The Lightning Project

The ongoing saga of the PNG Lightning Maroon Clownfish breeding project.

Browsing Posts in Lightning Maroon Updates

Short and sweet, after being gone for almost a week, and preparing to transfer in a mate this weekend, I thought I should take a quick snapshot of my water quality. pH – 8.2 Alkalinity – 4.25 meq/L Calcium – 420 ppm Magnesium – 1170 ppm Nitrate – approximately 2.5-5 ppm. I’m continuing to dose […]

This is why aquarists don’t like going out of town: And yet, I still have an upcoming trip to talk at PNWMAS this weekend.  Since I am only now really recovered from  truly abnormal overtime (I think I worked a month’s worth of hours in the first half of the month?) I figured I at […]

Apparently the Lightning Maroon thinks it is a better decorator than me.  With the help of its three Turbo snail buddies, every frag in the tank is getting tossed around, overturned, and generally abused.  The Lightning has taken a shining to an Aussie Green Goniopora frag, but frankly this Goniopora isn’t big enough to host […]

Pretty straightforward.  It’s been 5 days since I came home and panicked at a missing Lightning Maroon.  I honestly couldn’t bear to take pictures of it all shredded up, but thankfully most has healed and it is only the spine dorsal damage that remains…will it heal is anyone’s guess. I’ve been “practicing” pairing Maroons in […]

It’s now 1:00 AM on March 2nd.  The reason you hadn’t heard about the February 28th planned move of the Lightning Maroon into the new final digs is that it didn’t happen yet.  Short and sweet – left Thursday for Dallas and Next Wave (put on by DFWMAS).  The plan was to be back on […]

Tested again this morning – Calcium on the Salifert was down to 425 ppm and that was after another day’s worth of dosing 3 X .25 ml/gallon of C-Balance.  Hmm.  Did I just use 10 ppm of calcium overnight, or is it really just that there’s a certain margin of error with the test kit?  […]

I’m continuing to get the tank “dialed in” as they say.  Thursday and Friday I dosed the tank 3 times per day with .25 ML / gallon (6 ML) of each C-Balance 2-part solution.  Thursday evening, Jay stopped by and brought his Salifert test kit for Magnesium.  We ran it side by side with my […]

So I’ve been keeping an eye on things.  The main concern is a very slight level of Nitrite showing up on my tests…less than 0.1 ppm.  As soon as that goes away, we should be good to go. So here’s how the water in the Ecoxotic tested out this morning: Seachem pH – 8.1 Seachem […]

So this afternoon, something rather unexpected happened.  The Labrador Maroon’s ovipositor was down.  I’ve NEVER seen it down before.  It is still down hours later tonight. So the big question – what now?  Of course, it did occur to me that I could introduce the Lightning Maroon to see if I could get a spawn.  […]

Considering the “sustainable” inspiration behind the Lighting Project, it seemed only fitting that the live rock used in the Lightning Maroon’s final home shouldn’t be hacked off a reef or dug out of a lagoon.  It was that inspiration that got me looking around at more sustainable rock choices.  Of course, the most sustainable live […]