And while Jane and I have been too under the weather to go out and fuss with it, putting food in to bait it, the koi have gone over it. It moves, from hour to hour, mostly along the bridge, and at least once or twice a day one of the koi gets into it just for the heck of it, because they’re curious sorts. Ari is so large she sort of fills it. Banichi, who is actually one of our younger ones, gets in and I get a look at his sides, which of course one rarely sees on a koi—he’s black with a bit of silver, more silver, when you see him from the side. Maddy has tried it. But the ones who have tried it, keep trying it. Koi are a fish that is just nosy and into things, and they actually seem to have a sense of play—visiting various places of interest, getting pounded by the waterfall—going to the place they’re commonly fed, going to visit the various lilies. I’m sure possible edible things collect there, but it’s also just places to get into things. And I think the bubble amuses them. It moves. It’s not threatening. It’s a Thing. A Place. They don’t have to be bribed. It’s a curiosity to them, and they get into it and things are weird, I’m sure, so they come back, once they figure how to do it. I think they move it like a Ouija board—just everybody nosing it or being in it, or just creating currents around it. But it is a lot of fun. I like looking out and seeing where it’s gotten to now or who’s in it. We have yet to get a picture, but we will.
From my working chair, I can always see the pond bubble…
by CJ | Sep 6, 2015 | Journal | 25 comments
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I’m glad it gives you that enjoyment……I’m also glad Ready caught that you were wishing for one and that we were able to fulfill that wish.
Koi party bus!
The sun on the dome shape above the rest of the water may also make it slightly warmer, which might intrigue the residents. The fact that you haven’t been able to go out and fuss with it might also be part of its appeal; it doesn’t smell of people, its something entirely their own to mess with. But I’m glad we were able to find a gift that would entertain all of you.
I don’t know why people so underestimate the intelligence and social skills of fish. (The old goldfish “only have 2 second memories” nonsense) If fish were actually stupid, people wouldn’t have had to spend millions of dollars on methods to catch them.
p.s.I was saddened to learn of the passing of The Venerable Clam in the salt water tank. While I’m sure the nerites do their best as tank-cleaners, they don’t nearly have the stage presence of that clam.
Glad to hear the fish dome was successfully iinstalled and the fish are checking it out. I’d never seen a fish dome before and thought it looked like an interesting idea.
WHen installed, it sits way down so you can barely see the black part. All that’s really visible is bubble.
I’m so glad you and the fishes like it! I’d guess you’ll have to remove it once the temperatures dip below freezing, but I hope you have a long fall and can continue enjoying it.
For the winter it will be lovingly cleaned and stored in the temperature-controlled basement.
I picture them playing with those large pop bead that they give young children.
http://www.thisoldtoy.com/fisher-price/dept-5-nursery/b-beads-blocks-rings/1-pics/beads/667-1969-1972.jpg
Teasel posted on the demise of the venerable clam – we are sorry to hear of this. Much wisdom has been lost – may he find rest and repose in a better world.
Indeed. I fault myself, because I didn’t realize that the lights that used to serve the 50 gallon, which is 20″ deep, were not enough to reach the bottom of the 105 gallon, which is 30″ deep. It looks as if they do, but I don’t own a par meter—spendy things, and once you use them, your reason for owning one is done, because you have now measured what there is to measure. I should not have relied on appearances, however: the light looks the same, on top and bottom. But it isn’t. My final clue to what caused the demise was the appearance of small yellow and blue sponges growing on the bottom rocks of the tank. Sponge will not grow in the light necessary for clams of that species. So I started checking and finally found a reference that said that, no, 250 watts of metal halide will not penetrate beyond 20″. Looks the same, in terms of brightness, top to bottom, but the essential energy is not getting there. So the answer is better lights, which I am taking care of, but too late for the venerable clam. At least I know what happened. Makes me very unhappy, because I should never have relied on visual appearance, but everything I had found said it should be enough, until the sponges turned up and I kept digging until I found the answer…part of which lies in corporate wars of not very big corporations.
