reefkeeper1
01/17/2005, 08:16 PM
I tried to put together a writeup of Anthony Calfo's talk to SEABay on January 17th, 2004, but I never got around to finishing it up. Now that it's a year later, I thought it would be better to just put up what I had written down. It's funny how I wrote Anthony would be a good reason to go to MACNA XVI in Boston considering the imbroglio that occurred there.
Anthony Calfo Presentation – for SEABay.org on Saturday, January 17, 2004
On Saturday, January 17th, 2004, Anthony Calfo gave a presentation to my local reeftank club, SEABay. I found Anthony to be a very dynamic and informative speaker, and if your local club hasn’t already invited Anthony to speak, I would definitely recommend him. It looks like he’ll be one of the speakers at MACNA XVI in Boston, so that gives me another reason to fly out for that conference.
An aspect I liked about Anthony is that he’s quite frank that he’s interested in eating the varied wildlife he encounters on his travels. I don’t think he means in the crazy way that some people from mainland China eat endangered species, but more like unorthodox foods that most Westerners wouldn’t think of eating. He’s eaten ogo, or gracilaria, like me in a seaweed salad and urchin gonads; basically, if it moves, he wonders how it will taste. He happily admits that he’s a carnivore. I should have asked him if he’s ever eaten Xenia elongata since it grows so quickly and seems to smell like oysters when you harvest it. I wonder if any type of coral is eaten regularly somewhere in the world?
Limpets can be dangerous. More colorful, more dangerous
Muted color ones can reproduce and are fine.
Hard to be successful in propagating invertebrates.
Approach - Best to do in a dedicated vessel
Acquiring specimens – wild or cultured source?
Maturation – not too old or too young
Participants – right number of boys, girls or “its� invited
Gonochorists, Simultaneous hermaphrodites, Sequential hermaphrodites (clams), Asexual
Habitat
Substrates – soft or rocky elements (may be seagrasses, rock or substrate) Disease of seagrasses may be due to overhunting of turtles – they used to keep the seagrasses cropped. Thalassia (turtle grass) best grass for refugium.
Water flow – too often underestimated (nuisance algae can be taken care of with more waterflow) low end of 10 to 20 times an hour turnover of tank. Avoid too much laminar flow in one direction. Only seafans like laminar flow. Doesn’t believe there can be too much flow.
Light intensity – sunglasses needed? Abuse of too much halides. Promoted because it’s cheap and profitable for manufacturers. You can compensate for a lack of light for corals with more food, but the converse isn’t true. No coral is totally autotrophic. Death of coral over a long period of time may mean they didn’t get enough food – especially with LPS corals.
Photoperiod (double-times)
Tankmates – unnatural disturbances – perils of garden reef and mixed community tanks. Alleopathy or chemical warfare is more prevalent in a mixed reef. Minimize unnatural stimulation of organisms from different biotopes. Also give plenty of space.
Conditioning – Improve health, vigor and vitality with meaty matter for invertebrates. Corals are meat eaters.
Once a week scraping of algae off tank provides more than enough phytoplankton.
Old Berlin Systems with colt corals are a dedicated phytoplankton feeder.
Spawning – Unassisted, Assisted… Passive, Imposed
Cues: Temperature, Chemical, Photoperiod, Lunar
Double time with shrimp caused 2x spawing.
Nurseries/refugia
The advent of refugiums has made impromptu nursery-care tangible. Don’t get pigeonholed. It isn’t all just mud and caulerpa. There are other and better ways. Fibrous or pondfilter pads great for growing amphipods. Pondmaster 1000 filter pad.
Likes eating gracilaria salad.
Growout
Identifying and providing larval foods: Size, type, concentrations
Fishless refugiums as plankton generators
Plankton Reactors
Food Stations
Rearing space/culling
Put clams out of water for 4 to 5 hours, then puts them in cold water, then jam needle full of serotonin around a full moon to induce spawning. Clams pulsed at 2 minute intervals after leaving clams out in the sun dry and adding cold water.
Try to document as much as you can so that you can substantiate claims.
SPONGES
Sexual… mostly hermaphrodites, rarely self-fertilize
Asexual fragmentation easiest strategy by far
KEY: Mature refugiums and DSBs inline are crucial
Most sponges cannot be exposed to air.
How do you know a sponge was never exposed to the air. Hard to get a viable sponge that was always underwater.
