No - they use a lye mixture for that .Don't they use that to make lutefisk (it tastes that way..... well - at least they have no parasites!
. I would say they had a solid process because all of my non-immune clean box fish stayed parasite free with the addition. Do you notice any differences in fish care between the artificial reef inserts and the actual reef tanks (when you say reef is there any live rock from the ocean in the displays)?
Here’s a real world example! Checking my fish like I do about everyday my rabbitfish (I call him Peter) has this on his side just today, which given is a circle is almost certainly an injury (I have no idea what he got into).
My treatment is going to be to feed him more algae, and some selcon soaked food.
Sometimes I see stuff like this in other forum posts and people immediately move the fish or begin treating. I don’t think that’s a great idea.
I’ve had other fish develop problems, like my fairy wrasse developed pop eye. The blue chromis showed a few spots shortly after introduction that I couldn’t identify. Powdered blue tang had Ich. In all cases I simply made sure to keep the fish well fed, check them every day and make sure I minimized stress (like no intense tank cleaning etc).. and every one healed.
I think part of the issue is that sometimes we don’t talk about how hardy these fish can be. I know when I first started I was terrified thinking my fish would all be covered with spots and die because of reading so many disease threads.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I do believe a lot of it comes down to experience. Getting into the hobby is easy. Really knowing what it takes to make a thriving healthy tank can be a lot harder.
Yes, our reefs are made with cultured live rock from Florida that was kept submerged during transport (it even had a few fish hiding in it that made the trip).
It was simple but time-consuming. This rock was cultured in 60’ of water on stakes in the Atlantic. This avoids much of the fouling algae seen in inshore live rock. The rock was then transported by truck in tanks of water. The rock was then placed into to a 4000 gallon system. We then held it there for four months, while we removed fish and other hitchhikers. Then, we moved the rock to the two exhibits for another two months. We then began stocking corals, finally adding quarantined fish. The only unwanted critters that made it through were two mantis shrimp. No Aiptasia anemones at all. The only drawback was that the rock arrived with encrusting stony corals - the one legal way to get Atlantic corals. However, they of course didn’t survive the depuration process. I suppose we could have broke them off and moved them to a propagation tank, but we were pretty busy at the time.
Lasse,
Lasse, the rock maintained a great variety of life, just not photosynthetic organisms. Back the day, people would throw live rock damp in a box and ship it across the world, then soak it in a garbage can filled with seawater until it stopped smelling. This rock was never exposed to such extremes. Some soft corals did fine, as did all manner of forams, sponges and other life. It worked out really well compared to other options.
Lasse,
Nice tank. What are those vertical lines in the blue background?Lasse,
I found an old photo of one of our reefs with the cultured live rock in it. This is from 2016, so one year after opening and two years after adding the live rock. It has filled in a lot more in the past five years. The two large corals, center and right were grown in a different system and then moved into this exhibit.
Here is the company that supplied us with the rock Tim Birthisel is the son of one of our Zoo volunteers, he has worked with Bowling Green State University and us:
Home - terrasubaqua.com
www.terrasubaqua.com
Jay
Here is an even older photo, of our 1999 reef made with stacked dry rock. While it ended up looking nicer than this, you can see why I opted to go with cultured live rock this time around!
