New location!

So! I have officially completed my time on Grand Cayman back in January. I will be calling North Carolina home for the next year as I finish up school at NCSU Vet School. I will be missing the ocean and diving/snorkeling whenever I wanted. But I think this will be a great opportunity for me to learn more about aquaculture/fish medicine. I have some more pictures from Cayman and a few interesting videos so I will be posting them once I get a chance this next week. I hope to be able to post more things as I go. Keep posted!

Ok...long time without a post, besides the TED talk. I have been pretty busy with Vet school but I had some fun this past week. We went out on a boat to do some dives in order to fish for lion fish! Now, in the Cayman Islands you have to have a specific license from the Dept. of Environment in order to touch any lion fish in the ocean. Anyways, we ended up getting 49 lbs of lion fish!!!! I think they are absolutely beautiful fish but wow...49lbs!! The whole lot filled two five gallon buckets to the brim. I have taken a pretty good interest in the lion fish problem in the Caribbean since I have moved here in August 2011. I have been thrilled to be able to participate in the efforts to eliminate the lion fish from Cayman. I know I will never succeed since they are breeding and eating machines. I have recently helped out a friend doing his Masters on lion fish diet surveys, and let me tell you, they are out of control. The amount of food these fish can process is absolutely amazing. These things don't care what they eat, as long as they can swallow it. Gobies, shrimps, damsels, chromis, trumpetfish, crabs, octopus, mysids, squirrelfish and more are all being targeted by this glutton fish. The very first day helping in the lab just was scary to me. To think that this is only one or two fish in front of me but there are thousands out there still eating the same amount of prey items, just astonishing. I plan on doing some of my own research involving lion fish while I am down here and hope to update you all on my results.

Here is a motivational message for the day! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Here are some new pictures!

Good Snorkel Pics, a set on Flickr.

So, I have been a bit busy with school the past semester. I apologize for the lack of pictures but here are some that I have set aside as some of the best I have taken.

Thanks!

Updates!!

Christmas 2011 Snorkeling, a set on Flickr.

So, I just got an underwater camera and so I decided to put some photos up of what I saw! I am new to flikr so I am unsure of how to exactly post photos so I hope you enjoy!

New chapter!

So, I am sorry for no updates for such a long period of time. I have been quite busy with some new events that have come up. I got accepted to Vet school down in the Cayman Islands. I will not be able to continue posting any more aquaculture information, but I will try and update the blog with some pictures of some awesome snorkeling and diving pictures! I am hoping to get an underwater camera in the near future. I will try to get some pictures of the amazing Grand Cayman so you can come out and witness it for yourself. The reefs here are amazing! Vet school is keeping me a bit busy but keep posted for some pictures.

A cool video of my Stichodactyla gigantea feeding!

So, I bought this guy when it was bleached almost totally white except for the purple/blue tentacle tips, it was also very very small. So small that I think it is the smallest S. gigantea I have ever seen in pictures or in real life. But I bought it for a cheap price and fed it almost every other day. This video was taken months ago and I finally uploaded it. You can see in some of the tentacles that the zooxanthellae is coming back due to the brownish hue. The anemone today is mostly brown with blue/purple tentacles. It has also at least doubled in size since I purchased it. The color of the column has also turned a nice green color. I am very proud of this success!! This anemone eats the most out of all the anemones that I have. It eats 3-4 pieces of silverside or shrimp every other day or so while the RBTA's I have only will eat 1, maybe 2 pieces.

I had to speed up the video so you could see what happens. It is interesting to see and I hope you all enjoy it! Also, turn off the audio on this video, I forgot to edit that out and it is annoying.



Thanks,
Ian

Videos Yey!!

Thanks to Santa Claus I finally have a video camera!! So, I thought that I would post some videos of me glueing some ricordea mushrooms from my main tank. I hope everyone enjoys these following videos! More videos are coming so stay tuned!

Some Updates!

Finally, after finals and holidays the dust has settled and I can update my blog! So a few things have changed over the past weeks.

I decided to try feeding chopped up silversides to my anemones and they seem to be liking it a lot better than the mysis. I try and keep the anemones on the same feeding schedule as before, every other day (Monday, Wednesday and Friday). I also have seemed to have found the eating capacity of each anemone according to the size of the animal and the size of the silverside piece. If you give too many pieces the anemone will spit everything out and then you wasted food and energy on the anemone side of things.

I also have done some fragging of my toadstool leather that I bought just for fragging. It has been some months now and so the mother colony is doing great and already grown back to precutting size, if not larger. I lost 1 frag but was able to keep 3 frags which I glued to some rubble rock and they are growing nicely, ready for sale.







I just used some toothpicks and stabbed the little pieces into some sand/rubble rock so they would attach. I do this with xenia aswell so I can glue the rock and not the flesh of the animal, this seems to reduce lost frags.

I also lost one of the anemones in the garage tank for no apparent reason, it was one of the smaller of the RBTA's. I am down to four now. I have no idea what happened to this anemone since the others are doing just fine. It is frustrating when something like this happens.

I happened upon a "blue" carpet anemone at a LFS and bought it. It was extremely bleached out with barely any coloration. I would not recommend buying bleached anemones unless you know you can take care of it. I believe it is a Haddons carpet but I am still unsure of what species it is. It has no verrucae as far as I can tell except for a few very randomly placed and quite small verrucae along the upper region of the column. Also the tentacles do not vibrate like the Gigantea carpets. If anyone knows the species for this anemone please let me know by posting a comment.
The carpet eats like a hog and by far has the healthiest appetite of all the anemones I have, which it should due to the lack of zooxanthellae in its tissues. It will eat 3-4 chunks of silversides in one sitting and will not reject the food. It has grown in size and is really starting to color up since the purchase. I am unsure of the color of the anemone since it looks purple sometimes and then looks blue other times, we will have to see. Another interesting observation is that when I purchased the anemone the column was white but now the column has taken on a green tint and I am not sure what that means but I assume it is a good sign.








I will not be aquaculturing this anemone, I just wanted to show it off. :)

Stay tuned for some more updates!

Ian