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Friday 11 April 2014

64 Litre "Forest Edge" Tank - Week 36 Update

Added a group of Corbicula Fluminea (aka Golden Clam) to the tank...


I've actually been keeping them for the past few months in another sand-based tank, but its currently being rescaped, so i transferred them over to this tank.

I wasn't keen on letting them dig into the soil substrate in this tank and mess up the plants though, so i created a suspended "sand bed" for them to live in. Its basically made from an acrylic feeding dish filled with a layer of sand and attached to the glass wall.

The sand bed is positioned in the path of the filter flow, as these clams are micro filter feeders and do best with water constantly circulating around them.

Here is a close-up photo of the clams in their sand bed...


These clams are quite active creatures, they will move around the dish and dig into the sand using their "foot"... but they aren't able to climb over the edge of the dish (and disappear into the plants and soil below), so its much easier to keep and observe them this way. :)

8 comments:

  1. Hi! Where did you buy the clams? how you make the stopper to the food dish?

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    1. I bought the golden clams from Clementi Florist and Aquarium (aka C328) in Singapore.

      The acrylic food dish actually comes with an acrylic nut and bolt which is designed to be attached to a feeding tube, but i simply used a suction cup of the appropriate size to attach it instead. :)

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  2. how are the clams doing today? any noticeable growth?

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    1. Well, i've since given them away to a friend to put in his tank, so they are no longer with me anymore.

      But for the duration of 6+ months they were in my tanks, i did notice that they grew abit, but very slowly. :)

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  3. Nice idea of making a separe sand pool for clams! I used to keep clams in the past and I faced a problem of proper feeding. I figure they would suffer continouse food deficiency in a sterile tanks similar to those you showed above. How did you feed them?

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    1. Yeah, i guess it depends on how established the tank is... the vital thing these filter feeders need is a good population of suspended phytoplankton and zooplankton in the water column, not necessarily a "dirty" tank, but mainly a tank with a stable biologically rich ecosystem.

      Densely planted tanks that have been running for more than 6 months would usually have achieved that sort of ecosystem, so its possible for clams to live and thrive in those environments.

      The size of the clams vs tank size also matters too, the ones i kept were small juveniles (less than 1 cm in size), so they require much less food to sustain their growth, compared to larger adult clams.

      As of now, i've kept those clams in the photo for more than a year and they have since been transferred and distributed across different tanks over that period of time, many of them have grown noticeably larger so i guess it indicates they managed to filter enough food to maintain their growth so far. :)

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  4. It means you never added any food for them only? well noted about sufficiency of ecosystem.
    My tanks were rather dirty community tanks and clams lived there more than a year till I added a medication against planaria. All other molluscs (tuberculata, granifers, physas, planorbis) survived with no harm to population.

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    1. Yeah, i never specifically target fed them... the clams just filtered their food from the water column, i guess my tanks have sufficient suspended food supply for them to consume.

      I do try to cordon and position the clams directly in the path of fast water flow from the filter output though, so that probably helps making things easier for them.

      Specialized filter feeders like clams are indeed very susceptible to dosed medications or treatments as they ingest it directly from the water column, so it affects them much more severely. The other molluscs and snails can withstand and tolerate those dosed treatments much better, so they don't encounter as much issues.

      For this reason, if i have to medicate or treat a tank, i usually shift the clams to another tank to live temporarily.

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