Aquarists become so desperate during an ich outbreak that often they will do anything to cure their fish and return the tank to harmony. While ich isn’t often fatal, various species react different to the parasite and without treatment it can become like a plague, looming over the aquarist’s head as more and more fish fall victim. If the parasite infects gill tissue, the fish’s respiration rate increases giving the parasite the upper hand.  It was an ich invasion years ago that forced me to separate my fish and reef aquariums, creating two distinct systems. Treatments for external parasites on fish are 99% of the time fatal to corals and invertebrates. It seems like even when treatment is administered or fish develop natural immunity, ich has a way of making a grand appearance from time to time. Water borne parasites are usually highly contagious in captivity. In the wild, natural currents along with environmental factors make external parasite infections far less common. In aquaria, where we are operating a closed system, the perfect environment for these simple life forms is created. Curing an outbreak of ich can be a nightmare, not only because the parasite is quite resilient, but also because truly curing it requires a lot of work. Netting all the fish from the tank, moving them into a hospital aquarium and treating them, while the main tank remains fallow for a period in excess of a month. Considering this is impossible for some aquarists (due to space or time restrictions) some have wondered if ozone can cure an ich outbreak. How ozone works:I previously talked about ozone in another post, so I won’t break open the intricate details and benefits of using it here. Ozone does have a chlorine like effect on water, oxidizing nutrients and killing pathogens. Ozone is confined to a reactor connected to the aquarium, most often the protein skimmer. Any residual ozone entering the aquarium would spell disaster for livestock, so the gas is filtered out via carbon before entering the water. This means that ozone is never present in aquarium water, but simply completes its reaction within the skimmer before being filtered out. In reality, ozone in and of itself doesn’t offer the benefits normally touted when implementing an ozone generator. The benefits come in the form of having water with a higher oxygen redox potential, which thus gives the tank’s bacterial filter a head start at breaking down waste.… More:

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THANK YOU! For years aquarists have struggled with the plight of aquarium noise – splashing, splooshing, humming and what some may swear could be the sound of fish chomping as they chow down on their favorite foods. Well, some of us need to sleep at night, so thankfully, Neptune Systems has come out with the perfect solution for this dilemma

The QED, Queit Echo Driver, is a noise cancelling headphone set that allows you to enjoy your serene aquascape in the state that you should – absolute silence.

Solved. Finally. For Good. Aquariums are meant to be seen. Not heard. For far too long aquarists have fought the good fight against aquarium equipment – forever trying to reach the holy grail of tank-silence. Product after product continues to only slightly improve on reducing the din of the average aquarium – but they are never truly silent. It is time to put an end to it all. For good. Just slip on the QED by Neptune Systems, plug its AquaBus cable into your Apex, and enjoy your 120 gallons of coral fantasy in complete silent bliss! The advanced patent-pending aqua-quantum noise cancellation DSP on the QED listens and identifies every piece of aquarium equipment (pumps, feeder, skimmer, light fans) and then creates a cancelling wave for each and every tiny sound.  The result is uncanny. “I could not believe my ears” said James Sankyo an alpha-tester for the product “it’s like they took the entire aquarium and turned it off – but its still running!” No, there is no Bluetooth for your phone. No jack for your iPod. This is all about aquarium enjoyment in uninterrupted pure silence. More information will be coming soon – but for now just know that we have listened to our customers and the solution to the cacophony that is your aquarium is not far off.  

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(Image: Courtesy of Dominique Adriaens/Ghent University)In a discovery which could help could help in the development of tough, flexible armour or slender grasping robots, a team from Ghent University in Belgium have created a 3D computer model to reconstruct seahorse tail movement. The model allows them to analyse exactly how specific tissues and bones contribute to this grasping and varying degrees of bending. It is already well-known that, despite being covered in armour, the tip of a seahorse’s tail remains flexible enough to delicately unwind itself after grasping an object. With the aid of the new model though, it has been shown that each sheet of tissue stretches across many vertebrae in the tail, and it is this support of several vertebrae without fixing them firmly together that might both allow flexibility and encourage rigidity. Surprisingly, the team says, tails of different species of seahorse show greater variation in anatomy than expected, despite having the same bones and muscles. The work was presented today at the annual meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Boston, Massachusetts.

