Friday, September 10, 2010

This is kind of stupid, but I thought I'd share a video of my new lab fish. Who knows if they'll survive quarantine, but we can bask in their beauty for a while.



The blue-ish one is a powder blue tang approximately 3" long and the yellow one is one of my favorite fish of all time! It's a yellow long nose butterfly fish. The tang is covered in a pretty common parasite so they have to stay in quarantine for a few weeks. The treatment regimen is to lower the salinity by 70% and then let the fish hang out in that for 4 weeks. Amazingly, saltwater fish can survive in very low salinity water, the parasite can't and eventually dies out as all of the eggs hatch. Although, the unfortunate thing is that salinity can be reduce drastically over a one hour period, but the salinity must be raised back up to normal much much more slowly. It usually takes a week and a half to bring the quarantine tank's salinity back up without killing the fish. I'm sure there's some interesting physiology involved there ;) So maybe in 6 weeks I'll post another video of these guys swimming in the main tank!