Have you seen
Phishy Business jaw dropping Seahorse Tank? Simply beautiful. Hopefully it inspires someone here to start a seahorse tank.
Photos and information by Phishy StaffAlright all, here's the tease revealed for you. We have a new display tank here at Phishy Business! It is a 110 gallons, right when you walk in the front door. It houses Caribbean sponges, Gorgonians, and 5 pairs of Brazilian Seahorses!
Just a few new horse pics. In case you're wondering about those white ones, no, we didn't add any new seahorses to the display. They can change their color pattern to reflect their surroundings, and the ones that were originally bright red have changed to match the color of the gorgonian polyps in their display. Still, very cool critters! The very good news is that all are aggressively eating frozen foods, and we believe at least one, possibly two, are carrying fry. Woohoo!
The aquarium is a 110g, with a 1.5" drain in each of the top corners, as well as a 3/4" return drilled through each corner. The returns are each split into two 3/4" lengths of locline. I have a Sedra 9000 running as a return pump; it provides gentle flow, but enough to keep the gorgonians and sponges clean.
The sump is a custom acrylic build. Both of the drains empty into a tray with filter floss, which we change weekly. In the main part of the sump is an Elos skimmer run by two Sedra 5000 NW pumps. There is another pump feeding a GEO gfo reactor, stocked with about 500mL of ROWAphos, a chiller and a GEO 618 calcium reactor (a 200g frag tank is tied in to this system). All of those flow into a 50g refugium loaded with Chaetomorpha and Ulva, before draining back down to the sump and returning to the horse display. In addition to the equipment, we change approx 75 gallons a week out of this roughly 380 gallon system. All of this together keeps water parameters pretty close to: 74 degrees, 0-5ppm nitrate, 0 phosphate, 9-10 dKH, 1.025 SG.
For feeding, we occasionally offer enriched live brine, but for the most part give them mysis shrimp that has been soaked in astaxanthan powder. We feed the horses 4-5 times daily. It took about 5 days for the first horses to start eating frozen; the rest followed suit within another week. For the sponges and gorgonians, we feed oyster eggs and/or phytoplankton twice a day.
We are hoping to ultimately breed the horses (in fact, a male dropped just this morning; the 4th to do so in the last month). We plan to culture several types of food on which to raise the fry- brine nauplii, copepods, rotifers, and phytoplankton (to feed to pods and rotis).