Sting Ray Fossil, Heliobatis Radians
Good morning friends, Aimee, the three dogs and yours truly just returned from the annual 2017 Tucson Gem and Mineral show. Now that I have spent years underwater I find myself more attracted to the underwater fossils more than ever and when I found this rare sting-ray I of course went crazy and had to photograph it! This was a large ray measuring around or close to 24 inches from top to bottom and cost around $10,000, more than I had with me… We spent days walking around looking at gems, minerals and fossils from all over the world but most pieces were way out of our budget, I think Aimee ended up with a sterling silver ring with a tiffany jasper (lavender) cabochon and I bought a colorful tripod bag from Tibet. While in Tucson I went out to help the SDMB association “Sonoran Desert Mountain Bike” help build a new trail at Star Pass which should be open sometime this year. I got up early two mornings in a row at 7:00 and rode the bike “burrrrrrrr” to Star Pass and met a group of around 40 other volunteers and worked swinging a pick for four hours each day, it was super fun and very rewarding.Guardians of the Coral
There are two genera of coral guard crabs commonly found in the aquarium trade – Trapezia and Tetralia – that are symbiotic with small polyp stony corals such as Acropora, Pocillopora, Stylophora, and Seriatopora...Reef Threads Podcast #307
Amphiprion mccullochi
We’re back for another show. This week’s topics include water and smoke detectors, Nest thermostats, and our thoughts on the MACNA conference. Download the podcast here, or subscribe to our podcasts at iTunes. Also, follow us on Twitter at reefthreads.—Gary and ChristineSponsor: Rod’s Food
Rod’s Food website
Salty Confessions: Procrastination Never Pays in Reefkeeping!
Ignoring a protein skimmer in need of maintenance could make you pay later! Regular SWS readers know that CC and I always emphasize the importance of staying on top of routine maintenance chores so small problems don’t develop into big ones. Great advice for a hobby in which only bad things happen quickly, right? Unfortunately, my recent failure to follow my own “sage” advice nearly led to disaster. Allow me to set the stage: Over the holidays, my wife, Melissa, and I had to ready our house for a large family get-together. Because we’re generally messy and disorganized people who like to procrastinate, that meant major cleaning and decluttering in the last few days prior to the gathering. On the first day of our cleaning odyssey, I was vacuuming around my reef system (situated in the living room) and noticed that the protein skimmer was in need of a tear-down and cleaning. Specifically, the volume of water discharging from the skimmer was greater than usual and the water level in the reaction chamber was higher than normal—both tell-tale signs that the air-intake was getting clogged.Paul B’s Unique Perspective on Keeping Mandarins
Mandarin dragonet (Synchiropus splendidus) Hobby pioneer Paul “Paul B” Baldassano is not your grandfather’s reefkeeper (though he is old enough to be your grandfather!). Nor is his book, The Avant-Garde Marine Aquarist: A 60-Year History of Fishkeeping, anything like your grandfather’s hobby literature. In fact, Paul B’s perspective on just about any aspect of the marine aquarium hobby is quite distinct from anyone else’s. For proof that Paul has a decidedly different thought process, look no further than the following passage about mandarins and other dragonets from Chapter 7 of his book (which, by the way, would make a wonderful stocking stuffer for that slightly off-kilter hobbyist in your life):Mandarins and Other Dragonets Mandarinfish and all the other dragonets have the same problem—a tiny mouth and almost no stomach. Mandarins were designed to eat amphipods and copepods, or “pods” as we call them, but a mandarin will eat anything small that moves. I know many people try to “train” such a fish to eat pellets, potato chips, or frozen food, but dragonets hate you when you do that because all you are doing is slowly killing them. Because of their weird digestive tract, which is something like that of a seahorse, they don’t have the ability to store food—kind of like when people get that surgery where they put a band around the stomach so they can’t eat as much
