I guess the major interest has been the continued success of
the fry, on Monday a few started holding on to the holdfasts I put in the
tanks. By my understanding this is pretty rapid development so that’s nice. They’re
still growing at a good rate, which bodes well for their continued development.
The only other interesting thing to report from this week
was managing to pick up the package from the States and get started with that.
In that were some rotifer
eggs to restart the rotifer cultures (recap – rotifers are, in the seahorse
growing context, useful because they’re smaller than artemia and grow pretty
well so can be used to feed seahorses when they’re at their smallest. I’ve got
my fingers crossed that a good supply of these should help out with the histrix
fry, hopefully giving us a second species that do well.
Also in the package was a really useful book and some new
phytoplankton to start some clean healthy cultures with as however carefully
you look after phyto cultures they age and become less productive. The book is basically
a how to guide on plankton culture, explaining how to run the systems like clockwork, we’ve
been doing pretty well on all that in the last month or two but extra
information and approaches can’t be anything apart from useful.
It’s been a pretty chilled week really, gym sessions and
volleyballing have continued. On Tuesday I went along to what was meant to be a
kickboxing session that turned out to be a lot more like aerobics, not quite
what I’d envisaged but a new experience nonetheless. On Thursday evening I went
to a dinner party which was hosted on the roof of a block of flats just round
the corner. It was a full moon so eating out under that was pretty atmospheric,
coupled with good company and tasty food it was a cracking evening.
Next weekend I’m heading back to the UK for a couple of
weeks so updates probably won’t be as regular as they have been for a while. The
primary reason for the timing of the trip is to spend time with Maddie as she’ll
be on holiday from uni, but it’s also a good excuse to see family and friends.
I’ll be meeting up with Neil Garrick-Maidment from the Seahorse Trust, he’s
been pretty helpful with the project so far so it’s going to be good to meet up
with him face to face. As well as that I got in touch with the London Zoo
seahorse breeding program and managed to get them to agree to let me pop in to
see how they do things, which I’m really looking forward to.
That’s more or less it for this week, apart from to give you
an exclusive preview of what we hope the current fry to look like at about 4
months old:
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