Reef Aquarium shows and conferences have become a very big deal in the American marine aquarium hobby and if you haven’t been to one of the big three yet, MACNA, Reefapalooza or ReefStock, you are really missing something special. Reefapalooza…
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Pseudojuloides polackorum is the newest species of pencil wrasse from South Africa
The genus Pseudojuloides constitutes a collection of fusiform torpedo shaped wrasses with chisel like incisiform teeth that are more often found living in lose sandy rubble instead of the usual coral cover. Pseudojuloides was last revised in 1981 where five new…
Centropyge abei and Chaetodon smithi: Black and yellow superstars of Waikiki
If you ever visit Hawaii and don’t stop by the Waikiki aquarium, consider yourself a felon and a convicted criminal for breaking the fish geek code. In a small public aquarium within the Waikiki neighbourhood of Honolulu lives two mega superstars of…
Steinhart Aquarium’s Caribbean display is a truly realistic representation of a biotope
Few set ups truly elicit fascination and marvel quite like those done in a biotope fashion. A biotope refers to an area of uniform environmental conditions which provides a specific niche for a particular set of organisms. Because aquarists are spoilt for choice…
Happy Taxonomist Appreciation Day!
Today, March 19th is Taxonomist Appreciation Day. This rather obscure day may not sound familiar to everyone, but it should, and hopefully it will gain a stronger following in the years to come. Today we say thank you in appreciation…
Hybrid flasher wrasses abound at Triton Bay’s Flasher Beach
When it comes to reef fish, Gerald Allen is a world renowned ichthyologist, diver and all around messiah of all marine fishes. So when Dr. Allen writes a rave review about a particular place in the world, you better take…
New island in Tonga will be a front row seat to reef development
Earlier this year a volcanic eruption began forming a new island in Tonga and it’s fairly substantial in size, considering how little time it took to form. At almost a mile long and half a mile wide, this virgin island…
Aberrant Ctenochaetus binotatus shows up with patchy skin coloration
Another surgeonfish has been collected in the wild with the strange piebald coloration that seems to be pretty common in wild surgeonfish and now we’re really getting anxious to know what this condition is, or what causes it. The genus Ctenochaetus is…
Video of crazy, never ending coral field in Japan
There’s a lot of coral awesomeness in Japan, for some reason it is home to the northernmost coral reef ever found, as well as one of the single largest coral colonies yet documented. And here again we have procured this…
PNG’s Pictichromis aurifrons from Milne Bay show a gradient of color patterns
Dottybacks are some of the quintessential reef fish; they are small, hardy, come in a myriad of colors and they are both readily available and affordable to aquarists. The other feature of dottybacks is how amenable they have been to captive…