Chaetodon smithi photographed in flawless clarity by Ian Skipworth

I think it’s safe to say that I love fish. I mean that’s all I ever post about here, but don’t get me wrong. I love every facet of this multidimensional hobby and this field just as much. I rarely talk about…

Awesome Fish Spotlight: All that glitters is not Golden Angelfish

All that glitters is not gold. That is certainly the case for Centropyge aurantia, the golden angelfish. Despite having both the common and latin name of this fish associated with the precious metal, there is in terms of appearance, very…

Reef Nuggets 5: Pseudanthias and notes regarding feeding and husbandry

In Reef Nuggets 4 we recounted Macropharyngodon and our personal experience with maintaining a harem using M. vivienae as an example. Today’s installation will aim at covering a topic that’s widely discussed, and on a subject that is ubiquitous and iconic in…

Awesome Fish Spotlight: What do you call a pig that cannot oink?

A pig that’s not a pig, it’s a babi wrasse! For the record, if you said bacon you’d also be correct. “Babi” is the Malay and Indonesian word for pig, and apart from delicious Balinese cuisine like Babi Guling, it is…

What’s in a name?

Scientists are often pretty whimsical in their own way when it comes to describing a new species for science. To the undiscerning amateur like us, we may find scientific names cumbersome, made up of an unpronounceable mass of consonants with an unearthly…

The Phoenix Effect gives us reason to be hopeful about wild corals

On any given day it is easy to come across news of how the ocean is in danger, coral reefs are dying, and the sky is generally falling in regards to the outlook for corals on this planet. That is…

2014 recap: Top 10 scintillating reef fish stories

2014 is fizzing away by the day and as usual, we’ve recapped our ten favourite reef fish stories for the year. Normally we’d put out our top ten highlights just as the year closes to make sure no surprises pops…

Aquapods are already leading the charge in offshore fish farming

We thought long and hard about the relevance of a fish farming story to our readers but the saga of Aquapods is a compelling one. You see, we tend to think of fish farming as the kind of thing that…

Prognathodes: more than meets the Aya

The following is a guest contribution from Joe Oliver, a resident Marine Biologist for the Curacao Sea Aquarium and Substation Curacao. The Banks Butterflyfish (Prognathodes aya) and its relative the French or Three-Banded Butterflyfish (Prognathodes guyanensis), are both striking deepwater butterflyfish that…

America & Cuba, sitting in a tree, Gramma dejongi for you & me

The leader of the free world, President Barack Obama, just announced a shift in United States policy with the Caribbean island nation of Cuba which has been sanctioned by the American government for more than half a century. The sanctions…