For today’s post, I’d like to take a slightly different tack than usual. By presenting my meandering thought process on the concept of marine biotope aquariums, I’m hoping to elicit some input from you, my fellow salties, on precisely how…
Google Street View of Great Barrier Reef officially released
A little over two years ago, we learned Google, in conjunction with Catlin Seaview Survey, had the ambitious plan to map the Great Barrier Reef and allow anyone to take a “Street View” look at this majestic location. Last week, Catlin…
Get to know some unique, free-living and “walking” corals
Disc corals have gotten incredibly popular over the last few years for their ability to have extremely brilliant colors, a single polyp & corallite which is hard to propogate, and because they are just that cool! However disc and tongue corals…
Friday Smorgasbord: 3D cameras, shipwrecks, pranks, waterproof phones and Amy Adams
Welcome to another edition of the Friday Smorgasbord. Kicking off this week’s edition is an intriguing project in Canada. We have gotten so used to flat 2D images of underwater expeditions, but Ocean Networks Canada is using a revolutionary 3D…
6 great iPhone applications for identifying and learning about reef fish
If you’re one of the 10 million people who got a shiny new iPhone 6 this weekend, or just happen to have a shiny slab of computing power that fits in your pocket, you should really take advantage of it…
Quarter million crown of thorns starfish eradicated by new injection method
The news about the natural reef environment can be so overly bleak, it’s nice to hear some progress coming out of Australia that bodes well for the future of the Great Barrier Reef. The Crown of Thorns starfish, Acanthaster placi,…
Friday Smorgasbord: Old seas, strange fish and 3D maps
It’s Friday and here is another edition of our weekly smorgasbord of weird, wacky and interesting. Starting off is the discovery of a 100-million-year-old ocean found under the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. US Geological Survey (USGS) hydrologists drilling discovered what…
Cirrhilabrus squirei gets range extended like a trailing caudal fin
Cirrhilabrus squirei, one of the newest additions to the Fairy Wrasse stable, has until now only been known from a small area on the Great Barrier Reef and one reef in the Coral Sea off North Queensland, Australia. A recent…
Not True To Name – a variation of the red tailed flasher wrasse, Paracheilinus rubricaudalis, found on the GBR
The Flasher Wrasses, like their cousins the Fairy Wrasses, epitomize what a great, reef-safe marine fish really is. One of the newest species on the block, Paracheilinus rubricaudalis or the Redtailed Flasher Wrasse described by Randall and Allen in 2003,…
United States drops (unarmed) bombs on Great Barrier Reef
Last week the United States dropped four bombs on the Great Barrier Reef when a training exercise went awry. Although the bombs were unarmed and did not explode, nor created any physical damage to the reef, the event has created…
