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For the Love of Gobies
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| I apologize for the break in my article,
but time constraints have been a problem. Since last I left
you, I have added quite a bit to my tank, and my goby has
been home for about 2 weeks now, and is doing wonderfully. As
you'd expect, I've got a lot of pictures to post, but not much time to
do it. Unfortunately, I was unable to capture pictures the way I
had intended, as I added each addition, but I have a lot of pictures to
post, and every tank member is here somewhere. We'll get to each
of them one by one, and I'll share all of my observations with
you.
Let's start with the addition of a piece of "dead coral". Why do I term it as dead? The piece I speak of is no longer growing and colorful, as we would expect to find in a wild reef. Instead, it is the skeleton of what once grew like a colorful ocean flower, blooming from it's pores in a splendor of living brilliance. It is still beautiful, both in shape and the varieties of brightly shaded algae that grow on it in the tank. After putting it into my tank after work one evening, I watched it carefully for a couple of days to see if there were any changes. Sure enough, even something termed as "dead" had begun to grow something marvelous in my tank. I was happy and surprised, and very excited to find out what it was. It was bright yellow, and there was only a small spot of it on my coral skeleton. I emailed Rob with the pictures I took, right away. "What is it? How do I care for it?" These were my questions. "That be yellow sponge!" was his reply. Hmmmm, sponges weren't something I'd studied before. Now I was in a new territory, and full of so many more questions. |
I continued to watch my new yellow sponge, but in the past few weeks it hasn't seemed to spread at all. After adding the coral, I also added 2 new damsels to the tank. A domino damsel and a blue damsel. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get pictures of these, as they died the very next night. I don't know for sure if it was the slight spike in my nitrite levels (.2) or if it was the electric blue damsel that was responsible, but when looking into my tank in the morning, I found only one fish. I searched the entire tank, and after about 15 minutes found them actually buried in the sand. As I watched, the remaining damsel occasionally swam over and brushed the sand over the 2 fish lying in the corner, working to completely cover them. That night I did a 25% water change, and another water test in 3 days. My water levels were perfect once again, so I chose my next addition to the tank. I had decided that it was time to add something different, yet compatible with my goby. This was to prove a challenge, as not many things appeared to be a compatible mix. I went to work and searched our entire saltwater system. |
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