Coconuts Revisted
Joseph W. Gardner
July 1998 Issue 15
Back in the late ‘70, just after I got out of the Navy, I wrote an article for TFH about preparing coconut shells for the aquarium. I had had the misfortune of spending hours trying to scrape out the meat. It was slow and tedious work. I used to leave the suckers in the refrigerator for 2 - 3 months and then cut them in half. It was much easier to do it that way because the meat dried out and essentially just fell out of the coconut shell when I cut it in two.
It is now 20 years later and I’ve developed some new techniques. What I now do is drain the milk (my kids like coconut milk), cut or break the coconut in half along the scoring place in the coconut for that purpose and place them in the oven at about 150F for about 1 1/2 hours. This slowly dries out the coconut meat and if I don’t have the temperature too high, the shell does not crack. If you go with a too high a temperature, the meat swells and cracks the shell. Slower cooking works better. Then you take the coconut shells out of the oven and check them to see if the coconut meat has pulled away from the shell. Hopefully, it has, or at worst only needs a little help to be pulled out. If it is not ready, just put it back into the oven and let it dry out some more. After you’ve separated the meat from the shells, you can eat the meat. My kids like to eat the warm coconut meat because it is like toasted coconut but not shredded.
In the summer time, you could probably cut or break the coconut in half and set them in the sunlight to dry out. This will not cost you anything in terms of electricity or gas like the above method will. In Michigan’s climate, most of the year will be too cold or cloudy or both to try this out.
Anyway, once the shells are free of the coconut meat, you can take a hack saw cut a small triangular hole near the top of shell. You can also use a wood drilling bit and get round holes of various sizes - your choice of the size though you probably want it to get it fairly close to the size of the fish you are trying to breed. Once you get the coconut shell, boil it. This will reduce the amount of tannic acid. If you have fish which need very acidic water you can skip the boiling part. Cave spawners like kribs, apistogrammas, badis badis, etc. seem to like this situation. In addition, fish, like tetras which require or appreciate soft water benefit because the coconut shell assists in making the water more acidic. In addition, I personally like coconut shells because they look more natural in my tanks and I really do not like ceramic substitutes. So, if you would like to try and use coconut shells for breeding or for aesthetic reasons try this method out. It should save you hours of scraping. The End