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Fu Manchu lionfish (Dendrochirus biocellatus)Yearn to keep a lionfish but don’t think you have the tank space to accommodate one? You might want to think again! While having a small to medium-sized tank might preclude keeping some of the popular Pterois species, there are several lionfish species in the genus Dendrochirus that are small and retiring enough to be kept successfully in fairly modest-sized quarters. Among these is the subject of today’s post: D. biocellatus, the Fu Manchu lionfish, also known as the twinspot lionfish, ocellated lionfish, or twospot turkeyfish. In terms of its ease of care, I would characterize D. biocellatus species as moderately difficult. So, it’s not a great choice for beginners, but if you have a few years of successful fishkeeping experience under your belt and are willing to give it the specialized care it requires, you won’t be disappointed!Physical traits D

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Like other water parameters in your marine aquarium, stability is also important with pHStability of water parameters is essential to success with marine aquariums, especially when it comes to keeping sensitive invertebrates. Among the various parameters that hobbyists often struggle to maintain at an appropriate level is pH, essentially a measure of how acidic/basic the water is. While the ideal target for pH in a marine aquarium is somewhere in the range of 8.2 to 8.4, it’s more important to maintain a stable pH, even if it’s slightly outside this range, than to constantly chase a particular value within the range. The challenge is, owing to various natural processes going on in the tank, the pH in a closed aquarium system usually drifts downward (there are exceptions, of course), so the hobbyist must take certain steps to counteract this trend. Here are six of them:1) Perform regular partial water changes Regular Saltwater Smarts visitors must be pretty tired of hearing this by now—as I recommend water changes for virtually anything that ails a saltwater system. But the truth is, nothing promotes stability of parameters, pH included, better than routine partial water changes. Every time you replace old salt water with new, you’re not only removing dissolved pollutants and replacing components vital to the health and growth of your livestock, but you’re also replacing compounds that buffer the water against shifting pH (carbonates and bicarbonates)

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Good morning friends, sorry about not posting yesterday but I got busy and then just ran out of time. I have a fun blue-light photo for you all today with Aimee as the star all decked out in her new Ikelite yellow glasses and her camera completely decked out in Ikelite blue-light fluorescent gear! So for those of you non-divers trying hard to figure out what is going on here let me try to better explain. What we are doing is putting blue-filters over our normal white light flashes, putting a yellow filter over the lens, wearing yellow glasses over our masks and using the white light VEGA’S (Ikelite video lights) as our main search lights, which also have blue filters screwed onto them.

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‘Coral Morphologic TV’ @ Red Bull Guest House 2015 ‘Coral Morphologic TV’ debuted this past weekend at the Sagamore Hotel, on Miami Beach. The site-specific installation was commissioned by the Red Bull Guest House, and consists of 4 vinyl-wrapped outdoor televisions each playing the Coral Morphologic films ‘Natural History Redux‘ & ‘Circumtropical’ on loop. Tags: Coral Morphologic, Red Bull Guest House, Sagamore Hotel This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 1st, 2015 at 11:23 am and is filed under Installation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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From the despair of hurricane Katrina, a damaged library will be transformed into an impressive new public aquarium. The Aquarium will be built in downtown Gulfport, Mississippi. The total cost of the renovation is estimated at $90 to $120 million. The State will be providing $24.5 million dollars, but there will be an estimated $80 million dollars still needed to finish the plans. The State is banking on the help of the Restore Act, as a result of the BP oil spill. The tentative name in the works is the Mississippi Aquarium. Here’s hoping everything comes together to bring an exciting new aquarium to a previously devastated area. MORE… More:

