Hello there!
It’s been a pretty good week in all, Monday started with
sorting out a few issues with the building and restarting the artemia cultures
to feed the fish house, something went a bit wrong with the last ones but this
time round is looking good so far. I also managed to get in touch with the lady
running the seahorse breeding program at London Zoo and arranged to meet up
with her, they’re a purely conservation based program and work with British
species but it’ll be very interesting to see how they do things, and to see
behind the scenes at the zoo!
We’ve just had a new engine fitted on the boat that the
divers use, so on Monday evening we went out to test it on the creek which the
boat’s moored on. It’s a pretty good way to spend an evening, especially at
high speed.
Tuesday was fairly quiet, I met with another web designer as
the last one’s gone AWOL. He seems to be a bit more professional about the
whole thing, I’m hopeful for some good results in the next week or so. Lab kit
delivery has also been slightly sorted out, at least some of the order is now
in Kenya, to be delivered early this week at some point hopefully. I’m still
not sure when it’ll all have arrived but it’ll nice to have something to play
with at least.
Last week we had a new seahorse come in, the first fully
grown H. capensis we’ve had, and he
gave birth last Wednesday.
Capensis
fry are known for being far less tricky to raise and so far they’re doing very
well. They’re slightly bigger at birth than the histrix so they take artemia fry and, so far, thrive on it. Some of
them have already doubled in size. I’m not getting overly excited yet but it’s
very nice to have some degree of success for the first time. I’ve got some
video:
And some pictures:
The small pale things are the artemia
that they eat. In the video you can see the fry moving around the tank in the
circulation pattern I described last week. You can also see the variety in the
sizes of the fry, whilst it’s definitely nice to have some fry surviving this
is something we’ll need to work on in the future. We’ve solved a few issues we
had with water quality which is a start but as we gain more experience the
survival rate will hopefully go up and up.
One thing that’s sure to help with this is having a better
variety of food, on Friday I got told that the order from the States has arrived;
unfortunately it wasn’t at the local post office but the one in town so I didn’t
have time to get in to pick it up before closing time. Providing that the stuff
has survived shipping (keep your fingers crossed) we’ll have another source of
food, which can only be a good thing.
Yesterday I was down in Shimoni with the divers again, getting
up at 3 is a pain but it’s a really beautiful spot, I saw dolphins for the
second time in 2 weeks and managed to avoid sunburn, despite it being an
incredibly hot and sunny day – in contrast to the snow I
hear some of you have been having back in the UK. So in all it goes down as a
success in my book!
In other ‘news’ there’s been a decent amount of gymming,
some volleyballing and a wee bit of eating out, so it’s not been a bad week in
all. I’m looking forward to having lab kit and new foods to play with this
week, I’ll let you know how it goes next time!
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