Our BESRC tank consists of a 65 gallon saltwater tank, with dead coral pieces, rocks and crushed coral as a substrate. The tank has both artificial and live marine plants and while we have several fish, our primary focus is on invertebrates. We have both a Millineum 2000 and Fluval filter on the tank, which is located in the Media Center at Brown Elementary School in St. Joseph, Michigan, USA. Many thanks to Michael Martin at Cedar Eden Environmental for helping us to set up the web cam and modify html code he wrote for displaying and archiving the images.
Why a web cam?
The BESRC web cam was established because we have lots of interesting critters in our tank that only come out at night or that our students may want to check in on from time to time over weekends or vacations. We all wondered WHAT on earth that horse shoe crab was doing in the middle of the night, because EVERY morning our gravel was completely rearranged! Plus, there are some really cool web cams on other marine tanks and aquariums across the country, like the shark tank at Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida. We wanted our students to be able to experience those as well (they are listed on our main BESRC page at the bottom)
Why the Media Center?
The marine reef tank in the Brown Elementary School Media Center was established so our students could experience what the gulf coast salt flat marine ecosystem was like. Many of our students have never been to the ocean. It was set up permanently in 2001 in the media center to allow all students to be able to experience it and to avoid the problems associated with changing temperature (the media center is climate controlled for the most part) and setting a marine tank up and tearing it down every school year. Mrs. Mundy, the school media specialist, generously helps maintain the tank every day, and we have some animals in the tank that are several years old!
Why Isn't BESRC Crystal Clear Like Most Fish Tanks?!
Our reef tank is exactly what its name implies. It's a semi-contained ecosystem (called a microcosm) that has all the elements of the natural ecosystem except the predators (that is, fish and invertebrates that eat other fish and invertebrates!). We have small microscopic algae, larger algae you can see, larger plants, bacteria, invertebrates that live in the crushed coral on the bottom and on the sides and then all sorts of animals that we add, like the anemones, crabs, sea apple and fish. If you were lift a big rock, you would find all sorts of worms and creepy crawly things under the rock that help keep our tank balanced. We only keep the algae off of the front of the tank and the end where the web cam is, otherwise, we try to balance our animals and plants so that we don't have to clean the inside of the tank very often. We follow a weekly feeding schedule that makes sure all our different animals get fed what they need, when they need it. Tank food includes fish flakes, dried red algae sheets, phytoplankton, zooplankton and krill. Many of our animals graze the plants and algae in the tank as well. Our biggest problem comes from the invertebrates that like to rummage through the crushed coral (like the horse shoe crab and the sand star), stirring up the fine sediments and making the water cloudy. That means that we have to change the filters every few days to keep the water reasonably clear. Otherwise our tank is pretty stable and the tank more closely resembles what the animals and plants would live in out in the natural marine environment. Most of our animals naturally appear in salt flats, turtle grass beds and shallow reefs near shore along the gulf coast of Florida.
Where do we get our animals and plants from?
We get our animals and plants from three primary sources. Locally, we get most of our fish and some of our big or macro-algae, and the other invertebrates and sea grass or macrophytes, we got from Gulf Specimen, an education/research oriented non-profit organization located in Panacea, Florida. Gulf Specimen houses a series of special aquariums and touch tanks containing over 30,000 gallons of sea water. They specialize in invertebrates that live along the northern Florida coast in the sea grass meadows and lime outcrops. Like in our reef tank, Gulf Specimen provides an opportunity to see and touch up to 200 different species of invertebrates and fish that most people don't even realized are living out in the sea meadows. We also get animals, sponges and macroalgae from SeaLife, Inc (an on-line marine specimen supplier). These are not necessarily the flashy fish you might see in a typical marine collector's tank, but rather the huge variety of animals that actually inhabit the majority of the gulf coast's shallow water habitats. Gulf Specimen has been extremely helpful in guiding us in building and maintaining our reef tank.