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FB Link: https://www.facebook.com/coralfish12g Instagram Link: http://instagram.com/coralfish12g In this CoralFish12g video I feature Philip Nguyen's Hammer Heaven reef tank. Hammer corals are awesome but this is just awesome. Maintenance is done weekly with a 2-3 gallon water change with Red Sea Coral Pro Salt with RODI water. And the Sandbed is vacuumed 2 times a week. No dosing it any sort since the Pro salt has high concentration levels of trace elements. Tank equipment is as follow: 8 gallon display tank 10 gallon sump Maxspect razor r420r 60w 16k lighting Jebao wp10 wave maker Mame glass overflow Tunze osmolator nano 3152 Coral Box D300 protein skimmer Ehiem compact 2000 return pump 4 stage RODI water filtration Tobu - Candyland | http://youtu.be/ZFrkGSmYJ6w | provided by CopyrightFreeNetwork

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Reef tanks can be quite challenging to shootAt its core, the reef aquarium hobby is a pursuit of aesthetics. We seek out visually appealing fish and corals and look for inspiration in other aquarists’ tanks. More and more reef hobbyists want to share their hobby with others online, and that’s when things fall apart. It is not that there’s a problem with the reef tank, but that the photo taken doesn’t do the real thing any justice. Sometimes, the photo just comes out with the colors wrong or the exposure messed up so the bright areas are just lost in overexposed blotches. There have been times when people show me pictures of coral they found online and I have to explain to them that in real life, it will not look like that because most of the aesthetics that grabbed their attention in the first place were visual artifacts in the taking of the photo that exaggerated the color. Most of the time, this is unintentional on the part of the photographer.Our reef tanks happen to be among the most challenging subjects to shoot. Chief among these challenges is the fact that our aquariums are dark subjects.

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 Owning fish is a big commitment, both of time and money. Many people think they are ready for this exciting pet ownership, only to realize they are not. Apparently, many people also think releasing these fish into natural waterways is a good idea. It is clearly not. These captive fish are dumped into rivers and lakes and can decimate the natural population rather quickly. The aquarium fish grow to big as big as their environment allows, hence the size of the massive Koi shown in the photograph.These now much bigger fish, overtake the area and are able to consume all of the resources, to the natural populations dismay. It is a serious problem and one in which consumers need education on. Dumping unwanted aquarium fish into natural waterways is a worldwide problem that needs to be addressed. MORE… More:

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In celebration of our 500th blog post, in what we hope will become a bi-monthly feature, we bring you the first instalment in our ‘coral spotlight’ series which examines the natural habitat and captive care of selected groups of Anthozoans. Currently containing 13 distinct genera, the Fungiidae is a fascinating family of corals both in terms of appearance and behaviour. Commonly known as plate, disc or mushroom corals (not to be confused with Corallimorph ‘mushroom anemones’), species from the Fungia, Cycloseris, Heliofungia and Herpolithia genera are the most commonly encountered Fungiids in the trade, and they generally all share the same habits and ecology. Found over much of the West Indo-Pacific region, these Large-polyp Stony (LPS) corals naturally reside in shallow lagoon or reef environments where they occupy a benthic location usually on sand or gravel substrates, sometimes in turbid waters. Here they live out their lives fuelled by photosynthetic Zooxanthellae within their tissues, and by direct capture of zooplankton. These corals are both interesting and unusual in that they can move around slowly by inflating their tissues, and they can even excavate themselves if buried by substrate

