Відео

I've only ever fed live, though I have heard that they can eat prepared foods later in development. The larvae seem to grab on and hold something and have the claws to sort of rip it apart, so I've seen them grab and hold on to adult brine shrimp and make each other lose limbs when underfed... I've been feeding a mix of copepods and artemia nauplii, with most of the total food offered being artemia (by volume)

A couple of inverts - peppermint shrimp and glass shrimp - and I managed to get two mandarin dragonets to settle (but fully colored juveniles from them), plus a whole bunch of banggai cardinals. Not many, and generally in small quantities, but not none.

@@mdbssn interesting choices. While I have raised thousands of clowns haven’t had much luck with other species besides a few banggai’s, but can’t produce them in large enough numbers to make it worthwhile. I have an interesting trio of splendid dottybacks that o hope will eventually spawn.

@@captivebredcanada The choices are basically what chooses to spawn in my tank and what I can collect larvae/eggs for, haha. There are more that have spawned with various attempts, but far more failed runs than successes.

@@mdbssn yeah I get that I can’t seem to get a pair of mandarins to spawn despite having no problem getting many to eat pellets. I’ve had males and females fight and also fall into roommate loveless marriages.

Well it's very likely you'll get a couple of batches of larva a month to try with in the future - two shrimps will each carry a brood of eggs that will be released when they molt (around 4 weeks.) My preferred method for collection is something with a dim light (and a dark room) and that has an air powered pump to pull water and larvae in and catch them in something. There's a larval trap from Vossen aquatics that works pretty well, and I've got my own design on thingiverse, but a light to attract them, a cup to scoop them up, and a cup or jug with a side cut out and replaced with aquarium mesh will probably do nicely.

@@mdbssn I just didn’t expect it and was totally unprepared because they aren’t full size yet but I guess nature finds it’s way. Funny you should say when they molt because it was right after I removed the shell that it happened. Ahh we learn as we go, I’ve been doing fish for 40 years and this one got me unexpectedly. I’ll search on thingyverse and print up your setup as I like how it looks and then get some 500 micron netting from eBay or Amazon. Thanks for the reply and the video.

No, I left them in a container for too long with minimal water exchange and lost them eventually. Strong suspicion based on the source, though, was that they were collonista snails.

Unfortunately I've lost one from both of my pairs over the last year, so I haven't been getting larvae for a bit - hope to rectify that soonish. I do have a relatively large spawn of peppermints from earlier this week in a bucket and seemingly doing well, though, so I'm working on getting some of those to settle (I think I've gotten within a week before). Those are in theory closer to the cleaners because they're in the same genus.

@@mdbssn sounds great! Would love any updates you care to share on that. Do you hang out on any forums like reef2reef? I'd just love to see more of your experiments recorded somewhere.

@@DJDDstrich I'm on Reef2Reef but most of my larva projects have been put on my club's forums (WAMAS). It's a bit of a mix as to where they end up and it always feels a little strange to just repost.

The smaller, darker blue wire is a 22 gauge solid core.

@@mdbssn thank you I’ve been looking online to buy wire for a minute, and it’s so hard to judge the proper size, by no means am I a pro, I barely scratch the hobbyist check mark. Is this a wire you recommend for micro soldering on pcbs or would there be a better wire you’d recommend.

It was a pretty basic setup - a 10 gallon brute trashcan with an airstone with a bubble or two a second, starting as fresh made saltwater. I had a cover over it to reduce evaporation, a seedling grow mat on the outside for heat, and a dim light overhead (I think on 24 hours in this case.) I've moved to smaller containers with 3d printed things to round the corners more recently to make maintenance and spotting larvae easier, but I also haven't had a successful mandarin run since.

At least for these guys, I don't think it's necessary. I haven't had a lot of success culturing parvocalanus in the long term, but it seems like most larvae don't need food as small as they can offer (the nauplii are smaller than most readily culturable copepods). I've heard mandarins have been raised off of artemia nauplii, which are much, much larger, and I had my little bit of success with a mix of tisbe, tigriopus, and apocyclops (cultured separately, but all offered.)

That's a Vossen Aquatics larval trap, I no longer use it to collect eggs and larvae (I've designed my own 3d printed one), but it works pretty well and isn't too expensive.

I don't think I've got that many from a spawn in my tank, maybe 500-600 tops, but the average is lower (maybe correlates with the age of the animal, too). As for how many, it's hard to say. I have two cardinals that are ravenous around this time and are often the ones that tell me there are larvae around (by eating them), and even within a group of strongly phototactic larvae, not every one will go towards the light and there is a bit of stray light around that can confuse them. There are also larvae that just don't pay as much attention to the light and larvae that really prefer it dim - they'll stay several inches underwater if the light is too bright. That all and that when there are larvae around, I'll try to collect them with a cup or a turkey baster and put them in to speed the process and keep the cardinals from eating them all. Alone and without the predation, I wouldn't be surprised if it could get better than 80% catch rate for buoyant eggs or phototactic larvae - with all the pumps off, of course - but in reality I probably do closer to 50% most of the time unless I catch the spawn very soon after it happens.

