Moving Day

I run a web design firm so I can appreciate colors. But not in an aquarium. Right now there are just too many solid colors growing in various spots... china red, burgundy violet, play-doh green. Just a few spots, but that's how it starts. They're fungi, and they can ruin the aquatic balance of life.

And so, we did a major cleaning of the Aquarium today. Sucked up all manner of guck and poo, retired both seaweed rocks, the mollusk egg case spiral and a few empty shells, cleaned the Oxygen Dreadlocks, and scraped all those tiny algae off the walls with a cotton ball. Finally, we reshaped the entire aquarium floor so the sides slope up, leaving a depression in the center. This is to allow the detritus to gather in the center, making it infinitely easier for me to clean.

Of course, it took a little convincing that this was the right thing to do.

"The crabs are going to asphyxiate! The baby shells are going to be buried!" I protested as the sand was swept up and over the hapless creatures. Andres rolled his eyes.

"What do you think happens in the ocean, when the waves roll over the sea bottom?" he said. "That the shells go into their Hollywood trailer?"

OK maybe not. But I was still anguished. Then it struck me. This was like moving day. Not sure which part—the moving out or the moving in—but the similarity stuck like a snail on an aquarium wall. Boxes strewn all over your living room, peanuts everywhere, people running around asking you where you want stuff. So it was here too: marine dust and sand kicked up, pieces of seaweed floating about, rocks being moved, the fish darting around inquisitive, the crabs desperately trying to bury themselves under something, anything that wouldn't move. Only the baby shells and the snails remained, as ever, nonplussed.

Finally. All done. Ready to pour in the day's truckload of fresh seawater. Oh, I forgot to mention—in order to clean and reshape and re-landscape, it does help to suck out half the aquarium. Otherwise you might have a mini-tsunami on your living room carpet.

Fresh seawater is in. Now the copepods. Fiesta Nacional! Love those guys. But this time I am wiser: no more all-at-once. I put in about 25% of the copepods, and watched the fish have a feast. Not just the fish, either... finally, at long last, I saw the anemones slurp up the wee things too. Fleakiller caught one with one of its tentacles, and then the Matriarch, in the cozy shade of the Mexican Sponge, reached out for a juicy copepod and leisurely ate it, its little body disappearing nanometer by nanometer inside the voluptuous translucent cone. Two of the Matriarch's presumed offspring caught their very first copepods too.

All in all, a successful inhouse move. Tomorrow I go hunting for new sea furniture.