Whether scouting for your first aquarium, or “graduating” from a freshwater aquarium, there is something about a saltwater aquarium that is mesmerizing. For many lifelong aquarists, that feeling of captivating awe never goes away. Thankfully, the intimidating task of learning how to actually build and maintain a saltwater aquarium system does go away. In fact, …
Live foods
Now more than ever, there is a huge variety of foods available to the marine aquarist. If there is one, big distinction between them it is whether they are live or not live. Almost as a rule, live is better. There are several reasons for this. In some cases it’s because of what’s in them, and in others it’s because of what isn’t in them. Heavily processed aquarium foods, much like human processed foods, are formulated and manufactured with one thing in mind: Convenience. Now, it’s not like we’re all looking to make things more time-consuming or complicated for ourselves. But let’s face it; we don’t keep reef aquaria because they’re easy. We do so because they are, when healthy, amazing to behold. Building and maintaining even a modest, so-so system requires some time and expense. Just as it is with our maintenance routine, if we start to slack or skimp when it comes to animal nutrition, the system and every living in it will look much, much less than amazing to say the least. Processed foods, and even many preserved foods, lose important dietary constituents during the production and packaging process. Particularly where heat is involved, many essential vitamins, antioxidants, etc. are lost. Exposure to light, freezer burn, etc. are other factors to consider. And then substances such as preservatives are often added, even while we remain unsure about their long-term effects on the health of the potentially thousands of species we might keep. Live foods, on the other hand, are complete and natural. Even chemically delicate but nutritionally valuable compounds such as enzymes are left intact. Their natural behavior even makes a sizable difference. For example, motile phytoplankton and bacterioplankton swim in the water column long enough to get captured by sessile, filter-feeding inverts; copepods move in a manner that elicits the feeding response of picky eaters such as mandarins and sea horses. But that’s not all; live foods are, overall, comparatively less messy. Powders from dry foods and juices from frozen foods can significantly pollute your aquarium waters, necessitating extra water changes, extra use of chemical filtrants, additional equipment, etc. (who’s saving money/time now?). In contrast, live phyto actually removes nutrients from the water, and live pods actually clean the bottom and tank panels! In this section you will learn how to use live foods and how their use improves the health of your precious livestock.
Why Larval Pods are Better for Seeding (Even If You Can’t See Them)
Copepods (pods) are essentially required for any reef aquarium. They perform three important ecological tasks: (1) Graze on benthic microalgae, (2) scavenge detritus, and (3) serve as food for diverse zooplanktivores. They are so ubiquitous in nature, and even in captivity, that they commonly invade new tanks as hitchhikers on live rock, corals, etc. While …
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Are You Ready to Keep Jellyfish?
There have been a few times that I’ve been asked how to care for jellyfish. And, long story short, it’s complicated! In this short article, I describe the complications of keeping these fascinating creatures in captivity. Some creatures should just stay in the wild, and the jellyfish usually is one of them. Jellyfish tanks Meticulously …
When to Choose Poseidon’s Feast
Back in “the day,” to acquire a seed culture of copepods, aquarists would typically have to resort to scooping a couple cups of gravel from the bottom of a fellow aquarist’s tank. In these cases, you could only hope to have nabbed a few viable pods–and not any pests (like juvenile aiptasia anemones)! If you …
Three Great Hacks for AlgaeBarn Simple Brine
For about a century, brine shrimp (Artemia spp.) have been among the most important of all aquarium foods. Not only are they extremely nutritious, and fish love them, but they are also incredibly convenient to use. This is because it is relatively simple to store and hatch their cysts. Cysts are unlike eggs in that …
Corals in a Box of Water: Creating a Natural Reef Tank
We’ve come a long, long way in advancing natural marine aquarium keeping. Those of us who started out in the 80’s with barren “aquascapes” dead coral skeletons and crushed coral bottoms might look back with amazement at how so much has changed so fast. Just recall how many developments have taken place over the last …
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Gutloading Live Microcrustaceans
In the sense that very, very few animals specialize to eat only one thing, all animals are omnivores, and prefer live foods. For example, when herbivores graze on turf algae, they’re not just eating algae but rather the entire “epilithic algal matrix” which includes those bacteria, protists, etc. that live on the algae. Similarly, in …
Why EcoPods are the Best Live Copepod Product Ever
Earth is a planet of pods. Wherever there is water, there are amphipods, isopods, branchiopods, and so on. Pods are an integral part of pretty much every freshwater, brackish and marine ecosystem. But even among all these big players, the tiny copepod is a giant; in terms of both biomass and sheer number, copepods (subclass …
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The Whole Package: Integrating AlgaeBarn’s Kits & Combos
AlgaeBarn is hardly the only aquarium hobby-centered business to produce phytoplankton and macroalgae. But we like to think that we’re pretty darn good at it–if not the best! Consider our highly-acclaimed premium live phyto blend OceanMagik in various kits or our standard-setting CleanMacro series. If it needs to be stated, algae is kind of the …
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Daphnia as a Live Marine Aquarium Food
Daphnia sp., widely known as water fleas, are hardly new to the aquarium scene. Freshwater aquarists (and perhaps quite a few saltwater aquarists too) have scooped them from ponds, ditches, etc. to use as aquarium feed for at least a century. Some particularly assiduous hobbyists have even found success culturing these tiny crustaceans for long …
What’s the Difference Between PNS ProBio and PNS YelloSno?
