You’ve successfully kept saltwater fish. Then you moved on to corals. Then, maybe you took on the slightly greater challenge of tridacnid clams or some other delicate or specialized species—with yet more success! What’s next? There are hundreds of thousands of animal species that inhabit our planet’s tropical coral reefs. Even the most advanced reef …
The Marine Planted Tank: Creating Your Ocean Garden Read More »
The cultivation of saltwater plants is nothing new. It has been fairly common for hobbyists to keep marine “plants” (more often macroalgae than true vascular plants) since the 1980s. Even so, we’ve seen very few aquarium systems that are built and maintained primarily for the display of marine flora. Indeed, to date, the vast majority …
As of late, a few varieties of mangrove have become more available to saltwater aquarium hobbyists. With this, it will likely be a bit more common to see one of these beautiful plants poking somewhere out of one’s aquarium system. However, as keeping mangroves becomes more common, there may develop a tendency for aquarists (especially …
Creating a Suitable Growing Space for Your Mangrove Read More »
Coral reef aquaria, and the science of maintaining them, have advanced by leaps and bounds in the last decade. Much of this owes to progress in the area of foods and feeding. Many marine creatures (especially filter-feeding invertebrates like sponges) that were once deemed difficult or even impossible to keep are now cultured with regularity. …
Most of us invest a lot into our aquarium systems. Some of us invest a whole lot. The best means of protecting your growing livestock collection (i.e. investment) is a rigorously maintained and monitored system of quarantine. But we all already know that, right? A quarantine (QT) tank is that one thing we should have. …
A major component of reefing and keeping saltwater aquariums that deters people from the hobby is the maintenance that is required to upkeep them. It may feel like reefing requires too much work, but it may also be that you have an uncertainty on how to maintain a saltwater aquarium. Luckily for you, this article …
Beginners Guide to Maintaining a Saltwater Aquarium Read More »
Most people who are familiar with corals–whether admiring them in the wild or displaying them in a glass box–understand quite well that corals are incredibly complex animals. This certainly so with the zooxanthellate corals. Virtually all corals (zooxanthellate corals included) are predators of plankton and other tiny organisms. But the zooxanthellate types undoubtedly are the …
Enhancing Coral Nutrition with Purple Non-Sulfur Bacteria Read More »
Some aspects of this hobby are often overlooked until problems actually arise. Marine aquariums require a lot of time and dedication, so it is easy to understand how small things may be missed. But, sometimes small things can snowball into a disaster. If the aquarist had been prepared sooner and had the proper equipment on …
Anyone can agree that having a tank wiped out by disease is a terrible experience and having to treat a reef system for ich or marine velvet is a lot of frustrating work. The best thing a hobbyist can do is avoid the issue from the start. There are generally two ways of treatment for …
An idea that I have heard often within the reef community is that you are not caring for corals or fish, but rather you are caring for the water that these organisms live in day to day. When caring for this water that your fish and corals are living in, you need to test it …
There comes a time in this hobby when many aquarists grow bored of their beginner corals and they become interested in small and large polyp stony corals (SPS and LPS, respectively). For those of you who have been maintaining a “softie” reef (which includes coral such as zoanthids, mushrooms, leathers, and star polyps), you may …
When setting up new aquariums, most people worry about and focus on ammonia and nitrites. Everyone knows that cycling a tank with fish is dangerous because of these two compounds, as they burn the gills and body of the fish as the tank matures. But, once these get to zero, most people are satisfied and …
All saltwater aquarists will deal with common diseases in the beginning of their tank keeping journey. These include the infamous Ich, or “white spot disease,” skin and gill flukes, HLLE, Lymphocystis, velvet, and possibly even Brookynella, or “Clownfish Disease.” These each come with their own remedy, but the cures are well documented and easily available …
Starting out in the aquarium hobby, most people simply buy test strips (which I do not recommend whatsoever) or “master” liquid test kits. While these liquid tritration tests are pretty accurate, it can be extremely difficult to decipher color charts and differentiate between ever so slightly differing shades of yellow, green, and red. This leads …
Our aquarium systems grow over time. It’s almost inevitable. It’s well-nigh organic. And we surely all hope that as they grow, they get better. One proven way to dramatically improve the functionality of an existing system is with the addition of a sump or refugium. The conventional overflow-with-sump/refugium plumbing design (we can call it a …
Considering that it serves as both aquascape material and biofilter medium, it’s safe to say that live rock is pretty important. We want it to look and “behave” as naturally as possible. Really, truly “live” rock can only be as good as the base you build it on. For reef aquaria, the best substructure is …
A Clean Start: The Benefits of Using Dry Base Rock Read More »
I should have done this! I should have done that! Throughout your experience in the saltwater aquarium and reef hobby, you will be finding yourself commonly saying these things. Maybe you did not dip your corals, or you bought the wrong additives, or maybe you added a fish without properly preparing your tank. This fish …
How to Set Up an Aquarium for a Green Mandarin Dragonet Read More »
Imagine for a second how food energy from grass, a primary producer, is transferred to a bluebird. The bluebirds don’t eat grass. Rather, they consume grasshoppers—which certainly do eat grass. In this way every secondary consumer obtains life-giving energy and biomass from primary producers through an intermediate, primary consumer. So it is across the ocean, …
Water changes are the most dreaded part of regular tank maintenance to most hobbyists. So much so, that many people start skipping water changes for weeks or months at a time. I don’t blame them, lugging buckets, checking salinity and parameters of new saltwater, stressing fish and other tank inhabitants, and the inevitably of spills …
Increasing the Efficiency of Your Sump to Decrease Water Changes Read More »
There are plenty of reasons that you might consider installing a refugium in your marine aquarium system. Yours might be to add water volume to compensate for an increasingly crowded main tank. You might want to boost your copepod production. Most probably, you’re aiming to reduce dissolved nutrient concentrations. Particularly in the latter case, you’ll …
