and we keep rolling along!

Been a bit since I updated so I figured I'd take a few moments.  In week two of Shimeks class and I must say I am excited about the whole thing.  Despite being online with discussions and lectures typed (no face to face) it's proven not only to be extremely fun but informative and useful.  It's got my brain pan overflowing if you will.  This weeks lecture is on gametogenesis and a lot of the cellular tasks involved in creation of sperm and egg alike.  very fun stuff!!

I dropped off some Nassarius to Andy Berry over the weekend and he set me up with some RSF Columbellid snails for breeding.  Within the first hour of introduction to my system one of the snails left me a nice egg mass!  happy to see as this means my breeding of these species will be kickstarted and hopefully maintain the same accelleration.

Work continues on my flow through slide design however the going is slow due to normal time constraints and of course lack of ideas for sealing.  I cracked my first prototype which wasnt good as casting these units takes a few days for cure time.

The new pipefish are quite happy in their environment, and I changed up a little bit of my live food drip to push a stream of rotifers and live algaes into one of my displays powerheads.  it's a nice slow 150ml / hour drip so nothing super crazy but I will have to remind myself again to keep an eye on salinity as it will creep if I dont.

The baby clowns continue to fare well and are all on prepared foods (crushed flake and otohime) at this point.  And unfortunately with the first run of my snail study I still have yet to spot a juvinile snail.  This is not too suprising as there were only two veligers that made it within the egg capsule and I have no proof that predation of some kind did not occur.  It's also quite possible that both survived and are growing, but its tough to see something white the size of a grain of sand when it lives in a bed of white sand!!