I was just walking past our 750-gallon reef tank the other day, when I spotted this – a mated pair of Bangaii Cardinals in the act of the mating. The female had the eggs in her mouth and was about to transfer them to the male. Check it out and leave a comment below.

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That’s right. You heard me.   Jellyfish tanks in the home and in offices are the newest trend in aquariums.  And today I have a special treat for you.

I  recorded an interview with three jellyfish experts (one of them is me), where we go into great detail on what it takes to get started today with your own jellyfish aquarium in the home (or business).  We covered it all – from tank design, to filtration systems, to diet and even how to breed them.

20 Years ago, it was almost impossible to even keep a jellyfish alive in captivity and now, because of a breakthrough in understanding their life cycle, we can easily keep many species in captivity and breed them too.

Here is the link to the interview.  Any questions you have (just post a comment) will be answered here on the blog.

Jellyfish Call w_ Alex Andon

You can either listen to the interview here on the site or you can download it to your iPod by right clicking and “save file as”.  And if you’d rather get started with your own jellyfish aquarium you can go here to get your jellyfish tank (jellyfish and jellyfish food too).

Either way, let us know what you think of the interview and if it was helpful.

Technorati Tags: how to breed jellyfish, jellyfish aquarium, jellyfish food, jellyfish home aquarium, jellyfish in the home, jellyfish tank

We’ve had 8 seahorses in our 150g seahorse exhibit now for 5 months and now they are having a new batch of babies every month (sometimes more often). I thought I would share our experience as we grow them up. I’ve kept seahorses a few times before, but this is the first time I ever tried to breed and rear them.

The species of seahorse we are exhibiting here is Hippocampus erectus, which is local to the New England coast and can be found in backwaters and marshes. The ones we have came from 2 locations. Four were from the New Englan Aquarium, and the other four were from Pro Aquatix (a tropical fish/coral breeder in Florida).

We are now growing out batch #3. The first batch was a dud, as often the case where a seahorses first brood is less robust than later broods. I kind of think of this as the first time parent syndrome. The second batch we were not ready for them – and even though we fed them newly-hatched brine shrimp (not enriched), most of the babies were not large enough to eat the brine, and those that were would ingest air at the surface and then later die.

So now we are on our 3rd batch, which just hatched 3 days ago. We now have rotifers being cultured (about 1/4 the size of brineshrimp nauplii), and this batch of seahorses is the largest one yet. They still tend to congregate at the surface, so we are experimenting with different approaches to preventing this air-ingestion problem. Once we have that licked, I think we are going to be awash in baby seahorses.

Please leave a comment below and let us know if you are interested in the detailed methods we are using to breed these seahorses. If we get enough responses then we will go ahead and provide the detailed procedures for you. Also, let us know if you have experience in breeding seahorses.

Technorati Tags: fish breeding, how to breed seahorses, seahorses