critters

[hawkfish]

man its been a long time since i've been on. The beginners board actually did get accomplished. Good!
anyway, my tank is doing fine (29G), lots of copepods, a mandarin,cleanershrimp(bought to get rid of ick but royal gramma and jawfish still died), button polyps, greenstar polyps, toadstool leather, about 65 mushrooms on 3 big rocks, and tons of small feather dusters. recently some bigger looking copepods have shown up. they look like small crayfish. they can curl up really tight, and they like it in the hair algae and other dark spots in the tank. i was wondering if anyone knew what these things are(actually i know someone will know)?
more specs on tank: 40W lights, 600 lph powerhead, dlsb, 45lbs lr.
thanks a lot ,
Zach

 

[jonthefb]

It sounds like they are gammarus shrimp. do they roll up in a ball like a rolly-polly? god i hope im not the only one who knows what a rolly-polly is. thats what we used to call the little bugs when i was a kid. anyways, sorry about the rant. Gammarus shrimp are kind of oval shaped if you were to look at a cross section of them, and the crawl aroung with their rear end kinda curled up under their thorax, but if frightened can curl up into a fairly decent ball. good luck
jon

 

[ultrazilla2000]

LOL...I know what a Rolly Polly is! Here we call them potato bugs, not sure why other than the fact they roll up into small grey balls (round like some potatos???). I catch them and feed them to my Leopard Gecko all the time...I think she likes the icky crunchy sound they make.
I have seen some pics of some copepods looking similar to them, but haven't seen any in real up close life.

 

[jonthefb]

i am such a nerd that when a clarkii clownfish that i had died, i put his carcass in a small petri dish (i am a bio major so before laughing just know that i have tons of this crap laying around the house) and used a pipet to place small samples of the water he was in on a microscope slide, and checked it out through my 500 dollar friggin scope that i use for class. It was teh coolest thing to see these guys "up close and personal" They were so clear that you could see them digesting bits of the dead fish right trough their exoskeleton. But only a nerd like myself would ever do this. It is kinda cool having a scope around though and i would encourage anyone interested to get a good quality cheap one, just because you can get to know stuff soo much better. We all talk about copeopods, or ich, but not many of us have ever seen these little guys besides in books. Another fish that had ich in my tank we dipped in a black freshwater bucket and i then did the same with the ich and checked it out under the scope. What a cool (not really) litte parasite, looks like a white do t on your fish but onder a scope you really get to shake hands with the ugly! Even just checking out an algea patch on the back glass of the tank. You would be surprised about the amount of microscopic life that inhabits the jusk that we scrape off every day so we can se out little fishes. man i am such a nerd, but anyways good luck!
jon

 

[sylock]

jonthefb,
That is actually one of the pro's I am giving my wife for a reason to get a saltwater tank. I am a nerd too, but I prefer the be called "An intellectual trapped in an athelets body". I think that kids should have well rounded lives, ie sports and education that is fun. What would a decent 'cheap' microscope cost and if you have a brand/model number that would be great.

 

[jonthefb]

well anythign by leica is going to be top of the line. Mine was so expensive because it is a binocular model, and has a couple extra cool features like a graduated stage. I purchased mine from Capital Microscope Service at <a href="http://www.microscopesandmore.com" target="_blank">www.microscopesandmore.com</a> They have the best prices, and also price for students. Most places need a school id of some sort, but i called them up and talked to them about my situation and they gave me the discount without any problems. The brand of my scope is NAtional, but anything by National, Parco, or Swift would be a great monocular scope. I would get one that you plug in for the light source, because trying to mess with mirrors and light is just a pain in the butt. Your also going to pay more for scopes with wider fields of magnification. my scope does 4x, 10x 40x and 100x, and if you wanna check it out is the national 160 series model 162. Let me know if you have any other questions, but check out the site cause they have a very wide array of scopes, from elementary school, up tolab type like mine!
good luck!
jon