Tank lighting is undergoing a revolution, and companies a few years ago were being acquired and gutted. One victim was the manufacturer of my light kit, which was the company to beat back in 2004. Now defunct. The whole technology for marine lighting underwent a revolution from massive ballasts and energy-hungry metal halide lighting to LEDs, and right now Chinese companies of every grade of quality are hammering at the doors of the American hobbyists trying to sell lights, some of which are fine for marine, and some of which will not adequately grow plants in a freshwater tank below 10″. Companies were bought up in a speculative way, then just flat driven under, and some owners of mh kits are defiantly putting out ‘their’ results, the advertisers are putting out numbers that don’t make clear sense to someone who hasn’t gotten down and studied par ratings, because what par is actually needed is never stated in anything I could find. I think my next step in this hobby is going to be scraping together a par/depth/brand chart for various species, which does not seem to exist—all this in my non-existent spare time, but as I find it, I’m going to note it.
You never even heard the word ‘par’ in the days of metal halides. But the LED kits (which some are diy-ing) can be adjusted in very complex ways, to deliver reds, blues, whites, according to time of day, and depth of the tank. So they are potentially better, but ‘undocumented’ does not adequately describe the problem. Adding to it all—most companies producing LED lighting do not have paper manuals, do not have pdfs, and you cannot access their manuals, ergo their instructions, without being an owner of ‘their’ light kits.
If your eyes are not now glazed, say that when I bit the bullet to acquire this wonderful tank, which is deeper than most, I didn’t realize what was brewing in the light-kit-world, and that there was a strange kind of information war going on, in which the purveyors of the new tech were treating their par information as trade secrets from the very people they’re trying to sell to. Tank manufacturers were understanding they could build deeper—but cluelessly re what lights needed to do—and the somewhat clueless but profit-hungry manufacturers of the lights were busy keeping their secrets from rivals—but also, law of unintended results, from potential customers—in a market so pitifully small compared to others that it’s really been war in a teacup. Nobody outside the hobby would have a clue as to what’s gone on, but it’s been really frustrating for the hobbyists.
Re: measuring light levels in an aquarium.
Photographers have light meters. Should be easy enough to get one for a few minutes, maybe with photographer attached. Dunk a mirror in the tank at the depths of interest (propped against a rock?) laying back at a 45 degree angle, reflecting light from the top out through the side of the tank. Measure light level with a non-submersible photographer’s light meter on the outside. Should be close enough. 😉
Good idea in that, re just the light. But par is not just the light level, it’s the photosynthetically useful light… here’s an example of the kind of stuff you have to wade through for par meters re how accurately they measure the output of the LED lights, and it’s enough to make your head explode. http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2013/2/equipment
My experience with spectroscopy in college convinced me that Ma Nature’s Mark 1 eyeballs are superior in color judgements to any mechanical detector I ever used. We may not be able to draw a spectrum, but we’re Jim Dandy about distinguishing or matching colors! That is not to say, 1) LED manufacturers aren’t “playing fast and loose”, nor 2) physiological processes aren’t sensitive to additional IR/UV wavelengths.
Re 1 above: I was wondering how they get “white light” LEDs. Electronic emissions, photons emitted when electrons jump from a high energy “orbital” to a lower energy one (That’s how LEDs work to produce “cold” light.), are all frequency specific. E=h? (That’s a nu, not a v.) Turns out many of them are actually fluorescent lights! 😮 They have a blue LED, surrounded by a yellow phosphor. Close enough for our eye.
Nevertheless, I would trust my eye, being a non-colorblind male, over any instrument to judge color perception of something like a string of individual red and blue LEDs to reproduce the color of a GroLux bulb. And that’s relying on the efficacy of GroLux bulbs, which are similarly electronic and frequency specific.
How do they get white LEDs? Pretty much the same way as fluorescent daylight bulbs: a phosphor mixture is excited.
CJ, I understand, I think, about par. If you were using RGB LEDs and expecting to get something good for the tank, all three of those frequencies could miss.
Also, camera sensors are sensitive to some invisible frequencies. However, all that said, I think Paul’s idea is valid. What you’ve got is what you’ve got. If you put a digital camera on aperture priority at a fixed ISO and get 1 second at 20″ and 2 seconds at 30″, the extra 10″ is cutting the light approximately in half. If you add the same kind of lights, you should be in the ballpark.
But, I thought clams were filter feeders?