@@mdbssn gotcha. That's pretty good either way I think. I do wonder why you don't just put the parent in the tub over night though?

Most eggs from pelagic spawners float, so it can collect the majority of them by being a surface skimmer, you just have to make sure other overflows are off since they will do the same. It should collect any floating egg small enough to fit over the overflow and big enough to be kept in by the mesh (and there's some flexibility as to what size that can be used.) I think they've evolved to float is that they get spawned mid water and if they sunk, would fall into coral, anemone, and other creature mouths, whereas if they are clear and float, they will be harder to spot and eat (and fewer organisms are out at night, so fewer immediate predators.)

@@mdbssn thanks for the response

What do you do with the eggs collected? How do you hatch them?

Haha, well in transparency, I did actually pull it off before the video to take a look for myself, but it did release very cleanly (when the heated bed cools down you can hear some crackling as it releases) and spun immediately after picking it up!

Once they've settled, I think they just eat as an adult would - small pieces of meaty stuff. I was giving these guys a couple drops from the same mix I fed the display (frozen, a few pellets, some powdered food.) As larvae, they needed live planktonic food, and it was a blend of copepods and newly hatched artemia. I did feed a small amount of phyto to the vessel, but it was more to keep the other organisms nutritious - I don't think the larvae eat it directly.

Mine seems to be pretty happy, but they can get bigger than this and that size wouldn't do well. I actually ordered one online and it arrived at the top end of the size estimate and it was too big for the tank, so I ended up getting it eating, selling it, and getting this smaller one. They are active swimmers, but also need space to turn around, so especially in a tank this small, you need margins between the rocks and the glass, especially at the corners. Otherwise, if you can get a smaller one and get it onto prepared foods, I think it will do well (I've had mine for more than a year and it seems happy), but a larger space would mean both more space to hide (and with more aggressive fish or more of them, it may be needed), and more space to forage off the rocks while getting used to prepared foods.

Sharing this to Facebook

They do, I trained them (and the ruby red dragonet) onto frozen as soon as I got them as there's basically no way to meet their nutritional needs on copepods alone in this size of tank. Took about 2 weeks a fish (3 for the ruby red), and I figure you have to feed frozen and have to feed with the pumps off after that, but I've had no issues keeping them long term and am still getting regular spawns out of the pair.

@@mdbssn How did you go about getting them to eat frozen? Also for the copperband, is it stressed at all? Do you have a larger tank in mind in the future for it?

They will bicker, and for a while the fire shrimp lived in the back cave and the skunks were out, but the fire shrimp have been much more outgoing in the last year or so. They used to sort of evict the skunks when they came out, but they seem to not chase each other off very much.

They are some of the most skittish fish I've kept, even though I've had these two for close to three years now, so maybe they know better and are still putting on a show...

A lot of it is just that I tend to run the tank on the whiter side than the blue, I didn't do any adjustments for the short (maybe the ambient light helps reset the color balance too?)

Watch the meter

It's more apparent on some speakers with bass - was hard to notice on my phone, but clear on the desktop. Mostly low frequency noise (60, 120, 180 Hz)

are you deaf

It's a Red Sea E170, so about 45 gallons including the rear chamber. The top is a little cut off in the frame.

Light mineral oil - difficult to find, but recommended in some repair documentation I've found and won't go rancid. Been using it for 10 years and had good results so far. The one I found is actually sold as a livestock laxative, of all things, as it seems that most of the mineral oil available in drugstores was heavier.

@@mdbssn I only found some specific bore oil from Yamaha (I think I'll try this) and some food safe mineral oil (for wooden cutting boards and so), that I suppose is in some way, lighter... But I'm a bit scared hahaha

For most shrimp there are a dozen or more distinct zoea stages, most of the time it's just a molt and some new features, but there tend to be some significant changes where dieoffs are more common (this happens with fish larvae too), and I'm not sure it's that well understood as to what you can do to overcome that. My methodology has changed a fair bit since this video, and I've gotten them to about 3-4 weeks post hatch. I've been feeding live foods exclusively (currently a blend of size sorted copepods and newly hatched artemia), keeping them in a bucket, running an airline with low (a bubble or two per second) flow for circulation, and a seedling warming mat as an external heater. With about weekly full water changes, it feels like at least some of the shorter settling time larvae may make it, but with little glitches in the process and inconsistent spawn collection, I haven't done it yet.

Very Nice Website by the way!

Haven't looked at the page in nearly 20 years, but I've fixed the problem. In migrating hosts/server types years ago I had a bunch of links die because of inconsistencies in capitalization (the previous host didn't care about it), and this zip was one of them. It's been corrected on the page and should be downloadable again.

Thank you so much@@mdbssn

So long as you have the spawning pair, the barrier to entry is pretty low! That said, it's taken quite a few attempts to get to this point, and they've got a ways yet to go before they're juveniles. There's some good information out there, though, and a few people actively trying to do it or who can talk about their experiences doing it.

