June 29 - hatching has begun!

Just in time! I just looked in the tank and saw 4 larvae swimming around! Yay! We're going to be out of town for a couple of days and I thought I was going to completely miss it. Video to follow!

June 25 - omg

While eating a leisurely breakfast this morning I noticed the magenta Biospira bottle on the table. Oh nooooooo! I poured it into the tank and waited an hour or so before checking the chemicals in the tank. All were fine. Which makes sense, you don't really have to worry about nitrogen compounds until the hsc's are eating and pooping but the bacteria do need time to settle in. Now, the associated issue is that I dumped in the whole bottle instead of just half. I'm not sure what that will mean but the bottle said it was okay to do that so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

(.5 hours spent checking chemicals in tank)

June 24 - Rolling rolling rolling...

5 hsc eggs in this photo; look closely at the lowest
one on the sand - you can kind of see legs

Horseshoe crab eggs still in the eggs and in a plastic
spoon. If you squint your eyes you can see
legs sticking up from the one at the farthest left.

A close-up - now you can pretty clearly see the legs sticking up
in the egg in the lower left as well as maybe some legs
in the other eggs. Screen shots - what fun!

Pretty exciting day in the hsc tank world. I decided to take a few of the eggs out of the tank and get a closer look. I've had the eggs for 10 days now and they were looking different - more transparent around the edges - so I took some photos and a video with my iPhone. It was amazing! As my daughter said, "They look like little mushrooms," and indeed they do. The most astonishing thing to me, though, was that each of the 4 eggs was moving around on its own - rolling around! The water in the spoon wasn't moving and the spoon was on a table on the floor but they were tumbling around. 

The above picture is from May when I got to go to the Delaware Bay with the Green Eggs and Sand program. Here's what brand new, just laid horseshoe crab eggs look like, so you can compare.

(2.5 hours: mostly spent on photography and blog design)

June 20 - green eggs and tank

This morning, the tank looked pretty clear so I transferred the eggs from the aerated bucket to the tank - also aerated. It looks a bit murky in the video but that's because I took some of the sand out and stirred things up again in the process. It was a bit tricky washing the bucket out with conditioned water and hoping not to damage eggs in the process but they're all there. Now it's a waiting game. Good luck little eggs!

(2 hours: additional work with water and transferring sand, taking the video, changing blog format/design)

June 18 - coarser sand needed

When I checked the tank this morning, the water wasn't completely clear. It dawned on me that, based on my handling of the very fine sand, that perhaps this was not the best sand to use. It packed together too tightly and how would the baby horseshoe crabs dig in it? So - I went to the local aquarium store, got coarser sand, removed the fine sand from the tank (thank you WW spoons, you were perfect for the job), checked the salinity, added the new sand (which was dry), cleaned the foam filter in 10 ppt water that was treated for chlorides (the foam was loaded with silt), and hooked up the filter again. It is bubbling away with the eggs still in the bucket, awaiting transfer when things settle down and I add the Biospira. Whew! I think this was worth doing but it has been a fair bit of work.

(3 hours: finding coarser sand, cleaning out the aquarium, testing water)

June 17 - Sand!

The eggs are still in the bucket of 10 ppt salinity water. The aerator is bubbling away. Yesterday I bought "live" sand for salt water tanks at an aquarium store and today I got the tank set up and will transfer the eggs to the tank tomorrow.

The bag of sand had a lot of water in it and I didn't know the salinity of that water. I didn't want to dump the sand in the 10 ppt water I had made on Friday because I didn't want the salinity to spike. So I put some sand in a quart container of plain tap water that had been treated for chlorides. The salinity was about 20. Ah! Good thing I didn't just dump the sand in the tank without checking. I drained maybe 2 pounds of the sand using coffee filters in a sieve. I added the drained sand to the bucket with plain water and found that the salinity was maybe 2 ppt. This led to adding about 1/2 cup of ocean salt to the bucket of plain water. After stirring it (it was very cloudy), I checked the salinity and it was fine. Yay!

The water is really cloudy - see photo - so I resurrected the water filter. I had wanted to change the foam filter but there weren't any at the aquarium store so this will have to do. The filter should remove the silt by tomorrow. I'll add the Biospira tomorrow and the eggs!


The top show how cloudy the water is. You can kind of see the aerator stone but that's it. The bottom photo is a side view and you can see the big blob that is the water filer. Here's hoping this looks clean tomorrow!

(4 hours: finding aquarium sand, testing for salinity of water and water from sand, mixing water, setting up aquarium, cleaning filer)

June 15 - Day 1

Today I got about 200 horseshoe crab eggs from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources in Annapolis, Maryland. They look like very fresh eggs - just hard little green balls, no gel around them. Very exciting! There will be NO FUNGUS this year. There will live horseshoe crabs this year, all year!

(4 hours getting 10ppt saline water ready, round trip travel to Annapolis, setting up blog)