A seahorse diary

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

I've owned an 8-gallon biOrb (click on biOrb for link) for several years.  I've always broken the rules with it.  Originally this tank housed dwarf African frogs, for instance.  It is supposed to be a none-too-perfect home for these frogs, but they thrived in it.  See this page for a description.

All along I was wondering about using a biOrb as a home for dwarf seahorses.  Eventually the makers of the biOrb came out with a marine conversion kit.  I was intrigued.

Several months ago I began researching the possibilities.  First I started out on the biOrb website, then I went to YouTube to see what biOrb owners had actually accomplished in turning their tanks into marine wonderlands.  The results looked promising (if a little crowded -- some of these people were keeping schools of clownfish in the 8 gallon biOrb!), so I decided to proceed with the idea.

As of this writing I have 3 dwarf seahorses living in my marine biOrb.  Any "news" and progress updates about them will be posted on the Blog page.  This page will be devoted to describing how I built this environment, and how successful it ultimately is.  Please check back frequently to see how this page progresses.

Correctly or not, I worried that the ordinary biOrb air stone was not sufficient for marine use.  Instead, I use the Kordon coarse air glass air stone.  I use the coarse model because of the small air pump I am using with the biOrb.  It had to be modified with a strip of airline tubing to attach it to the biOrb's airstone base, but that was simple to do.  The stone emits a strong, fast-moving cloud of tiny bubbles rather than the larger, slower bubbles that the biOrb (and Lee, which I have also sometimes used) plastic airstones give.

The biOrb Marine Conversion Kit is excellent, but was beyond my budget at the time.  Instead, I used bottled sea water and a trimmed Dirt Magnet sponge filter insert, as well as marine BioSpira to get the bacterial colony started.

I am using aquarium-quality seashells as a substrate.  Any substrate used in a biOrb aquarium must be large and loose; otherwise the filter will not work correctly.

I did start out with dry rock and marine rubble, but before I added the seahorses to the tank I treated it with Panacur to kill off all the hydroids.  Unfortunately, along with the hydroids all kinds of interesting worms, jellyfish, microstars, and my sun coral died as well.  Live and learn.  The good thing is that the copepods survived.

I may get some more microstars; don't know about the coral since they generally come attached to live rock.

As of last week I'm adding marine W.O.W. (Waste Out Weekly) to the tank once a week.  We'll see if it does anything good.  The water I use in the tank is Sea-Pure by CaribSea.  Since the tank is so small, I'd hate to have to mix seawater for it.  This stuff comes premixed (it's actually natural seawater, according to the label), so that takes away that hassle.

I used to use Nutri-Seawater for my other group of dwarves, but can't find it in the stores anymore.

I'm finding that the biOrb circulates both live and frozen brine shrimp in the same manner, and that this does tend to fool the ponies into eating the frozen stuff.  That's good, because some days I just don't have enough live baby brine shrimp. 

I've decorated the tank with every possible hitching post I could find.  The ponies like the replicas of freshwater hairgrass the best, although I do have silk replicas of marine plants in the tank as well.  The one thing I didn't get my hands on quick enough was a bubble-tube cover that looked like a column of grass.  The ponies are always trying and failing to hitch on the bubble tube, so they would have loved that!  I'll keep trying to get one.