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…

Caribbean Coral Diaries – Mussa angulosa

Spiny Flower Coral Mussa angulosa is a large polyp stony coral found in turbid Caribbean reefs. This coral has fleshy polyps which can grow in groups or as a single polyp. The polyps can be up to 10cm or 4inches…

Homophyllia bowerbanki, a reintroduction to ‘Bankies’ and ‘Hillae’

It’s been nearly a year now since the familiar Australian ‘Scolymia’ and Bowerbankis were removed from Acanthastrea and placed into their own new genus Homophyllia. Unsurprisingly, most reefers still call them ‘Acans’ by convention, but there is a lot that we…

Exploring Coral Reefs In Grand Cayman
Cayman Islands Reefs South of Cuba, where the Caribbean and North American tectonic plates meet, lies Grand Cayman a divers paradise surrounded by deep walls, crystal clear water, and miles of coral reef. Grand Cayman is the largest of the three…
Wild 4-Way Homophyllia coral is four times the Scoly

What you are seeing here is a very peculiar coral, both in color, pattern, and especially the fact that there are four corallites growing closely into a mini colony. This head-scratching and head-turning coral was collected in Australia by Ultra…

Some Refreshingly Exotic LPS Corals From Pacific East Aquaculture

At any given time in the marine aquarium hobby, the community’s attention tends to focus one a particular group of corals, hyping up their demand and balooning their prices. This phenomenon is a double edged sword in that right now,…

Recent trip to Japan Part 1: Visiting Aqua Gift in Osaka prefecture

Recently my family and I traveled to Japan to see our parents, but at the same time I had opportunities to visit two aquarium shops in Japan.  One of them is Aqua Gift in Osaka prefecture and other one is…

How to Frag LPS Corals

LPS corals are morphologically one of the most diverse groups of corals; they come in a broad range of shapes, colors, and textures. While many may assume that Euphyllias and meat-like corals are soft corals, they actually have a skeleton underneath…

Couple of Great Homophyllia australis at World Wide Corals

Homophyllia might have taken over as the name for Scolymia but that doesn’t mean we’ve lost any love for the ‘Australis’ doughnut coral. Hundreds of these corals are exported from Australia every week, and by and large, every single one of…

Spectacular Reef Tank of José Elias Castro in the Dominican Republic
This jam-packed reef tank comes to us from José Elias Castro in the Dominican Republic. This 400 gallon tank is stocked with over 60 fish and just about every coral you could wish for. For water movement, Elias uses a VorTech…