Worms…Polychaetes and friends
Mostly dioecious…sexual reproduction, separate sexes
Events triggered by chemical cues… mass spawning events
Some asexual reproduction/fragging
As with certain fanworms
Some egg depositors in tubes
KEY: populations easily limited or stimulated by available food… substrate grain and depth important
Bad worms
Planaria or flatworms. White planaria are harmless – shows you have a lot of copepods.
Gastropod key to reproduction are fuges and DSB’s. Strombus and Stomatella can reproduce. Queen conchs get huge. Will need a 200-gallon aquarium to maintain a full size queen conch. Best bets for success are Cerithium, Trochus, Strombus, Stomatella
Bivalves
Tridacnids
Simultaneous hermaphrodites
Only males (gonads) active when young
Adults function in alternating roles
Spawning in captivity is somewhat common with 3 smallest species
Aquarium breeding is impractical if even possible
Long larval stage/growout(years)
Cephalapods
Easiest to keep are cuttlefish. Easy to ship eggs and rear.
All dioecious
Generally short-lived
Spawing is common, rearing can be difficult
Species tanks required
Conspecific intolerance is very high
One university if breeding them easily, but not releasing them to the public.
One to three years – hard to get over 5 years.
Pistol shrimp much worse than mantis shrimp
Shrimp have a 3 to 5 year lifespan. Lysmata are the best shrimp to reproduce. Larvae have large mouths, feed on nauplii
Crabs – Few consistent captive spawns, Mostly brood-spawners. Little beyond anecdote.
Don’t put peppermint shrimp in refugium. Spawn periodically, but they are eating something so they are a net loss.
Microcrustaceans – amphipods. Freshwater gammarus very bright red. Fishking. High caretenoid pigments. Copepods are little dots.
Echinoderms – easy to split yellow ones. Big phytoplankton eaters. If a filter feeding sea cucumber doesn’t move, it means it’s happy. Won’t move for years if it gets enough food. Pearlfish live in the anus of a sea cucumber and chew on the respiratory trees inside.
Has no idea how to raise urchins. Don’t eat uni too far from a coast or it won’t be fresh. Urchins are good herbivores. Eat some coralline.
Stars – reproductive activity limited to brood spawners and fission/fragging.
Harlequin shrimp are easy to breed as long as they get enough starfish food.
Serpent and brittle starfish are the best two candidates for reproduction. Key is getting good live rock and san inoculants and minimizing predation.
Ascidians sea squirts. They have a short life span and are very toxic. Key is lucking out on the import of a hardy incidental species & keeping large, mature, fishless refugia to feed/support them.
General rule is to emphasize second to last syllable for pronouncing scientific names.
Anthony Calfo Presentation – for SEABay.org on Saturday, January 17, 2004
On Saturday, January 17th, 2004, Anthony Calfo gave a presentation to my local reeftank club, SEABay. I found Anthony to be a very dynamic and informative speaker, and if your local club hasn’t already invited Anthony to speak, I would definitely recommend him. It looks like he’ll be one of the speakers at MACNA XVI in Boston, so that gives me another reason to fly out for that conference.
An aspect I liked about Anthony is that he’s quite frank that he’s interested in eating the varied wildlife he encounters on his travels. I don’t think he means in the crazy way that some people from mainland China eat endangered species, but more like unorthodox foods that most Westerners wouldn’t think of eating. He’s eaten ogo, or gracilaria, like me in a seaweed salad and urchin gonads; basically, if it moves, he wonders how it will taste. He happily admits that he’s a carnivore. I should have asked him if he’s ever eaten Xenia elongata since it grows so quickly and seems to smell like oysters when you harvest it. I wonder if any type of coral is eaten regularly somewhere in the world?
Limpets can be dangerous. More colorful, more dangerous
Muted color ones can reproduce and are fine.
Hard to be successful in propagating invertebrates.
Approach - Best to do in a dedicated vessel
Acquiring specimens – wild or cultured source?
Maturation – not too old or too young
Participants – right number of boys, girls or “its� invited
Gonochorists, Simultaneous hermaphrodites, Sequential hermaphrodites (clams), Asexual
Habitat
Substrates – soft or rocky elements (may be seagrasses, rock or substrate) Disease of seagrasses may be due to overhunting of turtles – they used to keep the seagrasses cropped. Thalassia (turtle grass) best grass for refugium.
Water flow – too often underestimated (nuisance algae can be taken care of with more waterflow) low end of 10 to 20 times an hour turnover of tank. Avoid too much laminar flow in one direction. Only seafans like laminar flow. Doesn’t believe there can be too much flow.
