I received the (red-eye) delivery of my new moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) in the wee hours of the night a couple days ago. It is very exciting, as I've been hunting around and waiting for them for quite some time and finally found a supplier out of Hawaii that had them on their stocklist.
They all had some measure of tissue damage or tears in their bells. I think they were caused from small amounts of air in the shipping bags that probably ended up as small bubbles through rough handling by the airline and lodged in the jellyfish's tissue which it started to decompose. But after a couple days, they are healing nicely. Two of the three jellyfish have inverted their bells which is probably due to temperature or salinity shock (even after three hours of careful acclimatization). I've been increasing the temperature in the tank (from 68.5f) slowly and they seem to be responding well to that. One is almost all back to normal and the other is still noticeably inverted but much better than it was on the first night.
The tank is functioning really well. I've set-up a couple of jellyfish tanks in the past but this was the first one that I did the construction/modification and plumbing by myself. The jellies are kept mostly suspended in the middle of the tank or riding the water 'merry-go-round' around the perimeter of the tank being pushed by the laminar water flow. Happily, the flow is almost perfect and the jellies very rarely touch the sides of the tank.
There is however a little corner that is not covered by the spray bar and I've seen one of the jellyfish get (temporarily) stuck there. I'm going to have redo the spray bar configuration soon.
I shot this video on the first day they were here. You can seen the bell inversion on the two. They look significantly better now. I'm probably going to get out the video camera as soon as I get a chance for an update.
[video=youtube_share;015u83P8fU8]http://youtu.be/015u83P8fU8[/video]
I'll keep anyone who's interested posted. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask.
They all had some measure of tissue damage or tears in their bells. I think they were caused from small amounts of air in the shipping bags that probably ended up as small bubbles through rough handling by the airline and lodged in the jellyfish's tissue which it started to decompose. But after a couple days, they are healing nicely. Two of the three jellyfish have inverted their bells which is probably due to temperature or salinity shock (even after three hours of careful acclimatization). I've been increasing the temperature in the tank (from 68.5f) slowly and they seem to be responding well to that. One is almost all back to normal and the other is still noticeably inverted but much better than it was on the first night.
The tank is functioning really well. I've set-up a couple of jellyfish tanks in the past but this was the first one that I did the construction/modification and plumbing by myself. The jellies are kept mostly suspended in the middle of the tank or riding the water 'merry-go-round' around the perimeter of the tank being pushed by the laminar water flow. Happily, the flow is almost perfect and the jellies very rarely touch the sides of the tank.
There is however a little corner that is not covered by the spray bar and I've seen one of the jellyfish get (temporarily) stuck there. I'm going to have redo the spray bar configuration soon.
I shot this video on the first day they were here. You can seen the bell inversion on the two. They look significantly better now. I'm probably going to get out the video camera as soon as I get a chance for an update.
[video=youtube_share;015u83P8fU8]http://youtu.be/015u83P8fU8[/video]
I'll keep anyone who's interested posted. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask.