With its dark-brown body covered with a myriad of tiny white to pale-blue dots, the marine betta, a.k.a comet (Calloplesiops altivelis) is truly a dazzling sight to behold. Start out with a healthy specimen, and you’ll find it’s also a…
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Harlequin Shrimps: Seeing Stars (On the Menu)
Somewhat comical and cartoonish in both name and appearance, harlequin shrimps (Hymenocera picta) are not invertebrates to be purchased on a whim. Keeping these critters, as I’ll soon explain, demands an investment of cash and effort that not every marine…
DIY Marine Aquarium Chiller
Aquatic creatures, with the exception of mammals, are all cold-blooded animals. Some sharks and tuna slightly warm their blood through the movement of their muscles, but we don’t normally keep pelagic sharks or tuna in our tanks, so we don’t…
Convict chalice Echinophyllia documented in its natural habitat
Convict chalice corals are specimens of Echinophyllia plating colonies with a very distinctive series of stripes running usually from the edge of the oral disc (mouth) to the colonie’s edges. The lines of convict chalice corals can be very dark, or…
Get ready for lots of exciting stories from the Fluval Sea Flores Expedition
We’re back from the Flores Sea with loads of exciting observations and documentation on the reefs of this part of Indonesia. With support from Fluval Sea and no less than nine months of planning, we succeeded in diving and surveying and…
Calcium: A Critical Element in Reef Aquariums
The stony corals, crustaceans, mollusks, and echinoderms in our marine aquariums depend on it to build their skeletons/shells/tests. Soft corals use it to build supportive structures, called sclerites, in their tissues. Of course, without it, you’ll never get a nice…
The secret of Disco Clams? Mirror balls
A graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley has uncovered the mystery to what allows the electric or disco clam to dazzle us with its light show. You would think there is some bioluminescence or other chemical reaction taking…
Dig Those Crazy Pajama Cardinalfish!
A hardy, peaceful, wildly patterned species, the pajama cardinalfish (Sphaeramia nematoptera) makes a great choice for novice and experienced marine aquarists alike. Owing to its very manageable adult size, it’s a great candidate for modest-sized systems, and like many of…
MACNA adds trio of pioneering marine scientists to speaker lineup
MACNA 2014 just got a little better with the addition of three pioneering marine scientists to its already impressive speaker lineup. The Board of Directors just announced the addition of these three speakers: Dr. Todd LaJeunesse (a pioneer in the field…
Captive Bred Mandarins Return…But Only for a Moment
After Scott Fellman’s well-written rant surrounding the explanation and loss of ORA Mandarin Dragonet production, the collective breeding world pretty much wrote off seeing captive-bred Synchiropus spp. for the foreseeable future. I echoed Fellman’s sentiments recently in my own story…
