Wanting Versus Needing While my daughter was at home for Spring Break, one of her most frequent refrains was “I need this” or “I will die without that”. As a parent one of the things I tried to…
Nothing Better Than A Nice Bare Bottom
Sand Bed or Bare Bottom? In the aquarium hobby, one of the most significant debates when building your reef tank is to decide a bare bottom or to use a live sand bed. Let’s discuss the benefits and disadvantages of…
Looking Forward To The Future Of The Aquarium Hobby
Things I’m Looking Forward To While going through some old books and magazines I came across a poster for MACNA from over twenty years ago, it made me laugh as the topic of my talk was “The Future of the…
Living the Reef Life Part Two
Recently I have tried to go back in time and enjoy one of the aspects of hobby that I really miss: the road trip. As I discussed in an article last year, one of the things that the internet has…
Reef Tanks Can Suffer From Too Much of a Good Thing
By now we have all probably heard the quote from St. Bernard that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. That seems to be an especially appropriate quote for this hobby where it seems that often when we…
ReefStock Pulled Out All The Stops For Its 10th Year
After having been to and spoken at virtually every reef show that has occurred in North America over the past 30 years I may be a bit jaded in terms of what I expect at a…
Safeguarding Your Aquarium With Redundant Design
Redundancy We have all been admonished by the phrase at some point in our lives “Don’t be redundant. To most that simply means don’t say something twice. By definition it also means don’t exceed what is necessary or…
Using Trace Elements In Saltwater Aquariums
Trace Elements There was an old commercial jingle that ended with “because little things mean a lot”. As we all know in this hobby that is a definite truism. Whether it is doing the little…
The Modern Reef Aquarium Fish Room
One of the notions that most of us are familiar with is the “man cave”. This room of the house is usually dedicated to our enjoyment of sports, large television screens and adult beverages. In the best of circumstances, it…
Milestones & Pioneers of The Reef Aquarium Hobby
Between the inauguration last week and Martin Luther King Day, you could not turn on anything without hearing the phrase “Events that shaped history”. That got me to thinking about the events that shaped the reef aquarium hobby. While I…