Woke up in the morning and first thing i always do is check on the tank. in my half-asleep state…i noticed something yellow where there shouldn’t be anything yellow. look closer and saw that my clownfish had laid eggs again!

This time they were in a better location..in the front part of the tank so I can look at the details more. I’ll get more pictures but when the lights turn on, the anemone’s cover it up (great hiding place!).

hope they continue to breed and I might even try to raise them. that would be a project.

So JackPot! the Golden Blenny finally is starting to eat algae flakes like the other fishes. woohoo! at first he wouldn’t pay attention to them but lately he’s been eating it and spitting it back out earlier in the week but last night i saw him start to eat the flakes.

So last night was good and bad news. Bad news was one of my anemones got sucked into a power filter. bah. that was a mess to clean up. it wasn’t a rose anemone but still losing anything sucks.

anyways…a few weeks ago, I noticed one of the clownfish exhibiting breeding behaviors (the cleaning of rocks etc). Didn’t think much of it b/c people normally don’t have luck with their clownfish breeding and plus my pair was so new and also there were 6 other clownfish in the same tank. but just watching the tank, i noticed one of them fanning the rocks instead. so i looked closer and there they were! clownfish eggs! they must’ve been there for awhile since you can already see the lil’ eyes on each egg. Should hatch probably within the next 2-3 days is my guess.

unfortunately she happen to lay the eggs on a foundation rock so there’s no way for me to get to them w/o having to tear down the entire rock structure and there’s an anemone attached to it also. plus with a predatory mystery wrasse in there, i doubt there will be any survivors. but who knows….my giant anemone family (made up of 9 rose anemones) might provide them with some shelter afterall.

so how did i think this happen? Normally it takes awhile for 2 clownfish to pair up but maybe the way i chose them (one big, one medium and rest small) helped. Also maybe by having multiple clownfishes in there, it may have caused the 2 biggest to “mature” faster. who knows….

i tried to take a video with my phone but it came out with a weird extension that only Quicktime can play it. (not .qt or .mov) it has an extension of “.3g2″. not sure how to convert that into a youtube video but i’ll try using my actual camera tonite. see if i can get a video of it.

A Jackpot the Golden Blenny update. I can’t believe it’s been 2 months since I got him. I had to double check the date to make sure. Man..how time flies. But good news! Jackpot is still alive. So far I’ve had zero luck in trying to get it to eat flakes or frozen mysis shrimp. Instead he prefers to eat the algae off the glass which is good.

The tank I put jackpot in is a 29 gallon tank that is attached to my main tank. It’s always had trouble with alot of algae growth that I couldn’t control. But in the 2 months I’ve had Jackpot, he’s kept that tank pretty clean which is awesome…except for the fact that I hope he doesn’t eat all the algae and have nothing else to eat.

So I’m now doing something that goes against everything I’ve been striving for. I’m now trying to get that tank to grow more algae! Shouldn’t be that hard right since I’ve had trouble all these years? haha. So far it seems to be working. I monitor the amount of algae in that tank to make sure he has enough food.

an update on my tank. nothing really exciting has been happening except for the daily battle to keep the temperature of the tank down as we’re getting 95F days here in sunny southern california. I do have a chiller for the tank but it’s there for emergencies cause when it turns on, it heats up the room also which in turn then heats up the tank.

i haven’t bought anything new lately. haven’t had time to go to the fish store but I did snap a picture of this rose anemone with my camera phone.

Meet JackPot! (yes with an exclamation). JackPot! is not your ordinary blenny…it’s a GOLDEN BLENNY. This ladies and gentlemen is the rarest fish I have even gotten. Yes, rarer than my capclown fish or my mystery wrasse or my black tang and others. It’s that rare to me.

Why is it that rare? Since being in this hobby for 7+ years, I have never seen one available for purchase. I’ve seen one in a friend’s tank (who collects rare fish like people collect rare antiques) and ofcourse he wouldn’t part with it. So imagine my surprise when I went to my LFS and saw it available. I grabbed it immediately (it was still in the bag) and man…i was so excited. like a kid in a candy store.

My LFS owner knows that I know what to look for when I come in and when he saw me with the bag he said “haha..so you know what’s up…i haven’t seen one of those in 7 years”). His wife later saw me walking around with it and she said “oooh…you got the goldie!”).

When I got home, I wanted to put him into my main tank but it was filled with roses so i didn’t want to risk him getting stung since he does hang out around the rocks. So I put him into my 29 gallon tank that’s plumbed to the main tank where i am also keeping my capclown. The value of that 29 gallon tank just went up. haha.

JackPot!