From time-to-time, we start poking around all the thousands of posts we’ve written and we remember some of the cool stuff we’ve seen, written or created. This article originally appeared in January 2012 and it got us thinking, what cool things have you created to help you out around the aquarium? Here is a cool, custom glass pot Jake had created to rinse and feed PE Mysis shrimp in his system.
If you feed very fatty, nutritious frozen foods to your fish and reef aquarium inhabitants you know that feeding will invariably collapse your protein skimmer. Worse still, feeding frozen PE Mysis shrimp without rinsing it is like a mini-homicide on your protein skimmer’s ability to produce foam, not to mention all the oils and juices that end up mostly polluting the water, fueling algae growth etc.
There are a lot of aquarists that rinse their PE Mysis shrimp prior to feeding but if you feed everyday, that one minute transfer between the rinsing net or filter can make you want to reach for the pellets instead. To that end we comissioned a simple small glass pot to be built with a small comb on one side so that we could thaw, rinse and feed in a single fluid motion.
The small handmade glass strainer pot isn’t a revolution but it sure does encourage me to feed PE Mysis to my fish more often with less fear of fouling the water and collapsing the protein skimmer. A follow up version of the frozen fish food strainer pot will actually be a little bit larger, with the strainer comb higher and closer to the lip and it will also have a lid so that thawed-frozen food can be kept refriegerated for a couple days without drying.