Light intensity – sunglasses needed? Abuse of too much halides. Promoted because it’s cheap and profitable for manufacturers. You can compensate for a lack of light for corals with more food, but the converse isn’t true. No coral is totally autotrophic. Death of coral over a long period of time may mean they didn’t get enough food – especially with LPS corals.
Photoperiod (double-times)
Tankmates – unnatural disturbances – perils of garden reef and mixed community tanks. Alleopathy or chemical warfare is more prevalent in a mixed reef. Minimize unnatural stimulation of organisms from different biotopes. Also give plenty of space.
Conditioning – Improve health, vigor and vitality with meaty matter for invertebrates. Corals are meat eaters.
Once a week scraping of algae off tank provides more than enough phytoplankton.
Old Berlin Systems with colt corals are a dedicated phytoplankton feeder.
Spawning – Unassisted, Assisted… Passive, Imposed
Cues: Temperature, Chemical, Photoperiod, Lunar
Double time with shrimp caused 2x spawing.
Nurseries/refugia
The advent of refugiums has made impromptu nursery-care tangible. Don’t get pigeonholed. It isn’t all just mud and caulerpa. There are other and better ways. Fibrous or pondfilter pads great for growing amphipods. Pondmaster 1000 filter pad.
Likes eating gracilaria salad.
Growout
Identifying and providing larval foods: Size, type, concentrations
Fishless refugiums as plankton generators
Plankton Reactors
Food Stations
Rearing space/culling
Put clams out of water for 4 to 5 hours, then puts them in cold water, then jam needle full of serotonin around a full moon to induce spawning. Clams pulsed at 2 minute intervals after leaving clams out in the sun dry and adding cold water.
Try to document as much as you can so that you can substantiate claims.
SPONGES
Sexual… mostly hermaphrodites, rarely self-fertilize
Asexual fragmentation easiest strategy by far
KEY: Mature refugiums and DSBs inline are crucial
Most sponges cannot be exposed to air.
How do you know a sponge was never exposed to the air. Hard to get a viable sponge that was always underwater.
Worms…Polychaetes and friends
Mostly dioecious…sexual reproduction, separate sexes
Events triggered by chemical cues… mass spawning events
Some asexual reproduction/fragging
As with certain fanworms
Some egg depositors in tubes
KEY: populations easily limited or stimulated by available food… substrate grain and depth important
Bad worms
Planaria or flatworms. White planaria are harmless – shows you have a lot of copepods.
Gastropod key to reproduction are fuges and DSB’s. Strombus and Stomatella can reproduce. Queen conchs get huge. Will need a 200-gallon aquarium to maintain a full size queen conch. Best bets for success are Cerithium, Trochus, Strombus, Stomatella
Bivalves
Tridacnids
Simultaneous hermaphrodites
Only males (gonads) active when young
Adults function in alternating roles
Spawning in captivity is somewhat common with 3 smallest species
Aquarium breeding is impractical if even possible
Long larval stage/growout(years)
Cephalapods
Easiest to keep are cuttlefish. Easy to ship eggs and rear.
All dioecious
Generally short-lived
Spawing is common, rearing can be difficult
Species tanks required
Conspecific intolerance is very high
One university if breeding them easily, but not releasing them to the public.
One to three years – hard to get over 5 years.
Pistol shrimp much worse than mantis shrimp
Shrimp have a 3 to 5 year lifespan. Lysmata are the best shrimp to reproduce. Larvae have large mouths, feed on nauplii
Crabs – Few consistent captive spawns, Mostly brood-spawners. Little beyond anecdote.
Don’t put peppermint shrimp in refugium. Spawn periodically, but they are eating something so they are a net loss.
Microcrustaceans – amphipods. Freshwater gammarus very bright red. Fishking. High caretenoid pigments. Copepods are little dots.
Echinoderms – easy to split yellow ones. Big phytoplankton eaters. If a filter feeding sea cucumber doesn’t move, it means it’s happy. Won’t move for years if it gets enough food. Pearlfish live in the anus of a sea cucumber and chew on the respiratory trees inside.
Has no idea how to raise urchins. Don’t eat uni too far from a coast or it won’t be fresh. Urchins are good herbivores. Eat some coralline.
Stars – reproductive activity limited to brood spawners and fission/fragging.
Harlequin shrimp are easy to breed as long as they get enough starfish food.
Serpent and brittle starfish are the best two candidates for reproduction. Key is getting good live rock and san inoculants and minimizing predation.
Ascidians sea squirts. They have a short life span and are very toxic. Key is lucking out on the import of a hardy incidental species & keeping large, mature, fishless refugia to feed/support them.
General rule is to emphasize second to last syllable for pronouncing scientific names.