Surprising Results from Water Tests!!

     On Wednesday, the 22, I visited the HMNS to work on my tank. Christine was really busy, since she had to teach a lot of classes, so I worked alone. I started off taking water tests of both the tanks, the quarantine and the clownfish tank. 

     These are the results from the tests of the quarantine tank. The top one, the purple one, is for the pH of the test. It is purple, which indicates an pH of 7.8. Under that is the ammonia test, which is bright yellow. This indicates a ammonia level of 0ppm, which is great because ammonia can cause fish disease as well as other bad things. Under the ammonia tube is the test for nitrate. It is dark orange, which is really bad. It means that the nitrate levels are between 20-40ppm. It should be yellow and 0ppm. When the nitrate levels are too high it causes fish disease, coral disease, and algae growth. These are all bad things for the tank, which is why we are planning on doing a partial water change to try to lower the nitrate levels. Under that is the test for nitrite, it is right where we want it to be, at 0ppm. This means that the biological filter of the tank is working well.

     I then took water test of the clownfish tank. The pH levels were around 8.4, which is still good for the tank; however, we are going to try to bring down that gap between the two pH's. The ammonia levels in the clownfish tank was 0ppm, which is great. The nitrate levels in the clownfish tank were 5ppm, which is slightly too high. However, this is most likely caused by just setting up the tank. Usually when you put new water into a tank, there is a slight spike in nitrate levels. However, we expect the levels to go down as the water gets adjusted to the tank. More importantly, the nitrate levels of the tank were 2.0ppm. This is not very good because it can cause fish disease. The high levels of nitrite are most likely caused by the lack of a biological filter in the tank. This is why I believe that we should add a few clean rocks to the tank to start up the biological filter, so that it is ready as soon as we want to put the fish back in it. 

     As one can see, the chemical levels in the tank differ significantly, which is why I am taking multiple measures to change the levels of each tank, so there see where they should be. I am planning on  doing partial water changes and adding just a couple of rocks to the clownfish tank so that the chemical levels balance out. 

     After taking water tests, I washed the clean rocks that have been taken out of the clownfish tank. I then set them out to air-dry, so that all the parasites on them die. Soon I will start to add the sand, rocks and fish back to the clownfish tank, and it will be back to normal.

    My notes from this last internship visit.

The Tank is almost clean

Today, October 7, 2014, I went to my internship at the HMNS. I was only there for one and a half hours but it was enough for Christine and I to get lots of stuff done. First, we went to the Sharks! exhibit, which she runs. While there we checked the tanks to make sure they were all running correctly. They have to types of sharks in the exhibit, bamboo sharks and walking sharks. The walking sharks are really funny because when they swim, they look as if they are walking on their fins. After making sure everything was running smoothly in Sharks! We went to the clownfish tank, which was full of water, and began siphoning out the sand and the water. We about 99% of the sand out of the tank, so our next step is to get that last one-percent out by draining the tank and scooping it out manually. After we siphoned as much sand as we could, we began scrubbing the sides of the tank with steelwool-like pads and acrylic blades to clean all the algae and crystalline coral off of the sides. I then left, but I look forward to coming back and finally finishing cleaning the tank.

Internship Fun!

On Octpber 4, I went to the HMNS to visit the Hall of Malacology for my internship. Over the summer, I had been slowly taking out rocks and cleaning them and putting them into the quarantine tank until only half of the rocks were left. Christine, my mentor, and I, today, decided that we were going to do a massive push on the tank. We pulled all the rocks out and put them in a separate bucket. We didn't clean the rocks today, but we plan to do it next week. 

This is what the tank looked like after taking out all the rocks. It was pretty dirty. 

We then began siphoning the water and sand from the tank.

This is what the tank looked like after siphoning it for a few minutes. As you can see, we removed a lot of the sand from this side. The bucket we were siphoning the water into filled up, so we had to take it down to the loading dock and dump it out.

We took more water and sand out of the tank until the water level was really low. We then filled the tank back up with filtered fresh water, so that we could continue to siphon water and more sand out of the tank. It is easier to siphon water and sand out of the tank than scoop it out, which is why we continued to add more water so that we could keep siphoning. We did this process of filling up the tank and then siphoning out water and sand about four times, until the majority of the sand was out. Over the next few weeks, we plan to scrub the tank down and run fresh water through it to make sure it is fully clean. We will then add the rocks and the fish back into the tank until it is back to normal.