Christina Hamlet

The little (giant) anemones that could?

As part of a rather strange sort of accidents, I ended up with two giant anemones in my tank. They’ve been gradually shrinking until now one of them is about the size of a standard six-sided die and the other is about the size of a green pea. I’ve been wanting to transfer them to…

I’m still here!

Getting back into posting here, starting with some cool pictures of jellyfish. These are some simple dye visualization pictures from trying to set up field experiments. We’ll be taking more this week, hoping to get some nice flow images! I’ll also have two students working with me in the lab this summer, filming and quantify…

Brown Stuff

I recently returned from a conference in Australia, only to find my tank was covered in brown stuff. It looks like some sort of algae, but I’m not sure what kind. A few things happened — about 2 days before I left I received an order of mangrove jellies. I switched the wave maker to…

Chemical highs…and lows

The tank has been up and running for a while now. The environment of the tank is doing very well in terms of the nitrogen cycle, all levels are staying close to zero. The calcium and alkalinity have been dropping though, with occasional dips in the pH. The last pH drop killed my jellyfish, so…

Live Rock — found and growing

I found some excellent Live Rock from Gulf Live Rock. According to their website, they own a small area and deposit and harvest the so that they have a continual supply, which seems better than places that just go out and harvest some. The rock came teeming with life, including a few things I wasn’t…

The search for live rock

So it turns out that trying to get live rock when you live in a small town is trickier than it seems. And ordering online is……..an adventure. I went ahead and ordered some live sand to start cycling the tank. I’m still not sure the jellyfish aquarium will require much of a diverse bioload, but…

New Jellyfish Tank

I’m still in the process of setting up my invertebrate lab. Since this is my first trickle filter and dedicated jellyfish tank, I purchased one as a system from Midwater Systems. It was pretty easy to put together, especially with the great instructions that they sketched for me as a guide. Connected everything together…