Not a Pipe Dream

This is a pipe commonly used in the 1700's - and is also the inspiration for the name of one of my favorite fishes, the Pipefish! I currently have 2 Bay pipefishes that are getting along very well in their special tank. While I hope to have baby pipefishes if that is possible, my tank may not be tall enough. Part of the mating ritual involves the female courting the male (!) and depositing her eggs into a pouch on the underside of the male, just like seahorses. This is accomplished while rising up in the water column, and my tank may not be tall enough. It's a long shot, but who knows?

The male pipefish is the one brooding the eggs, nourishing them with a placenta-like structure inside the pouch. Interestingly, this may give the babies some extra immunity from both the mother, through the egg, and the father, through the placenta.The baby pipefishes emerge fully formed with no egg sac and can start eating right away. I am raising baby brine shrimp and copepods (tiny crustaceans) for the adults. Pipefish have tiny mouths with no teeth and quickly slurp up their prey by opening their mouths quickly. Part of the difficulty in keeping them is that they have such a short digestive tract that they have to eat quite frequently. I have them in their own aquarium so that I can keep the filter off most of the day while the aquarium is full of food, and turning it back on at night. All their food would quickly get sucked into the filter otherwise, before they had a chance to eat it. Bay pipefish don't swim well - they only have a small fin on their backs. They steer by turning their heads where they want to go. They live in eelgrass, and most of the time they are swimming vertically, looking just like the grass. It helps them fool the predators.

Here's some more pics of the routine in taking care of these critters:

Here are the two of them - pretending to be eelgrass.

Here's one of their favorite foods - a copepod! This one has an egg sac. Remember the character Plankton from Spongebob Squarepants, with one eye? Yup, he's a copepod.

Here's the jars I keep outside to keep the algae growing that is feeding the copepods.

Here is a close-up of the copepods, smaller than a pin head.

Who can resist that face?