I don’t think she needs green, photosyntheis works best with red and blue. Leaves reflect green, after all. The spectrum of the phosphorescent white LEDs has a spike in blue, of course, and quite a broad hump in yellow from the phosphor, covering quite a bit of green and orange. I’d expect a combination of red, white, and blue LEDs in the righ proportion could give her just what she needs. Tunable spectrum LEDS have R, G, & B LEDs and fairly narrow spectral bands. Those probably wouldn’t be so great.
Too bad there isn’t a design that has an array of sockets she can plug LEDs into, mixing and matching until she get just the color she’s looking for.
The LED tank lights do have separate controls for each light, run from a master program that lets you set time/duration and percentage of power for each color, to create a day with a sunrise, noon, and sunset, plus moonlight. It can store a small computer instruction to do this, so it has a USB plug that lets you ‘talk’ to it with a program you download from the internet. And it takes less electricity and produces less heat. It’s just a different world.
Re: LED spectra.
I can see where that might be a problem then. I suspect what you have are RGB triple LEDs. As you can see in the spectrum there they have three narrow spectral bands. That’s good enough for the human eye, evidenced by the color monitor and TV screens you use, but I wouldn’t doubt physiological processes might want different wavelengths.
I wouldn’t be surprized if the phosphor-based white LEDs might not work better.
Of course, I’m not a specialist in this field, just an Aspie trained in Chemistry, a good general Sciences major, and an Aspie brain that soaks up facts and fits them together in its own associative system. 😉
And this is why I leave saltwater fishtanks for those who are sufficiently versed in and patient to maintain them nicely 😀 OTOH, I am in a position to simply go out to a convenient reef and look at the fishies in their native environment, which isn’t an option for many. Was this the motorized clam? RIP
If by motorized, you mean the tridacna that took a header off its appointed spot, yes. It was a respectable-sized crocea (crocus or boring clam) with a gorgeous blue mantle. (Think of a mini giant clam if that’s not too much of an oxymoron) They apparently exist symbiotically with photosynthetic bacteria so I can see where lack of the correct light could slowly do it in.
I hope you consider getting another CJ, now you know what the trouble was. That clam had such STYLE.
OH, but the ones his size are rare. I’m going to get the tank back into good shape with lights and all before I commit. And the lights will be my expense for a while.
The tuning of leds to make corals happy (remember it’s not just our home star’s spectrum, it’s our star’s spectrum after it’s passed through x feet of salt water…
There’s always somebody with really pretty corals being pursued by people who want his light formula. 😉
Is ths issue keeping the clam’s and corals’ symbiotic zooxanthellae happy, or having colors that reflect best from their pigments? If the former, they have chloroplasts that have to get light the right frequency for photosynthesis. Clearly blue penetrates farthest in seawater, but some coral reefs are in very shallow water. What’s the native habitat depth? In any event, I don’t think I’d be wanting some real narrow spectrum sources. I might add some color to highlight pigments, but on a broad spectrum “base” to cover what the chloroplasts of different species might want.
LEDs might have spectra too narrow.
If the zooxanthellae ain’t happy, the coral/clam ain’t happy. If they give off a sort of baby poo brown gunk from their throats, that’s the zooxanthellae, and it happens when light or water conditions (mostly light) that then deprives the corals of food — because these are photosynthetic symbionts jumping ship. Science believes that corals may trade these about, and one company is selling zooxanthellae that can ‘assist’ corals that have lost theirs, but it is still unproven in our tanks that a coral can recover from this situation if it goes too far.
Do you know what color the zooxanthellae are when they’re happy symbiotes? That suggests yellow.
As chlorophyll is green because it absorbs red and blue (the colors it uses), reflects green, they probably need blue, maybe lesser amounts of red (if they’re from quite shallow waters; ~36% of the very red light is filtered out by 1m of water, blue hardly at all) and maybe a bit green. So perhaps the fluorescent LEDs using yellow phosphor aren’t a good match after all.
But I still wonder about a spectrum match to the LEDs narrow emission, and what tolerances the zooxanthellae have.
Some old-style fluorescent bulbs have pretty flat spectra in the visual range, and those should cover whatever specific wavelengths your critters need.
I had no idea how delicate the feeding and care of the venerable was. I would question the keeping of fish and other creatures in such a delicate environment. While an aquarium can be quite enjoyable, is it ethical to have them.
I say this having killed a number of goldfish and innumerable plants. I know I have a black thumb so while I look, I do not grow.