10 Tips for Limiting Marine Livestock Losses

There are steps you can take as a marine aquarium hobbyist to help ensure the health of your tank’s inhabitantsDistilled down to its essence, success in the marine aquarium hobby is about keeping fish and invertebrates alive and thriving. And while it may sometimes seem as though fate plays a major role in how animals fare under our care, several decades of aquarium-keeping experience (and more than a few missteps) have taught me that it’s largely in hobbyists’ power to avoid livestock losses. I’ve found the following 10 tips to be exceedingly helpful in maximizing the survival rate and longevity of my fish and invertebrates. Obviously, this isn’t a comprehensive list (after all, virtually everything we hobbyists do related to our aquariums influences the survival of our livestock, whether directly or indirectly), but it’s a pretty good start.1. Ban the impulse buy! I can’t tell you how often CC and I get questions from anxious hobbyists who have made an impulse livestock purchase only to discover after the fact that they can’t get it to eat anything they offer, it appears to be wasting away, it’s getting bullied severely by tankmates (or vice versa), etc. Unfortunately, such ill-conceived purchases too often result in the death of the specimen or one or more of its tankmates

Reef Threads Podcast #267


Visit the Coral Fever website at coralfever.com

Seth Drago of Coral Fever, along with his friend Bobby Miller, returns, this time to talk about how he handles fish and coral shipments and what he uses for a quarantine procedure. Much to learn about cleaning fish in this podcast. Download the podcast here, or subscribe to our podcasts at iTunes. Also, follow us on Twitter at reefthreads.—Gary and Christine

Sponsor: Rod’s Food
Rod’s Food website

Aerosol dispersal of pathogens
Aerosol dispersal of the fish pathogen, Amyloodinium ocellatum

NameEmail *

The Best Beginner Large-Polyp Stony Corals

There are a number of beginner-friendly LPS coral speciesThroughout my years as an aquarium enthusiast, I have followed all the advice from all the books I could get my hands on since there were no other hobbyists with the same interest as I in my circle of friends growing up. My aquatic progression took the following path: 5-gallon slate & stainless-steel-framed fancy guppy tank from my grandfather Goldfish won at the carnival Betta bowl 10-gallon freshwater tropical tank 29-gallon cichlid-specific tanks (bred angelfish and convicts) Brackish-water tank 55-gallon saltwater FOWLR tank Saltwater FOWLR carnivorous tank Saltwater soft corals & anemones Saltwater large-polyp stony corals (LPS) Saltwater small-polyp stony corals (SPS) The reason I went through all these stages was the lack of technology and information that exist today. I could not keep any corals well at all back in the 1980s because the efficiency of the power protein skimmer did not exist (still used wooden airstones), the lighting was still just T12 fluorescents, and the filtration was not very good at exporting nutrients (canister filters, undergravel filters, wet/dry trickle filters). If you did not do regular water changes, chances are the livestock would all eventually die. The carnivorous fish were the easiest to keep while the omnivores tended to die out due to malnutrition because the foods available at the time didn’t provide adequate nutrition.My 90-gallon LPS system These days, with the help of current technologies, you can more or less jump straight to any stage without the experience of prior stages. Thanks to the vast experiential knowledge base accumulated by hobbyists around the world these last few decades, we now have references and starting points good enough to help just about anyone succeed with the correct coaching. The key is to do your research and consider the source of information from the standpoints of relevance and accuracy. Therefore, in this article, I’m going to jump right to the large-polyp stony corals