The World’s Largest Pearl has been discovered in the Philippines and this thing weighs as much as a small child. Clocking in at around 34Kg or about 75 pounds, the huge gem was being used by a Filipino fisherman as…
Vintage
Top 10 great legacy aquarium products that are still being sold
A couple of weeks ago we lamented the fact that some pretty useless aquarium products are still widely available to purchase. Today’s piece is the flip side of that coin, with an overview of some great legacy products that you…
Some aquarium products we can’t believe are still being sold
In the early days of the reefing hobby, you could make just about any claim about the needs of aquariums and reef tanks and there’d hardly be anyone or anything to prove you otherwise. Long before the internet could come…
What a public aquarium looked like back in 1905
It is amazing how much we have progressed in the last century. When looking back at these early photographs of London’s Honiman Musuem’s first aquariums, it is even more impressive where we are today. These snapshots date back to around…
10 generations of Aqua Illumination LED lights
Aqua Illumination is the oldest aquarium company around today that has always been specifically dedicated to designing and building LED reef aquarium lights. This week we travelled to Aqua Illumination headquarters to spend some time with the crew, wrap our…
Antique coral reef illustrations will tickle your fancy
Antique coral reef illustrations In centuries past—an era absent the wonders of Google’s image search—curious naturalists were reliant on published reports for knowledge on the obscure creatures living in the far corners of the world. The scientists of this period…
Oldest Known Sponge Fossil Found In China
A newly published article documenting the discovery of a tiny fossil from Southern China is helping to expand our understanding of the very earliest stages of the evolution of multicellular animal life. (image above is Eocyathispongia. Image from Yin et al…
Can you believe some people actually used this LED light?
While beginning to clear out the fish room this weekend we stumbled this interesting ‘relic’ from the dawn of LED lighting over our aquariums. This weird slab of aluminum and large light emitting diodes is the ALED or ‘Aquarium LED’ which…
An afternoon with Dr. Anthony Gill and the Macleay Museum of Sydney
The final installation of our Australian trip recount adjourns with the meeting of Dr. Anthony Gill at the Macleay Museum of Sydney. If you remembered, we took a little trip to Cairns recently where we had the privilege of seeing the wonderful…
Caribbean Coral Reefs used to be made up of fields of coral
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…