Avatar
Christine Williams
6 Articles0 Comments

Chinese Tanker runs aground near Great Barrier Reef

A tanker ship filled with 950 tons of oil  and 65 thousand tons of coal has run aground 70 miles east of Great Keppel Island, northeast of Australia. Some oil has leaked from the vessel already, and authorities fear the…

Combinations of botanical extracts can kill Ich

Every aquarist is familiar with the signs of Ich, Cryptocaryon irritans: white spots covering the surface of a fish that look like salt. These white spots are places where the Ich parasite, a ciliate, ahs burrowed beneath the surface of…

How do you camouflage yourself but stand out with your friends? Ask a cuttle, Part 1

Mantis shrimp are not the only marine organisms to take advantage of polarized light in communication and defense; in fact, it can be argued that the cuttlefish pulls even more amazing stunts—camouflaging itself from predators while sending colored light signals invisible to everyone except other cuttles—all while only being able to see the color green. So how, and more importantly why, do they accomplish this?

Silica Dosing: reef blasphemy or another form of nutrient export?

It has been long held that silica in reef tanks is bad, very, very bad. We avoid beach and play sand like it’s poison because it is believed that silica will cause an undesirable diatom bloom: brown glass, brown gook on rock and substrates, and unhappy reefkeepers. But what if we could control this system and use it to our advantage…say, to increase nutrient export? Let’s take a look at some old data, some new data, and a controversial hypothesis: that dosing silica may increase nutrient export efficiency.

Even reef fish like a good massage

Nothing beats a good spa treatment to erase the tension of a tough week at work—the manicure, pedicure, massage…the works. Reef fishes (and not just the females) know how to benefit from a little pampering at stations manned by cleaner…

Are Yellow and Scopas tangs more than kissing cousins?

Sometimes the best discoveries in science are happy accidents, and this year researchers at the Canadian Centre for DNA Barcoding uncovered some genetic data which supports ideas that hobbyists have been suspecting for years: namely, that some fishes we assumed…