To keep a reef aquarium is to understand that a closed system growing corals is never static, it is ever changing, growing, regressing, progressing. The first few years can be challenging as the system settles in and corals grow to…
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Steinhart’s trick to decompress fish showcased on PBS
You might recall the hyperbaric chamber designed by scientists at the California Academy of Sciences Steinhart Aquarium. A recent story done by KQED-TV, the local PBS station in San Francisco, showcases the engineering needed to bring fish to the surface…
Opulent Osaka Part 4: A BlueHarbor tribute, and the man behind the brand
We’ve come to our last and final installation of our four part Osaka travelogue. If you’ve been following parts 1, 2 and 3, we hope you’ve enjoyed it, and thank you for exploring some of Osaka’s most opulent reef keepers…
Bulk Reef Supply demonstrates that toxic Chloramine IS getting through most water filters
Chloramine is a well-documented toxin to all manner of aquatic life, freshwater and marine, and aquarists have long believed that basic reverse osmosis is good enough to eliminate Chloramine from our water supply. Pre-treatment with carbon blocks and post-treatment with deionizing…
Review of the DoS Fluid Metering System by Neptune Systems
Historically speaking, the real big advancements in the aquarium hobby have always been in step with the development of new and better ways to move water. In the early 1900s, air driven aquarium devices radically changed the way we keep aquariums. Ensuing…
Tridacna costata, a close look at this rarely seen Indian Ocean clam species
Compared to corals, there are only a few giant clam species we get to appreciate in the home aquarium so it’s really exciting when we get new species like Tridacna noae and Tridacna ningaloo, but it’s also super cool to…
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…
Kessil A160we LED spotlight review: the best gets even better
When it comes to LED spotlights for our aquariums, there’s basically Kessil, and everybody else. Where nearly all other manufacturers have focused their efforts on building essentially the same tablet-shaped fixture with varying colors and intensities of diodes and a…
Top 10 new fish species of 2014
The last few years have been really hot ones for the discovery and description of new reef fish species and 2014 was no slouch either. Sometimes it seems like new species descriptions are dominated by dwarf gobies of the Eviota and Trimma genera,…