A seahorse diary

Trigger gave birth again 2 days ago to a brood of about 8.  I never could figure out exactly how many, but it was far short of his mega-brood of 16 in June (there were/are about 4 to 5 survivors of that brood).

I did see all four adults/near adults (Trigger, Nellie, Pluckie and 2-month-old Moxie, who now appears to be a male) together on a piece of fake hairgrass last night.  There are about 7 new fry as of today.  All I can do is keep them well-fed and hope for the best.

I think the time of naming the ponies has passed; can't even tell the fry from the latest broods apart, let alone name them.

I really do need to inject some fresh blood into the tank before the herd gets too inbred.  I'm trying to decide on just one male, or another pair.  It needs to be done soon.

Only one of the 4 babies born two weeks ago is still with us, but this morning s/he was joined by 8 new fry!  I'm hoping to keep at least 4 of them alive.

I tried to add this photo to the photo album just now but it disappeared.  Here's a photo of about 5 of the new babies with their daddy:

When the light went on in the biOrb this morning I was greeted by a sight I had never hoped to see again: 4 or 5 new seahorse babies.  And there was Trigger, still apparently undergoing contractions and attempting to court both the original female Nellie and his now-grown daughter Pluckie as well. 

I had forgotten that seahorse reproduction can be seasonal.  It could be that I'm in for a long, hot summer of baby seahorses.

Of course, with seahorses the birth is just the start.  Now they have to actually live to grow up.

Here's a picture of one of them:

The baby seahorse who is the lone survivor of Trigger's first brood is now over a month old and over half grown.  She's apparently inherited her father's somewhat shy, morose disposition.  Her coloring has varied from green to grey and continues to change.

Trigger is so hugely pregnant at the moment that I keep expecting to look into the tank and see baby seahorses all over the place.  But so far, nothing. 

I'm hoping there will be more than four babies this time, and that more than one survives.

As I had guessed, only one baby seahorse survived longer than a few days.  As of last week, on her two-week birthday, she was still going strong.  She sometimes disappears for a day or two, and I've not had the leisure time to search for her recently, but I will tomorrow. I hope she's still there. She was growing fast and taking on a greenish cast (with a pretty dark-gray "mane" like her daddy's) the last time I saw her. (BTW, I believe this is a female.) Trigger recovered from giving birth and now may be pregnant again.  It's hard to tell with that little guy because he seems to extend his pouch for no reason now and then, only to have it return to its flattened state a few minutes later.  I'll keep watching him.

It's just past the end of my seahorses' first month in my home and within the last 48 hours, 4 babies have been born. 

Having had experience with seahorse fry in the past, I'm not too hopeful that more than 1 will make it to maturity.  But I'm doing my best.  I think later today I may go purchase a larger brine-shrimp hatchery (or maybe make one of those ugly home-made ones -- funny what having more hungry mouths to feed will do to your sense of esthetics).

I'm worried about Trigger, my male.  He still appears to be in labor now and then, and his pouch is still extended.  I've not heard of a dwarf seahorse birth extending quite this long, so I'll be watching him closely for a few more days. 

So far the babies seem well.  They are exploring the tank and eating like mad.

So far, so good.

Both ponies have settled in and are eating like mad.  My big priority now is to get a steady supply of brine shrimp going.  I have one hatchery -- a 30 year old disk-shaped thing that I bought on Ebay -- that is working like a charm, and another -- a Brine Shrimp Hatchery -- that is barely working.  I bought another of the vintage disk hatcheries on Ebay yesterday and am going to get some chlorine bleach and start decapsulating cysts and sprinkling them into the biOrb.  I'm sure it will work; it did the one time I tried it previously.  Maybe I can get to the point where I can hatch most or all of the shrimp in the tank.  That would be the path of least hassle. 

I got this idea from a very old booklet that I have from childhood: Keeping Sea Horses by Robert P.L. Straughan.  It was written in 1961, which was the heyday of mail-order dwarf seahorses.  This author kept them in aerated glass fishbowls and sprinkled brine shrimp cysts on the surface to hatch in the tank!  Clearly the hobby was in its infancy at the time; these days with all our fear of hydroids, no one would dare do such a thing.  But I don't see a problem in trying it with decapsulated cysts in a biOrb, where the surface is constantly bubbling and churning.  And as I said, I've already tried it, and it does work.

Since I have two live-food-only eaters, I wonder at this point if it's worth trying to get some frozen-food trained ponies as their companions.  Supposedly dwarf seahorses can become trained to eat frozen food if they see their tankmates doing so, but I'm also afraid of the opposite happening.  However, if I could get them to eat frozen bbs, a lot of this worry would go away instantly.

I'm still looking for a good price on Instant Baby Brine Shrimp.  That could be another good option.  Let's see if I can get this pair to eat the stuff.  My other seahorses would eat it, so maybe there won't be a problem.  This would be another thing that would ease my mind a bit.

Not that hatching brine shrimp every day is so bad.  Particularly because this aquarium already has a sizeable population of pods, I don't have the worry about hatch failures that I had with the previous group of ponies when they were between bottles of Instant Baby Brine Shrimp.  But it would be so much more convenient just to sprinkle food in the tank every day and then just forget about it, like I do with my freshwater tank.  It's not a big worry right now because it's winter and I'm home anyway, but in the summer, it can really take a bite out of your day.

I hope I can arrive at some grand new care protocol that will make things much easier for dwarf seahorse keepers.  That's kind of a grandiose idea, but think of the possibilities if someone can do that!

