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For All Your Reef And
Saltwater Aquarium Needs... |
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We have completed
our research facility and are in the process of setting up some culture
systems. |
Baby Seahorses Born 07/08/2001 |
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above photos taken 08/03/2001 |
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above photos taken 08/07/2001 |
I am not sure what species of seahorse these are. We have had many cross
matings with a male H reidi, but we have yet to get any offspring from
such a cross. The Baby seahorses were fed
enriched rotifers for days 1 through 14. From day 10 on they were also fed enriched fresh hatched baby brine
shrimp.
above pictures taken 08/13/2001 2nd death in the family on )8/19/2001 One of the babies was reddish in color when I came in in the morning. A few hours later it was laying on the bottom still alive. I removed it to an isolation cup and it died about 1 hour later |
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above photos taken 08/25/2001 As you can see from the above photos the babies are growing fast and are turning orange. Most are solid orange, some are orange with black snouts and the rest are still black September 2, 2001 3 deaths in the family. Just when you think things are going well. I only fed them once yesterday and they only had about 10 minutes to eat. They are also getting extremely crowded. It is not uncommon to see a seahorse with 2 or more others clinging to him. Do to the deaths I wasn't up to taking another photo. September 9, 2001 They have been dropping like fleas. 4 one day 5 another 2 another etc. I probably only have half of them left. I think the problem is that they need a larger food source than baby brine shrimp. I have been trying unsuccessfully to grow out brine in quantity to feed them. I also purchased live saltwater mysis shrimp to start a culture. Unfortunately, a friendly customer gave me about 500 saltwater guppies and dumped them in my mysis shrimp culture. I will be getting more mysis next week but by the time they have offspring I fear it may be too late 09/14/2001 9/27/01 10/10/01 We will see how the next batch goes. I am not sure why I lost so many. In summary there were 2 days in a row when they didn't get much to eat. I had concerns about the size of the food being too small once they got over 3/4" long. On the next batch I will make sure they get fed sufficiently and start adding live mysis when they reach 3/4" and keep them in a larger container (maybe they were strangling each other) I am collecting brood stock now. Under quarantine I have a female orange/yellow Caribbean seahorse (very rare) a juvenile female yellowish H reidi from Brazil in with a male H. reidi, and 5 assorted males out of quarantine. I still cant grow out brine in quantity- Suggestions Please! 01/05/2002 I have one seahorse form each batch still alive. The older one is about 2" long and is eating frozen mysis shrimp. The younger one is about 1.25" long and is eating live adult brine shrimp 06/15/04
It is about time for an update. We have very sporadically raised a
few offspring to small saleable sizes. As we get mated pairs we
have been dispersing them to our customers to see if they could do any
better. I have had customers raise up to 6 from a single batch of
H reidi. A customer of ours recently visited one of the large
public aquariums and spent a few days with the people in charge of their
seahorse exhibit. They didn't do things too much differently but
there was one rather large difference. The water movement in their
tanks was strong enough to keep the frozen mysis in
suspension. They accomplished this with the use of a bubble
wall on one side of the tank. The males were removed from the
tanks before giving birth, so all the offspring could be collected, and
then returned. The water movement for the babies was strong
enough to keep them from sticking to the surface and to keep the
rotifers or baby brine evenly dispersed in the water. Everything
else was pretty much the same as we had been doing. I will be
hooking up a bubble wall this week to see if it increases the appetites
of our sea horses. I hooked up the bubble wall. I had to
make a cover for the tank to keep the salt splash in. The sea
horses are eating much better with the increased water movement.
The bubbles are not bothering them. On June 8th we had another
batch which we lost all of. They appeared to be getting stuck and
/or going through the window screen on the side of the holding
box. We removed it and replaced it with 250 micron mesh for the
next batch . 03/17/2005 I have just finished a new baby rearing tank. It is online with our coral system. The overall tank size is approx 30 gallons. There is a cylindrical tank within a rectangular tank. It circulates the water in a vertical plane and I should be able to adjust it to keep the babies off the surface or at least that is my hope. The pictures shows the details of the new system. Water enters the void space on the right through a 250 micron strainer and enters the cylindrical are although 4 1.5" holes at the right top covered with 250 micron mesh. Water leaves through 4 similar holes on the left bottom. In the middle on the bottom I put a pvc ring with a piece of onion mesh bag glued to it. The babies do not appear interested in hitching to it yet. There is bubble wall on the left side about 1/2 way up.
