If you’ve been in the hobby for a while, you’ve seen a number of lighting products make their way into the aquarium market. The ‘latest and greatest’ always seems to attract a number of devotees, and these disciples often (but not always) base their opinions on emotion (either that of the hobbyist, or a perception of that of captive animals – see blogs with statements such as ‘Wow!…
Last time, in Part 1 of this series, we reviewed technical terms useful in the understanding of coral coloration. We learned there are many different categories of colorful or fluorescent pigments, and these pigments can be further divided into classes (or clades) where ancestral origins are important in classification tools.…
This month we’ll begin to examine brand new information on effects of lighting (both intensity and spectral quality) and how it affects coral coloration. In addition, we’ll piece together some information from various research papers, and parts of the coral pigmentation puzzle will begin to fall in place.…
Debates about ‘the best light’ for illuminating reef aquaria have raged among hobbyists for years. There has been little doubt that corals, as a group, can adapt to varying degrees of light intensity and spectral quality.…
Soft corals reproduce asexually by a number of methods, including fragmentation, budding, fission and others, and hobbyists often exploit these in their coral propagation efforts (these methods were briefly reviewed at Part 2 of this series).…
The ultimate challenge of reefkeeping is the closing of our captive animals’ life cycles. A fortunate few have witnessed a coral spawning in their aquariums and might be interested in what it would take to raise coral planula larvae.…
For many advanced aquarists, successfully maintaining an array of coral species in captivity is no longer a true challenge. A few dedicated hobbyists are now searching for the keys in unlocking the mysteries of the ultimate challenge in the reef aquarium hobby – that of closing the life cycles of corals and other invertebrates in captivity, where the offspring of captive invertebrates grow, thrive and reproduce in order to begin the cycle anew.…
I wonder how many times this conversion has occurred?
“Have you seen this month’s power bill? It’s outrageous! It’s that @#*! reef tank of yours!”
Probably more times than I can imagine.…
Pocillopora meandrina is one of the most common corals of the Hawaiian archipelago. It is also widely distributed across the Indo-Pacific and eastward to the west coast of Central and South America.…
Reverse osmosis (RO) and deionization (DI) water treatment processes have found wide spread acceptance among aquarium hobbyists, and especially among reef aquarists, for many reasons. A properly functioning RO/DI unit can deliver water meeting rigid criteria for ‘pure’ water, does so at a modest price, and requires no operational skills.…