Not personally, I did help a friend design a seahorse build. They have pretty specific needs. I am thinking about building a dedicated seahorse/pipefish tank in the kids play room but, like the mandarins, they need tons copepods and amphipods to eat. Unlike mandarins, they can be trained for frozen more easily.

I've heard/read, too, that you really need to have someone available that knows something about saltwater aquarium/seahorse care if you ever want to leave for vacation since they have to eat daily. Since it was on the internet, it's gotta be true, right??

We did, for almost a year. They are EXPENSIVE little buggers, and tough to keep going. They really only do well on live food (we never had much success with the frozen food) and they are terribly nearsighted and eat slowly, so feeding them is a pain. They are darling, but it just got too expensive - a decent sized one was almost $100 from our fish place, and that was 15 years ago, I can't imagine they've gone down in price. Add in replacing them when they inevitably died, and we threw in the towel.

We kept a seahorse/pipefish display tank at the pet store I worked for in college. They need low water circulation rates, very, very clean water (even a little bit of ammonia or nitrite buildup will cook them), and they eat a LOT. We managed to get ours to eat frozen brine shrimp, and we fed them individually (using a turkey baster) 3 times a day.

The BioCube is up and running as of the day after Christmas (pump died on the big tank Christmas Eve). I cheated the cycle by moving some substrate, filter media, and a big percentage of water from the old tank to the new, and it was reading all 0s by Friday. Moved my old maroon clown and added a watchman goby and about a dozen tiny hermit crabs over the weekend - so far, so good. Minor green algae bloom in progress as of yesterday, but I've been running the lights too much trying to get the timer cycles figured out.

Nice! My Christmas gift from the wife was a pink birds nest, purple candelabra gorgonian, nuclear green toadstool leather, reverse war coral favites, Hollywood stunner chalice, eagle eye zoa, orange monti cap and green monti cap frags.

Turns out my very, very large longspine urchin has a taste for green monticaps and gorgonia. He is now in the sump. The green monti is now the size of a pencil eraser, it was the size of a half-folded dollar, and the gorgonian has a stripe cleared up one side.

A mule is 1/2 horse and 1/2 donkey. Donkey's have a very elevated sense of self preservation that horses just don't have. Horses have more of a flight instinct. Being in the middle of the two species mules will generally stop and assess a situation to judge the risk to one's self before freaking out and usually it's nothing. In the self-preservation idea again, they are mostly very sure footed because they don't want to trip and hurt themselves.. I ride a mule because if they are going to keep themselves safe I will be safe too. Oh and they have a sense of humor..........so funny. I can't explain that one.

I read the first paragraph assuming it was a joke. I'm rethinking that after reading paragraph #2

Joke? I wasn't even assuming it's in English!

Becca knows what I am talking about.

Sorry, I was on vacation and then really sick so I missed adding into this thread. I've had a biocube for years now, first the 14 gal and now a 29 my hubs gave me last Christmas. It has five fish, including an attacking clown that's about to go back to my LFS in exchange for a smaller one. The grans and my mom like me having a Nemo in there. I also have various corals and a rose anemone. The anemone is the hardest to keep happy but it hangs on. There's also a horseshoe crab, a peppermint shrimp and a sea urchin and a Feather Duster.

I'm probably the worst person to talk to about supposed care of a nano saltwater tank because I don't check the water at all except to make sure the salinity is right when I do the monthly water change of 25% of the water. I alternate between dry and frozen food with a splash of liquid for the Feather Duster.

I recently had an outbreak of that yucky red algae so I switched out some rock and replaced the sand. Other than that, I really don't have any problems with the tank or the longevity of the fish. It's almost time for the local saltwater enthusiasts annual swap so I'm looking forward to getting some new frags and maybe another creature like the horseshoe that I got there last year.

I do, and it sounds like an excellent Christmas haul!

<<< yells so these fish people will understand her: "Do you speak English?"

Nitrate levels, ammonia cycle, bio-media. Refugium. Diatom bloom and cultivated aggregate substrate.



^^^All of that is English. What's the problem?

those sound like the ingredients in Slim Jims

I went with 'yucky red algae' instead of cyanobacteria, Okie. I have a saltwater tank and don't understand half of the gibberish Becca and Coffee are talking about. I'm purely a hobbiest and not a true reefer.

I've downgraded myself from reefer to casual hobbyist (no time or disposable funds for the serious stuff anymore), but I still remember most of the lingo. I will admit, though, that a couple of those names Coffee rattled off took me a moment to recall.

I kind of remember seen the movie "Reefer Madness" is that the same? The lingo seems the same.

Okie, if you copy and paste the items that Coffee's wife gave him, you'll see that they are a variety of corals.
The only English translation would be 'that purple stick thing', etc.
I would love to see a picture of his tank. It must be impressive.