Tridacna derasa: A Good Excuse to Clam Up!

Of all the Tridacna spp. clams available to hobbyists, perhaps the hardiest and easiest to maintain of them all is Tridacna derasa, the so-called smooth giant clam. This species is so smooth, in fact, that amorous, gold-chain-wearing male specimens have…

Rare double fin firefish makes its way to House of Fins

A rare double-finned common firefish has just made its way to the aquarium hobby and it’s quite the attention grabber. If there’s one thing that firefish are well known for, it’s that prominent first dorsal fin. So you can imagine…

3.4 Fairy Wrasses: The filamentosus group

The filamentosus group presents the reader with a collection of familiar, aquarium-friendly species, many of which are exuberantly colored and morphologically quirky. Despite some superficial differences in colors and fin shapes, the overall morphology strongly implies that this is the…

Sometimes You Need to Overfeed Your Fish

You’ve heard time and again, here at Saltwater Smarts and elsewhere, that overfeeding is one of the surest ways to cause ill health in fish and pollute your aquarium water. The usual recommendation is to offer foods in very small…

Life Rock Frag Zone From CaribSea will hide your frags

CaribSea the long time aggregate company announced the availability of their new Life Rock Frag Zone pack. Life Rock Frag Zone is coated calcium carbonate that it said to make fragging easy. Small fragging pieces are colored to look like…

Pax Bellum ARID Filter review: the most ‘intense’ way to grow Chaetomorpha

They say that everything that is old will be new again, and this statement couldn’t ring any more true for the Pax Bellum ARID Chaetomorpha filters. In the early days of successful reef keeping, algae scrubbers and phyto-remediation was the state…

Marine Aquarium Water Changes: Don’t Postpone the Personal Payoff!

Yesterday, I finally got around to performing an overdue water change in my 125-gallon tank. Admiring the fruits of my labor afterward, I couldn’t help wondering, “Why on earth do I wait so long to do these when the result…

The cutest new species of slippery goby, Lubricogobius nanus

It’s been a hot minute since we saw some new species of reef fish being described and so this next new species from Papua New Guinea is here to make sure we don’t go without. Lubricogobius nanus is a small species…

SeaWorld overhauls tanks, begins transition to more interactive orca experience

Coming off the heels of yesterday’s news that SeaWorld San Diego will begin phasing out the live orca shows in favor of more natural, informational experience, the team started retrofitting the killer whale tanks to support this new direction. In…

True pink Nephthea is Japan’s best kept secret

There’s a gorgeous pink Nephthea soft coral that seems really common in Japanese reef tanks, but yet seems virtually unknown in American or European reef aquariums. We’ve been drooling over the pink Nephthea that can be seen in many photos of…