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 This video is pretty amazing, although it is from 2013, I hadn’t seen this before and just had to share. While diving off the Hawaii Coast, a bottlenose dolphin approaches diver, Keller Laros. Laros is an experienced professional scuba diver and Manta Ray researcher. Laros was taking a group of snorkelers on a manta-ray dive experience. Laros said he heard a cry and then the dolphin appeared. He noticed the dolphin was tangled in fishing line in its left pectoral in immediately. In the video, you can Laros clearly signal the dolphin over, and the dolphin follows. For around ten minutes, the dolphin allows Laros to work on freeing the line. Laros was able to get the hook and line around the mouth free, but as more divers swam over to remove the rest of the fishing line, the dolphin swam off. Who says animals and humans cant communicate? MORE… More:

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There seems to be a plague in our hobby. It isn’t marine ich, or any of the parasites that continue to dominate some aquariums. It isn’t the National Marine Fisheries Service, who may pass legislation the golden torch coral swaying gently behind me illegal to keep in captivity. It isn’t even shipping out freshly caught fish to aquarists without conditioning or shabby local fish stores and giant retail chains. While all of these present challenges to aquarists and deter new people from entering the hobby, there is something far more sinister that is discouraging, disheartening and upsetting enough to break the back of reefers with the best intentions.  When I entered the hobby over fifteen years ago, I didn’t notice the degree the marine aquarium hobby was infected. I don’t even know what you call it, mass ego disorder, poor manners, lack of edict or plain old poor sportsmanship. Whatever you want to call it, there is nothing that can shrink our hobbies’ numbers quicker and it’s barely ever talked about by aquarium writers. Over the years many aquarists have told me that they were treated with such disdain on aquarium forums that they could no longer use them. In some instances it was a fellow forum user, slamming an aquarist for asking what was termed a “stupid question” or calling them out for not executing the perfect aquarium plan. Sometimes it was a moderator, laughing away with snide comments as an aquarist was struck with a barrage of tragic circumstances within their tank. Even forums that prided themselves on a family-friendly atmosphere were leaving new and novice aquarists with a feeling of unworthiness among other reefers. Advising aquarists over the years, I’ve occasionally been a shoulder to cry on, a guy to call when the search for information had left you with an unexpected ear-full, often culminating in a vicious personal attack. I’ve never turned down helping a fellow aquarist, even in instances when they had lied about tank conditions so that I would get a rare or difficult to keep species in and condition it for them. Somehow as the reef aquarium hobby grew, it forgot exactly what it was. We aren’t curing infectious disease or saving human lives, we aren’t creating a system of government that transcends what’s already been done – we’re a group of hobbyists, and hobbies are supposed to be fun. For me the breaking point came a few days ago as I was chatting with a friend of mine.… More:

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 Very sad news in Florida. A spear fisherman, whose identity is still unknown,  bitten multiple times by a shark Friday afternoon off Jupiter Inlet, Florida. Jupiter is a very popular place for fisherman and divers and swimmers alike and is known for some of the best fishing in South Florida. Witnesses on the scene state that it was a bull shark that bit the man in his back, torso and head. The man was airlifted to St. Mary’s Hospital Trauma unit. It appears the man was spearfishing for Cobia, a popular catch in the area, which were found aboard his boat. Luckily there were two other people aboard his boat who were able to call for help. ‘He was bleeding quite a bit,’ witness Peter Pinello told WPBF. ‘It looks like a shark had gotten him in the torso. You could see his wetsuit was embedded in it, and it looked like it took a good chunk of it out.’ My thoughts and prayers go out to this man and his family. A status on his condition has not been made available as of today. MORE… More:

