With the nice weather I’ve tried to get out and do as much rock pooling as I can so its been a busy few weeks for the tank. First an update on ‘Ronnie’ the Blenny, who you may recall from the last update has been a bit unwell and needed treatment in an isolation tank.
He recovered well within a few days so I put him back in the main tank, but even though he looked much better than before, he quickly began scratching himself on rocks again and I thought he looked a little pale, so I took him out and returned him for more treatment in the hospital tank. He was much better than he had been, but I suspect the infection hadn’t fully cleared so another dose of medication should sort him out once and for all hopefully.
The Flatties Are Gone (And So Is The Last Crab)
Shortly after I posted the last update there was an ‘incident’ with the flatfish. I mentioned how they were struggling with the increased temperature in the tank due to the heatwave we’ve been having, and I think that was certainly a contributing factor in the demise of two of them. The bigger contributing factor though, I suspect, was the little crab I mentioned last time.
I’d returned what I thought was the last remaining crab to the pool where he came from, but the next day a small one emerged from the rocks. Too small to do any damage, or so I thought, so I left it in there. Now bear in mind all of the crabs I’ve kept so far have not been problematic until they reached a certain size. The smaller ones have been no bother, so I’m not entirely sure this little fella is the culprit, but my gut tells me he is. That, and the big chunks that had been removed from the largest of the flatfish when I discovered it hiding in the overflow the next day. It was still alive, but only just. I put it in an isolation net to live out its final hours, and then set about fishing out the rest of them so they didn’t suffer the same fate.
I managed to net three of them, but one was missing and I’ve never seen it since. It’s possible the crab was to blame, but it’s not inconceivable that the heat caused them to behave in a manner that made them fair game for everything in the tank to have a nibble at them.
Anyway, the remaining three were returned to some sandy pools at low tide and will hopefully have moved back out to sea when the tide came in. The crab was also returned to a nice, quiet rock pool. He may have been innocent but I couldn’t take the chance. He was tiny, as you can see in the video above, but he wanted to fight with everything. He met his match with that little male sand goby protecting his nest though.
I’m done with crabs now, even the small ones. I’m going to avoid flatfish too for the time being unless I manage to find any around 3-4 inches long, as I feel like they will be robust enough to not get picked on, especially in summer.
Monster Blennies!
A trip to Half Moon Bay in Heysham yielded some spectacular results. It’s a place I’ve been many times, but other than crabs, prawns, Sand Gobies and small Blennies I’ve never caught anything especially interesting there, although the rock pools are nice and deep, and lush with plantlife. Not only have I never caught anything especially interesting, I’ve never even seen anything. Nothing that would prepare me for the Sunday afternoon I would have there at the beginning of July anyway.
I went armed with the full arsenal. Regular nets, push net, drop net and fish traps that I’d never used before but decided to bring along ‘just in case’. While I went off on the long trek to reach the sea at low tide (it feels like the water goes out miles on that beach) I decided to leave a baited fish trap in one of the deeper pools, just to see what might happen. It’s a plastic trap I bought on Temu and I threw in a handful of frozen prawns as well as the bait that comes with the trap. Some sort of pink, spongy, floaty things, no idea what they are but they seemed to work!
An hour or so later I returned, and when I pulled the trap out there was all sorts of flipping and flapping around going on inside. It’s really hard to see inside the trap without unscrewing the entry points, but as soon as I took one off and peered inside, there was just a mass of wriggling and writhing fish. Initially I thought there must have been Butterfish or Eelpouts in there, but it turns out it was almost exclusively Blennies, with one solitary, massive (to me at least) Rock Goby keeping them company. If only it had been smaller, as a Rock Goby has been on the bucket list ever since I set up the tank.
There were well over twenty Blennies in there, and some of them were huge. I was just stunned at what I was seeing. I had no idea these pools were packed with fish like this. I’ve walked through them with my net on so many occasions and never so much as glimpsed anything close to the size of the Blennies that were in that trap.
I released them all (or so I thought) except two of the smaller ones which I took back with me. I say smaller, which they were in comparison to the rest of the trap, but they were both a fair bit bigger than ‘Ronnie’, who is no longer the King of the Tank. The two newcomers have settled in very well, and interestingly spend a lot of time together.
I would have loved to have brought back some of the giants, but they’d have made short work of everything in the tank so that wasn’t an option. In the future though I’d love to keep four or five of them in a tank on their own.
One sad thing to report though is that the next day when cleaning the trap I found a couple of small Blennies that had lodged themselves into crevices in the trap and perished. I felt terrible, and still do now as I type this. I could kick myself and if it would bring the Blennies back I would. Poor little guys. I’m such a dickhead.
I did check the trap when I released everything, but clearly I didn’t check it well enough and it’s a harsh lesson learned. All I can do is pass on this advice to ensure that anyone who might be reading this doesn’t make the same mistake. Check those traps carefully, and then check them again. And then check again just for good measure.
More Colour & A New Species Added
The tank was looking good in terms of the fish and the anemones, but it felt a bit bare and lacking in colour. It needed plants. I’ve had bubble wrack and saw wrack in there previously, and it did ok. It didn’t die, but it just didn’t look particularly nice as the wave makers in the tank just kind of pushed them downwards. And I was getting fed up having to fish out all of the debris that was coming from them, so I returned them not long after.
My plan was to get a load of sea lettuce and then fasten it to rocks using elastic bands, so back to Half Moon Bay I went, this time armed with three different types of fish traps. I dropped the traps in different pools and then spent an hour collecting sea lettuce. When it came to emptying the traps it wasn’t quite as crazy as the last time, but the main trap once again had a few big Blennies in there as well as a few smaller ones and a medium sized crab. All of those were returned.
The L shaped eel trap which I had never used before captured three smallish Blennies, which were also returned. Finally, the crab net trap looked like it had nothing in it as I looked into the pool, but as I brought it in I saw a small fish which I could tell wasn’t a Blenny. Could it be the small Rock Goby I’d been hoping for? Yes. Yes it could! That Little Rock Goby came home in my trusty fish container and is now thriving in the tank (see below). I just need to find him a friend now, or even a spouse.
The sea lettuce looks fantastic by the way (the prawns love it). Hopefully it will stay that way, but we’ll see.