We came in this morning and approximately 60 baby H. reidi in the adult seahorse tank. This is the first batch from the parents. We captured them with a rigid tube and transferred them to the baby system. One of the babies got stuck in the back corner between the plastic. I put some underwater epoxy in there to fill the void. We have a continuous rotifer culture going so we fed the rotifers some missing link and DTS and then harvested 2 1 quart portions around 1130am and fed them to the babies. They appeared to be eating. We fed them every 2 to 3 hours the first day with no mortalities. 03/18/2005
A.M. The babies are all still alive. None stuck on the
surface. Will try a few fresh hatched brine today and continue to
feed rotifers every 2 to 3 hours. 03/28 About 14 alive. none have died for the past 3 or 4 days. We started feeding fresh hatch brine today. Cant say for sure whether they were eating them but they are large enough to eat them without any difficulty. 04/01/05 14 old ones still alive. We had another batch of babies- harvested about 25 of them and put them in with the older babies. Two days ago I added a 5 gallon Kent doser to feed baby brine shrimp continuously throughout the day. Baby brine are hatched daily and separated from the eggs. The BBB and some green water are dumped into the dosing jug and set at a fast drip. Today added rotifers to the dosing bucket to feed the new babies. 04/02/05 04/03/05 05/08/2005 The mysis culture system is producing around 50 to 150 mysis per day. It takes a little over 1 hour to maintain. We had a crisis with hydroids. The baby seahorse tank was covered with them and they were eating the sea horses food as well as the seahorses. We lost most all of the babies. We now toothbrush the baby tank daily to keep the hydroids at bay. I had 5 larger ones left. I moved them to a 5 gallon tank with 3 erectus a customer gave us. They are all eating the cultured mysis. 05/16/2005 Somehow one of the reidi managed to get out of the water and dry up. The 3 erectus and the other larger reidi are all doing fine feeding on grown out brine shrimp and cultured live mysis shrimp. We lost most all of the smaller babies to hydroids in our coral system. We had been scrubbing the sides of the culture tank but not the front glass. We had a batch today of 161 babies born today. The mysis culture system is doing well. The sponge filters in the adult tanks are getting dirty. We have had moderate success growing out baby brine in a 10 gallon tank feeding larger species of micro algae whenever the water clears. We use a 250 micron screen to screen out the larger brine and leave the babies. I would like to try culturing copepods. Does anyone have any success stories on culturing them? 08/04/05 We had too many problems with hydroids on the tank in the coral system. We put the last batch of reidi in a sterile 10 gallon tank with a sponge filter and they are about 1 month old now. We have been keeping the s.g. rather low 1.017 to keep them off the surface. It seems to be working. Losses have been very minimal. We just had our first batch of kuda babies today from the ones for sale above. We only saved 5 from the skimmer. 8/12/05 Someone forgot to feed the baby seahorses last Sunday and today we paid the price. The batch from 07/05 was doing stellar until today. A lot of them were dead today. They also started turning orange today, the ones that are left that is. I noticed that in the sterile 10 gallon systems that the rotifers for whatever reason are all living and they are available for food all day long. In the flow through system they disappeared quickly. I also noticed that the growth rate is phenomenal on the new 10 gallon systems probably because the food is continuously available. The batch from 07/05 are big enough to start on baby mysis shrimp. Normally this would have taken 2 to 3 months. Today we had 2 batches of H reidi. One from mystery parents and one from our yellow parents. 12/18/2005 We had a major disaster a month or so back. The larger sea horse tank broke overnight and we lost a few of the ponies and those that survived stopped breeding. We had our first batch last week and they all died within a few hours. We have been able to successfully raise a few from each batch with great regularity. I do not think anything is going to change until we get a good food source in a size larger than fresh hatch brine shrimp and smaller than mysis shrimp. We are trying to culture the large species of copepods tigger pods from Reed Mariculture. Has any one had any success with them? I saw very large copepods in an exhibit booth from Reed Mariculture, but the copepods they sent me were no where near that large. We have had them for a few weeks now and they have not grown any larger. 10/20/2009 Here we go again! We got another pair of H. reidi a few months ago and they had their first batch. We had approximately 20 to 30 babies. They were transferred to a few quart acrylic tank within their parents tank. The tank had 1/2" holes in the sides covered with a 250 micron mesh. Rotifers were added to their container every 2 hours. Shellfish diet was added to the water to keep the rotifers fed. The babies all died within 5 to 6 days. I am thinking that they needed more water movement. Next batch I will try putting them in a lower tank and having water from a higher tank drip into their container. And It Starts Again 05/02/2015 About 6 months ago we aquired 2 male and 2 female captive bred and raised H. kuda seahorses. We also obtained several pairs of H. reidi but ended up with only 1 female. We currently have 2 male and 2 female H. Kuda and a H reidi in a seperate tank We had 100++ Kuda babies released on May 2nd,
2015. As of today May 15th we have about 16 left 05/18/2015 06/03/2015 A few days ago one of the female H. kuda died for no apparent reason. We removed the bigger pieces of live rock from their tank. We will be moving the female reidi to the tank with the kudas. The 2 pregnant kuda males should be releasing soon. We will place their fry in a separate tank from last months batch and start them on enritched rotifers and copepods with some fhebbs. We will
keep the water tinted with iso 08/23/2018 It has been a while since we have provided any updates . We have had many batches of seahorses come and go. We are getting better. We are in the process of setting up a new holding system for the brood stock. It consists of a 74 gallon DB Rimless Edge Aquarium, with an Ecotech Radion XR15 G4 Pro light with a custom Zebra Wood stand and custom sump. Filtration consists of a ceramic block, a Eshopps protein skimmer and a AT biopellet reactor. There is a epoxy sand bottom and all the rock work is artificial, The ceramic block was placed in another tank for a few weeks and then then transferred to the current tank. Two pieces of frozen shrimp were added. The water was tested for ammonia but it never showed up. I guess the ceramic block cycled the tank. The tank is running and waiting until we acquire some brood stock. |
10/29/2019 |
08/27/2024 |
08/30/2024 |
09/05/2024 |
09/13/2024 |
Greg Smith |
See our foods section for a variety of foods for your seahorses |
We
do not currently have any seahorses for sale. |
We do have over 600 unbelievably colored 3 month to 3 or more year old coral fragments for sale from $19.99 and up |
Fish &
Coral Ordering Information: Boxes and outer packs are $8.50 and up, icepacks $1.50, heat packs $1.50 each. We can ship via FedEx next day air or airport to airport. Live arrival is guaranteed on direct flights only (Check with your local airport. We ship from Cleveland Hopkins CLE). Minimum order for airport to airport $250.00 We can ship dry goods with your livestock. Report DOA's within 1 hour of arrival to 800-526-7258 from your home phone. |
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