The concept of shifting baselines is an important one in reef ecology which basically describes how successive generations of researchers have their own ideas of what constitutes a healthy or a natural reef. Nowhere is this concept more important than…
Coral
Top 7 rainbow SPS and Acropora corals
As stated in a previous post on rainbow corals, a plethora of colors are not too difficult to find in the LPS corals of today. It is evident that this is an exciting time to be in the marine aquarium hobby. What…
Tank Profile: Marco Pardun’s 104-gallon Room Divider Triton Reef
When I first came across this aquarium, it caught my eyes for a variety of reasons. First and foremost was the variety of color in its inhabitants. Next is the fact that it is a room divider (something I’ve always…
Rainbow Stylocoeniella was THE diamond in the rough of MACNA 2013
Yesterday’s post on the master list of rainbow corals in aquariums was started in part by our visit to the World Wide Corals Farm. But that write up got us asking coral people if there is such a thing as a…
Rainbow Corals: The Master Aquarium List
Twenty years ago, “mini reef hobbyists” were lucky to get corals in a particularly juicy shade of brown, and if they were lucky there might be a hint of green in an elegance coral or trachyphyllia. But this is 2015…
Bellevue H.S. Marine Science Lab Expands
Last year I introduced you to David Bowers and the incredible marine science classroom laboratory he runs at Bellevue High School in Ohio, USA. Over the last 20 years, David and his students have transformed the humble classroom from a…
Beautiful colony of rare Madracis spotted at World Wide Corals
As the coral enthusiasts that we are, we live for the rare, the unusual, and the corals that are otherwise challenging to identify. Case in point is this super neat Madracis coral that we spied at the World Wide Corals Farm…
“Eclectus” mushroom anemone takes Jawbreaker shrooms to a whole new level
The Jawbreaker mushroom is the strain of ‘Discosoma’ which single handedly showed us that mushroom anemones could be a striking aquarium animal and that Corallimorphs have plenty of strains worth collecting. The new Eclectus mushrooms from Bali aquarium raise the bar once…
Montipora caliculata is a species that really deserve more aquarium attention
There are over 70 species of Montipora described to date, with some of the widespread species being diverse enough to be divided into further sub-taxonomic units. The lion’s share of the “Montis” grown in the aquarium hobby are represented by only…
Tank Profile: Brian Babcock’s SPS-dominated Reef
With towering pillars of small-polyp stony corals framed against a spotless blue background, this aquarium makes me feel as though I’ve been plopped down smack dab in the middle of a coral reef, peering into the blue abyss beyond. Being…