I got my dwarf ponies yesterday -- a male and a female.  I was alarmed because the weather was so cold when they arrived, but actually it was in the 30's F, so I guess I shouldn't have worried so much.  They were warm enough, anyway -- there were two heat packs in the package, and they were packed within several plastic bags, some of them air-bubble bags.  All of that was in a very well-sealed little box.  So these ponies had barely felt the cold.

I acclimated them and put them in my tank; then rushed to put in whatever meager hatching of brine shrimp I had managed in the previous 20 hours, only to find that they were eating the tiny white jumping creatures that already reside in the tank!  I posted on Ultimate Seahorse about this and found out that these things are either amphipods or copepods; whatever they are, they are this seahorse's main source of food in the wild.  I hope with only a few ponies in an 8 gallon tank, these little creatures will serve as an extra food source for my ponies for a long time.  I feel relieved knowing they're there.  The only problem I note so far is that my female seahorse shows absolutely no interest in brine shrimp at all; she only seems to want the copepods (or amphipods; guess I'll just call them pods).

These two ponies do not interact very much, but maybe that will change.  The female has been a lot spookier than the male thus far.  He's a little more relaxed and adventurous and he hitched right away upon entering the tank; she had a hard time finding a hitching post (even though there are many in the tank), at first and seemed panicked for a while.  Now she is hitched but seems secretive.  I'll be watching her closely until I'm sure she has settled down.  As I said, she is eating, which is a good thing.

When spring comes I'll order some more ponies; I'm thinking about 4 more.  These first two are living my BiOrb experiment.  The first 24 hours have gone as well as I could have hoped, but of course there's a long way to go.

Got a message this morning that the new ponies are en route.  I'm trying to hatch some bbs and will put the finishing touches on the water in their tank.

Very nervous about it all right now.  One does lose confidence when one hasn't dealt with these creatures in a while, and it's been well over a year for me.

Somebody recently asked me if they should consider keeping a freshwater tank for a period of time before trying to keep a marine tank.  Some marine aquarists do recommend this, and so did I at one point.  But these days my feelings are pretty mixed on this subject.

Most (not all) freshwater aquariums are simply easier to keep than marine aquariums, the most notable exceptions being discus and African cichlid aquariums.  Each of these is an extreme environment on the opposite end of the pH spectrum -- discus, acid; African cichlid, varying degrees of alkaline depending on the origin of the lifestock -- and are best left to more experienced aquarists.  I'd put their difficulty on a par with keeping almost any fish-only marine tank.  But that doesn't mean you have to try these first before keeping a seahorse tank!

In an average freshwater tank it's for sure you have to watch out for ammonia spikes, because these can sicken and kill your pets.  It's the same in a marine tank, but there's a really lethal exaggerated effect.  Simply put, an ammonia spike in a marine tank seems about 10 times worse than in a freshwater tank.

There are numerous other differences.  Marine tanks take longer to cycle if you use the classic method (not the fast-cycle that I use, with a lot of added beneficial-bacteria products).  In fact, the first marine tank I owned took an astounding 3 months to cycle.  The longest it ever took me to cycle a freshwater tank was 5 weeks!

Also, in a marine tank you have to watch out for salinity levels and calcium levels, and other things you just don't have to worry about in a freshwater tank.  And you have to be sure that you replace exactly the amount of water you remove, and keep the water level steady (you actually should put a mark on the tank at the level at which you will keep the water).  With larger tanks you have to worry about mixing the saltwater so that it matches the water in the tank...and so forth and so on.  (With smaller tanks you can get away with using bottled seawater, which should present no stability problem in terms of salinity, etc.)  It seems like there are a million tiny things that are different, and each is significant enough to really hurt your pets.

However, it seems like there are also a thousand books on the subject to help you.  So what if you never kept a marine tank before and start out with one, having never kept a freshwater tank?  You won't have those freshwater memories to confuse you!

Then again, the very basics are the same: you're looking for three basic things to happen before you have a cycled tank: (1) the ammonia is at zero most of the time; (2) the nitrite is at zero all of the time, and (3) the nitrate..well, that's different.  In a marine tank it really needs to be around zero.  In a freshwater tank, it depends, but it can go as high as 40 ppm without being a problem.

Freshwater tanks are less worry.  You don't have to worry about maintaining a very specific water level.  You do have to worry about replacing your water with similar water, but that's really only a matter of checking the pH and temperature of the replacement water.  No big deal.

Basically freshwater tanks teach you about keeping an aquarium, which involves a daily routine and learning to deal with filters and heaters, as well as livestock.  But I'm not convinced that you need a Freshwater 101 prerequisite before you enter Marine 101 if you have carefully studied the subject before starting an aquarium. 

It especially seems not to be true with dwarf seahorses, with whom many of the "rules" of marine aquariums go out the window -- especially the numbers of fish you can keep in a small tank, the supposed difficulty of keeping a nano (small) marine tank, all the elaborate "can't do without" equipment you would normally use in a marine tank that these little seahorses do not need, and the issue of not being able to use live rock -- nowadays a staple in marine tanks -- with dwarf seahorses, etc., etc.  The only thing that you really want to have prior to owning these ponies is experience with hatching brine shrimp.  This is one place where having a freshwater tank would come in handy, because your freshie fish would happily gobble up all your "practice" shrimp.

In the end, it's up to you.  I guess I'd rather see someone have some marine tank experience before trying to keep most seahorses.  But freshwater experience?  Maybe.  Maybe not.