From the people who brought you chill Krill Waves Radio comes our new KrillER Waves Radio: one hour of skeleton shrimp and metal music to headbang to! 🤘🎵
Skip the relaxing lofi music and unleash your inner metal enthusiast — it’s all about screaming out and banging our heads with skeleton shrimps as we hold tight to the unpredictable currents that we call life.
Olive’s Wet Beast Fact: Also known as the Lionfish, this invasive and venomous fish was originally from the Indian Ocean, but is now a highly invasive species destroying Caribbean reefs. What a good metaphor for the holidays.
I want to draw trans clownfish sunny so here it is
(@inkysanctuary hi hello thank you for the fun facts!!!!! I have a tons of ideas based these so I’ll be separating the ask into small pieces for different posts!)
I work at an aquarium and today I was out by an exhibit with a table of shark artifacts(jaws, eggs, teeth) telling people about sharks. About an hour into my shift a teenager visiting with their friend saw me, gasped, pointed, and their hands immediately started flapping. They came over and I got to tell them all my shark facts instead of just the ones kids find the most interesting and when they left we both had the biggest smiles on our faces. I love my job so much
Is keeping sea slugs difficult? I love them and probably won't get them anytime soon because cats but if I ever do...
i’d say it’s pretty difficult, yeah. depends on what species you’re looking at, but all nudibranchs (and ‘things-that-get-labeled-as-nudibranchs-even-though-they-technically-aren’t, like the blue velvet slugs i just got) are very picky eaters and will often Exclusively eat one type of food down to species. the ‘easiest’ are probably lettuce slugs, as they’re algae grazers, but even then some say they’ll only eat certain species of macroalgae.
i have two species of slugs in my nano reef right now— berghia nudibranchs and the blue velvet slugs. i bought them because i have an excess of pest animals that they both prey on exclusively (aiptasia anemones for the berghia and flatworms for the velvets) and can’t control these pests via chemical means (for the safety of the other animals in my tank) or mechanical (they’re very hard to fully remove and i have hand tremors anyway), but it’s often accepted that if you don’t have a good supply of what these guys eat, they’ll starve to death pretty fast.
of the two, i’d honestly say the berghia nudis are generally easier to keep - lot of people will breed them and just keep a separate tank full of aiptasia to feed them with, since they’re very fast growing anemones. blue velvets are a bit harder because they’ve got short lifespans as-is and flatworms are hard to get ahold of except for by accident, while some people purposefully culture and sell aiptasia as feeders.
i’m taking a STRONG gamble with my slugs, and honestly i’m only doing it because i have a fair amount of confidence in my ability to maintain good water conditions, but even then it’s not bulletproof. they’re one of those things where even if you do everything “right”, they still might not thrive because we don’t really know them as well as we know, say, shrimp or corals just yet. for me this is really my only option for handling my flatworm problem, so i’m taking that risk, but it may not work out and i’m prepared for that outcome.
i’m hoping the will continue to improve when it comes to getting better at keeping and breeding these animals, though, because they’re very cool! while i can’t say i’d want to see them wild-caught in the pet trade, the ability to aquaculture them would be a huge step. and it would be wonderful to see them in aquariums more often :)