I think I've gotten to ~20 days but not longer, I've had a little better luck with peppermints, but not quite to settlement. That wasn't in this vessel, these I think are too small for it, and I think my losses were either due to evaporation (increased salinity) or water quality (larvae are less tolerant of nitrate buildups than adults), but I can't say I have it nailed down nor am anywhere near the ~5 month settling time.

I'll try basically whatever spawns, but in its current location, I don't think the tank gets dark enough for coral to synchronize their spawns. I have it in my main room and am a bit of a night owl, so there is some unpredictable light pollution that is probably messing up their internal clocks. Still, if I spot it, I'll try to catch it and try to figure out what it is.

I wanted to try and have to firefish, but they are the same sex and fought enough that I am sure of it (though they do currently coexist). I've heard they're particularly difficult in captivity because the larvae are very small, but they also lay eggs in their tunnel (like many gobies), so it's difficult to collect them in a display tank setting too.

@@mdbssn i won’t be trying anything soon (moving in a couple months) but once i’m settled in i wanna give it a try (if i can find a mated pair) or maybe sexy shrimps & use some of your methods do you have the file for 3D print kreisel you use?

I remember thinking that sort of floating catcher design was great, but without quite a bit of suction or some wave action or something, I don't know how they reliably work at smaller scales. Maybe it's just very dependent on water line placement - even this design tends to need a little positional tuning to make sure the skimmer is under the surface but still reliably pulls things in. I think going with that smaller inlet aperture helps a lot with maintaining enough suction to draw things in.

You have to pay a pretty hefty premium for the digital output, I think it's only the CameraLink VPC from FLIR, but there are USB ones from third parties. That said, I used a cheap USB analog video capture dongle to capture this. Most options should work, but my preference is one that uses the UVC standard because it integrates well with everything without drivers most of the time.

Unfortunately not, I lost her around day 125. I switched holding vessels to a larger one, which I think importantly (for bad reasons) had a coarser mesh to interface with the outside world. One of the copepod cultures I was feeding also crashed, and apparently the move to the larger vessel, resetting the copepod population and letting more of the smaller ones out, coupled with that culture probably being the one she was eating, meant she stopped growing (late to show coloration), slowed down, and passed away. The attempts aren't over, and after several months of iterating I've restarted some of those copepod cultures again to see if I can find some more success.

@mdbssn Well, each iteration will be a learning experience to hopefully bring you to success in the future. I had a reef tank and my cleaners would reproduce every 10 days. It ended up being a terrific source of live food for my reef critters. I always wanted to raise them to maturity but didn't have the necessary nutrition for them. I only had phytoplankton. (Early 2000s) I hope you keep posting... I'll be tuning in.

I think I've had tubastrea spawn in my system, but they're known to be able to and it was small/I haven't seen any settled ones. I've been making attempts with several shrimp, but they're tough. I think I've gotten peppermints close to settlement (high 30s days post hatch), and gotten skunk/fire cleaners a little farther (close to 50 days, but that's only a third of their settlement time), and have been able to try pederson cleaner shrimp a couple of times (10-11 days), but nothing settled as a juvenile yet.

Definitely, and I know a few FLIR and Keysight/NEC Avio cameras that include a mode for this, even using a single camera sensor. The disadvantage is that it both takes multiple exposures and some amount of post processing - so unless you have a very fast readout sensor, you're not going to get realtime video out of it. There could even be something similar to this happening in the Boson already - it uses a good bit of image processing hardware onboard the camera, and I think this is why the sharpness adjustment in particular can achieve some very high resolution appearing images.

You can stitch images together to create a functionally higher resolution image but what they do in astronomy is some science magic involving interferometry that makes it so their image quality is effectively what it would be if they had a lens the size of the area between them, not just the sum (at best() of the composite image. We're only now doing this with visible light in astronomy because their wavelengths are in the hundreds of nanometers, which is the precision you need in placing your receiver/mirrors from two telescopes to get that benefit. We've been doing it with radiowaves for a long time though since their wavelengths are huge. That black hole image was taken using digital images timestamped by atomic clocks at radio telescopes around the earth, which allowed us to create what was effective an earth sized receiving dish. Though, to clarify, this only increases image quality, not brightness.

At its core, it's a microscope - it inspects the very small. While this unit isn't as fine resolution as more modern ones, it can resolve nearly atom-sized differences in what it's measuring, so it's often used for process calibration an inspection - making sure the thin film you've deposited or the crystal matrix you're using in your application is free from cracks, impurities, or inconsistencies on the atomic scale. Beyond that, there are quite a few applications for those with relatively flat samples, since it is limited in how rough the surface can be to get the probe close enough, but different modes of operation extend the options considerably. You can vibrate the probe tip over a sample to measure its height without touching it, but you can directly poke it with the probe to measure adhesion and other properties, and more advanced microscopes allow you to use the probe to measure magnetic or electric fields. Since the probe tip can directly interact with the surface of the sample, you can also use it as an atomic scale manipulation tool in certain applications.