Innovation and controversy have always been closely linked and such was certainly the case when LED arrays were introduced to the aquarium market some 18 months ago. For the most part, the controversy has subsided with practical experience replacing conjecture and speculation.…
Some of the information within this article was presented at the Marine Aquarium Conference of North America (MACNA) in Pittsburgh. Since it is difficult at best to present even the highlights of a year’s research in a one-hour presentation, I appreciate the opportunity offered by the Advanced Aquarist staff for allowing me to ‘flesh out’ that presentation with many ‘new’ details in a written format.…
This article will help you understand the terminology and procedures required for successfully using available taxonomy keys.
…If you do not know the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost too.
In the mid-1980’s I bought a small aquarium laboratory ‘kit’ in order to monitor various aquaria chemical parameters. This kit, imported from Europe, included state-of-the-art testing reagents, including one for alkalinity (or carbonate hardness).…
Our quest for understanding of coral coloration, as this series has shown, is perhaps not as simple and straightforward as it may have originally seemed. The various pigments (let alone combinations) of chromoproteins and fluorescentproteins can produce a staggering array of apparent colors.…
The first four installments of this series dealt with fluorescent proteins found within various anthozoans. An understanding of fluorescence is needed before we examine another phenomenon – that of reflective pigments within coral tissues, which in turn is a prerequisite to understanding spectral data collected from various corals (presented later in this series).…
Coral biologists have been very busy recently, and with good reason. The understanding of the adaptability of corals and their symbiotic zooxanthellae to various environmental stressors has taken on a new sense of urgency due to shifts in global weather patterns.…
This month’s Product Review discusses the relative merits of different methods of water quality testing. One set of methods (test strips) is quick, convenient, and relatively inexpensive, while the other (titration) offers precision well beyond that of many ‘test kits’ normally seem in the aquarium hobby.…
In our efforts to replicate nature, it is only natural that hobbyists consider intense lighting a prerequisite to success with symbiotic invertebrates. In fact, there is often a mindset among many hobbyists that there is no such thing as too much light, and that an aquarium cannot be over-lighted, especially when maintaining small-polyp stony corals (or ‘SPS’ genera, such as Acropora, Stylophora, Pocillopora, etc.).…
Last time, we examined pigments responsible for yellow and orange pigments in corals, as well as briefly discussed light (specific wavelengths) and its potential effects on photoconversion of pigments from one color to another.…