Ammocoetes are photosensitive, allowing them to change color in response to ambient light (becoming dark in the day and ale at night) and detect if they are properly buried. Depending on species, ammocoetes can grow between 10 and 20 cm (4-8 in) in length and they can spend between 1 and 10 years in this state. Metamorphosis to the adult form can last up to 4 months and lampreys do not feed during this process. Metamorphosis is synchronized between members of the same species.

(Image: three ammocoetes buried in sand with only their heads exposed. They are similar to the adults but pink, with small, barely-visible eyes, and their mouth are flexible and look like fleshy flaps. End ID)

(Image: two lampreys mating. they are coiled onto each other with one using its mouth to suction onto the midsection of the other. They are on a rocky stream bed. End ID)

Lampreys are used in science for several purposes. They are often used as a model organism when attempting to understand the biology of early vertebrates and extinct agnathans. They are also studied quite a bit for their nervous systems. Lamprey brains are very simple and likely represent very early stages of brain development in vertebrates. In addition, they are useful for studies of the transmission of electrical impulses between nerve cells due to their axons (the part of a nerve cell that conducts electricity away from the main body and to other nerve cells), which are large enough for microinjectors to inject test substances into them. Lampreys are capable of fully recovering from having their spinal cords severed, something that is of great interest to surgeons and neurologists. Lampreys have been used as a food source in many cultures around the world. Some species have toxic mucus and blood, requiring them to be cleaned before eating. Historically lampreys have been kept in captivity for use in food as well as other purposes. There are records of people being executed or tortured by being thrown into a pit of carnivorous lampreys. In the wld, carnivorous lampreys generally don't attack humans unless they are starving. In addition, there is a record of one Roman statesman named Lucius Licinius Crassus being scolded for being more upset over the death of his pet lamprey than over the deaths of any of his wives. Unfortunately, the thing a lot of people know lampreys for today is the sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) being an invasive species in the great lakes of North America. They have no natural predators in the lakes and feed on a lot of ecologically and commercially important species. Due to their lack of predators, multiple methods are used to try to reduce their numbers and keep them from harming the ecosystem. These include using barriers to keep the adults from migrating upstream to breed, release of targeted poisons called lampricides, and releasing sterilized males into the lakes to mate with the females.

(Image: two sea lampreys suctioned onto a fish. The fish is green and covered with black dots. The two lampreys are suctioned next to each other on the top of the fish's head. Their bodies are dangling off of the fish in different directions. End ID)

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this Conservation Works blog on Substack:

Michael Soulé, the founder of conservation biology, used to say that one of the most important pieces of advice he got as a young scientist was “when in doubt, count.” Monitoring — counting or otherwise measuring organisms in the same place over time — is the foundation of conservation biology, and in many ways it’s the foundation of conservation, too. Unless someone counts how many lizards, salmon, ferns, or species of butterflies live in a certain place, and repeats the count at regular intervals, that group of organisms can decline or even die out unnoticed. Before an organism can be conserved, it has to be counted.

But what’s the point of counting organisms that seem doomed to extinction? That’s the question tropical biologist Peter Edmunds addresses in a recent BioScience essay titled “Why keep monitoring coral reefs?”

For nearly four decades, Edmunds has been monitoring coral reefs at two locations in the U.S. Virgin Islands, using annual photographs to measure changes in the relative extent of coral and algae. He started the project in 1987, less than a year before the first known Caribbean-wide coral bleaching event; since then, coral extent at one of his sites has shrunk by 92 percent and at the other by 52 percent. Both reefs used to be dominated by boulder star coral, a large, stony species that provides structure to Caribbean reefs and protects the region’s coastlines from erosion. Now, they are dominated by fast-growing “weedy” corals and algae. Given that climate change continues to drive up water temperatures and increase the frequency and intensity of hurricanes, writes Edmunds, “the prospects for community recovery are bleak.”

Yet he argues that monitoring matters, and will continue to matter. The series of photographs Edmunds and his colleagues have accumulated, for instance, suggests that acute disturbances such as hurricanes and major bleaching events cause less damage over time than the everyday stress of rising water temperatures. Moreover, as he writes drily, “the past is an imperfect predictor of the future, ensuring that old data can never fully take the place of new information.” Even a grievously altered system such as the Virgin Islands reefs will continue to change in different ways for different reasons, and understanding those changes will be essential to protecting the life that persists — both at sea and on land.

I was reminded of Edmunds’ argument earlier this month, when I attended the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem Biennial Scientific Conference, held this year in Big Sky, Montana. One of the speakers was Tom Olliff, an ecologist who, like Edmunds, has dedicated himself to one ecosystem: he spent 32 years living and working in Yellowstone National Park, eventually directing its Science and Resource Management Division.

Olliff noted the remarkable changes in and around Yellowstone during the course of his career, including the reintroduction of wolves, the recovery of grizzly bears, the boom in visitor numbers, and the excruciating and still-growing development pressure on private lands. He called on his listeners, who included many colleagues and friends, to undertake “audacious acts of conservation,” projects that take a long time to realize and may face determined opposition.

Olliff named some headline-grabbing audacious acts, like wolf reintroduction and dam removal. But he ended his talk with a quieter example. In his current position as a regional research manager for the National Park Service, he has been working with wildlife biologist Don Swann on the long-term monitoring of saguaro cacti in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and Mexico. Though adult saguaros are still common, young saguaros are struggling to survive as temperatures rise. How long should scientists plan to monitor the population? Four decades from now, a report on the saguaro population might be as grim as Edmunds’ assessment of the Virgin Islands reefs.

[cypherdecypher]

Animal of the Day!

Pineapple Sea Cucumber (Thelenota ananas)

(Photo from Florent’s Guide to the Tropic Reefs)

Conservation Status- Endangered

Habitat- Indo-West Pacific Ocean

Size (Weight/Length)- 6 kg; 70 cm

Diet- Algae

Cool Facts- Pineapple sea cucumbers are the kings of the sandy bottom. Active mostly during the day, these sea cucumbers wiggle their way across the ocean floor using numerous tube-like feet. They sift through sand with their large mouth for algae, helping to recycle nutrients like a true bottom feeder. The pineapple sea star plays host to hundreds of parasites, up to 800 unique species at one time, some never known to science until the discovery of this cucumber. Despite their numerous parasites, the pineapple sea cucumber is a delicacy in China and has resulted in their sharp population decline.

Rating- 11/10 (Has ananas in its scientific name, I applaud scientists.)