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Juvenile clown triggerfish (Balistoides conspicillum) hatched and raised by Biota Marine Life Nursery“Caribbean Chris” and I are proud to assert that promoting sustainability in the marine aquarium hobby is an important part of our mission. However, every now and again, we’re asked to clarify precisely what we mean by “sustainability” in this context. After all, we have no direct influence on livestock collection practices or the various environmental factors that impact the health of reef habitats. What can we, as providers of educational online content, do to influence hobby sustainability? As we see it, the most powerful tool in maintaining a viable, sustainable marine aquarium hobby is fundamental information. The more budding hobbyists know about basic aquarium practices and the animals they might want to keep in their tanks, the fewer “unexplainable” livestock losses they’ll experience and the fewer replacement specimens they’ll end up buying. And demanding fewer replacements means less collection pressure on the wild reefs.Our stance on sustainability also means that, despite the fact that we don’t specialize in breaking news, we do like to shine a spotlight on breakthroughs in the captive propagation of marine livestock—including prior posts about captive-breeding efforts involving the clarion angelfish and the masked angelfish. Today we’re pleased to bring you a similar announcement about aquacultured clown triggerfish that were hatched and reared at Biota Marine Life Nursery and are now available through Quality Marine.

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Soft corals can make a beautiful reef, too.

Once again, it’s time to talk reefs. Topics this week include the beauty of “invasive corals,” local fish stores, California drought, and reef snobs. Download the podcast here, or subscribe to our podcasts at iTunes. Also, follow us on Twitter at reefthreads.—Gary and Christine

Sponsor: Rod’s Food
Rod’s Food website

Invasive corals
“Invasive” corals never looked so lovely, Leonard Ho, Advanced Aquarist

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Bare bottom tanks have never been uncommon in fish stores. Often, it’s much easier for someone selling marine fish to maintain a bare bottom tank, simply because decorations can easily be pulled out if someone buys a fish. These systems are normally based off multiple holding tanks which are filtered by a central sump which is full of live rock and sand. This refuge was a place for aerobic and anaerobic bacteria to flourish, creating the backbone of biological filtration. Bare bottom tanks weren’t common in private aquariums and I still wouldn’t refer to them as common. They are growing in popularity though and embracing a bare bottom tank is still a new trend for reef aquarists. Aesthetics aside, is running a bare bottom tank of any benefit? Those who have given up on substrate claim it prevents old tank syndrome and reduces the risk to coral health posed by sedimentation. Are any of these claims true? Substrate’s role in the aquarium:It could be argued that substrate is entirely aesthetic, based on the personal preference of each aquarist. That wouldn’t be entirely accurate. Live rock in many ways is a form of substrate. It’s a key puzzle piece to creating an interface for biological filtration and can jump start tank cycling. Some aquarists claim an aquarium can be instantly cycled by cramming it full of cycled live rock. In my experience this practice reduces the intensity and duration of the cycle, but doesn’t prevent it altogether. Sand plays a similar role, geared more toward the anaerobic bacteria that breaks down nitrate. Since anaerobic bacteria prefers oxygen depleted environments, the nooks and crannies of the sand bed serve it well. Sand also plays a critical role for various fish, such as jawfish and invertebrates like sand sifting sea stars. For a long time deep sand beds were considered a necessity in reef aquariums and more recently shallow sand beds became popular. There are still outlets that sell crushed coral substrate but I know of very few aquarists that use it. It’s without a doubt that substrate plays an important role in our aquariums. So why abandon sand altogether? While it serves as a home for anaerobic bacteria, it also serves as a debris trap. Uneaten food, fish waste, detritus – all become lodged in the sand bed. Here they decay and are hopefully broken down into harmless compounds by bacteria.… More:

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 I bet you are thinking what the heck is that thing? Is it a big tubular piece of plastic or is it a giant silicone siphon tube? But you may be surprised to know that it is in fact a Pyrosome, whose name means ‘fiery body’. And while it looks like one large creature (or a large plastic tubing), it is actually a colony comprised of many little creatures called Zooids. Each Zooid is only a few millimeters in size, but they are embedded in gelatinous tunic that holds all the Zooids together. Each Zooid contains a pair of light organs, which make the colony appear bio-luminescent. “One long Pyrosome is actually a collection of thousands of clones, with each individual capable of copying itself and adding to the colony,” writes marine biologist Rebecca Helm in Deep Sea News. This footage was captured in Tasmania, Australia. .MORE… More:

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