Reef aquarium keeping has gotten a lot more sophisticated over the years. Fortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it has gotten more complicated or more time-consuming. To the contrary, we now have the knowledge to create convincingly realistic representations of coral reef habitats with surprisingly minimal effort. While it’s true that we’ve now got some …
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A Saltwater Smorgasbord: Using The Ultimate EcoPack
Though they are nowhere near as ecologically complex as actual, wild coral reefs, reef aquaria can be incredibly complicated and downright tricky to maintain in a “natural” manner. To be fair, reef aquarists have to sustain a precarious balance between underfeeding to the point of deprivation and overfeeding to the point of feculent nastiness. Waste …
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Phytoplankton
The first link in a food chain is always a primary producer, like phytoplankton (i.e. algae, plants, various types of bacteria). This is because all other living things—consumers—are incapable of synthesizing organic substances from inorganic ones. Primary producers rely on inorganic sources of energy (sometimes chemical, but usually from light). Using this energy, they take …
Brine Shrimp: Live Food Fast
Prepared foods have their merits. Aside from the obvious (their convenience), they are consistent in quality, easily available and relatively inexpensive. Some prepared diets may be as palatable and digestible as an animal’s favored item in the wild. They can also help considerably to vary most aquarium animals’ day-to-day diets. That being said, it’s hard …
Tig Pods: A Food for Many
The reef aquarium hobby continues to reach new heights. This is most evident by the extraordinarily beautiful systems we see on display in public places, in images on social media, in advertisements, and even in some homes. These advancements have come about not only through improved technologies and supplements, but also through a better understanding …
A Beginners Guide to Mysis Shrimp
Just like any other pet or animal you care for, it is important to be sure that the inhabitants of your saltwater aquarium are getting the best possible food so that they can live longer and healthier. The best way to do this is by feeding them live natural food, such as mysis or mysid …
Kickstarting Your New Refugium
Whether it’s just been installed as part of a bone-dry, newly set up aquarium system or as an add-on to a well-established, heavily stocked reef tank, you’ll probably want your new refugium to be operating at its peak performance from the onset. Seeding the right beneficial organisms in the right amount at the right time …
A Beginners Guide to Brine Shrimp
Do you feed your saltwater fish flake foods, pellets or frozen mysis? How about live brine shrimp or live fish foods in general? In this article I am going to explain the benefits of feeding your fish live food, specifically brine shrimp (Artemia salina). These creatures can be extremely nutritious for your livestock and are …
Tetraselmis: The Big and Fatty Alga
There is probably no single type of microalgae that is ideal as feed for a varied community of captive animals (such as a reef tank). Thus, the best phytoplankton-based aquarium foods are really blends, carefully formulated to meet the dietary needs of diverse creatures ranging from copepod nauplii to suspension-feeding tube worms. Sometimes candidates for …
Mixed Microalgal Feeds for a Balanced Nutrition
Primary producers—those organisms (e.g. plants such as algae) that build new biomass from inorganic sources of energy—form the very base of all food chains. They are of most obvious importance to herbivores. But, of course, without producing the material upon which herbivores feed, nothing else down the chain could exist. And the dependence of carnivores …