by Saltwater Smarts | Sep 24, 2015 | Corals, Equipment, Fish, Invertebrates, Opinion, Science, Technology
Virtually since the advent of the internet, there’s been a tendency in our hobby to rate the reliability and trustworthiness of online content beneath that of print-format materials—books, magazines, and so forth. But is this assessment really fair?The general premises behind this viewpoint are: Anyone with a computer and internet connection can post anything they want online, whether or not he or she has the requisite expertise to expound on the subject. Online articles and posts are seldom given professional editorial treatment and/or subjected to peer review, so you can’t trust that they’ve been vetted properly for accuracy. There tends to be an “echo-chamber effect” online, so inaccurate or outright fallacious information appearing on one site can be picked up immediately by others and repeated ad nauseam, creating the false impression of consensus on the information/viewpoint. Now, there’s truth to each of these arguments, but as someone who’s made his living as a writer/editor for nearly 20 years (primarily in print format) and once served on an editorial committee that reviewed book submissions for a major retail pet chain, I can say with some confidence that print materials have their limitations as reference sources, too. Among them: Just as with online materials, print books and magazines are no more reliable or accurate than the writers and editors who produce them. You can’t assume that just because someone went to the effort to produce something in hardcopy, the information it contains was properly vetted. by Saltwater Smarts | Sep 21, 2015 | Corals, Equipment, Fish, Science
A misguided and hasty approach often leads to a failed aquarium and exit from the hobbyIt’s a tale as old as the hobby itself: A novice marine aquarist sets up his or her first system, runs headlong into every conceivable obstacle and pitfall, responds with a series of misguided decisions, loses a whole tank’s worth of fish and corals, and finally chucks the entire hobby in frustration and despair, all the while cursing Neptune and that silly enchanted trident of his. Just as this scenario is all too common (with the possible exception of the Neptune part), so too are the reasons many novice marine aquarists fail and drop out of the hobby. A post-mortem analysis of the average hobby failure would likely reveal one or more of the following five underlying elements:1. Failure to research I’m including this point first because it’s the most significant contributor to hobby dropout and encompasses many of the major oversights that newcomers make. Failing to cycle, skipping quarantine, overstocking/overfeeding, combining incompatible species, and choosing inappropriate life-support equipment (skimmer, lighting, etc.) are just some of the bad decisions new hobbyists sometimes make due to lack of prior research—and all can have hobby-ending (not to mention budget-breaking) consequences. Without ever reading hobby literature, perusing informative websites, seeking advice from more advanced hobbyists, studying up on the habits and demands of various species, etc., newcomers don’t even know they’re supposed to be concerned about these things—or, as Caribbean Chris and I like to say, “They don’t even know that they don’t know.” And that’s a recipe for certain disaster in this hobby! 2. Having no coherent strategy The best way to get started on the road to success in our crazy pastime is to establish a set of long-term goals—a strategic vision of the type of system and livestock you’d like to keep—and then implement the appropriate tactics, equipment purchases, and stocking approach to help you achieve those goals. by Heidi dM | Mar 20, 2015 | Conservation, Science
Sharks keep our largest and most important ecosystem healthy…our oceans. Being at the top of the food chain in the marine environment, they regulate the populations of other marine life, helping to keep fish stocks in the ocean healthy. … by Rich Ross | May 28, 2014 | Fish, Invertebrates, Science
Anilao Pier, home to the notorious bobbit worm, is my favorite site in the Philippines for night diving. I first dove here in 2012, during my graduate studies at San Francisco State University and the California Academy of Sciences. The diversity of marine invertebrates here is astounding, especially with respect to sea slugs, snails, and anemones. I’m particularly interested in sea hares, a group of sea slugs in the order Anapsidea. They’re called sea hares thanks to the horn-like structures on their head, known as rhinophores, which allow them to sense their environment—and which happen to resemble rabbit ears. Like the nudibranchs they’re related to (same phylum, different order), sea slugs have evolved potent chemical defenses to deter predation, since they’re soft-bodied and possess either a reduced shell or no shell at all. On one of my night dives during the expedition, I came across two beautiful, large, lime-green sea hares crawling through the sand and sea grass about 3 meters down. Overwhelmed with excitement upon spotting them, I actually squealed through my scuba regulator! I picked one up and let it go, watching it swim gracefully with its wing-like dorsal appendages (called parapodia), and later collected both for the Academy’s sea slug collection. This was my first encounter with a species I later learned was Syphonota geographica, the only species within the genus Syphonota. Despite it being circumtropical (distributed throughout the tropics) and an invasive species in the Mediterranean, the Academy’s Senior Curator of Invertebrate Zoology, Terry Gosliner, had only encountered this species once before in the Philippines. I’m thinking about investigating its taxonomy and chemical composition for my PhD, since it may actually represent more than one species and contain variable chemical composition, depending on where it’s found and what it eats. Syphonota geographica in the Indo-Pacific have been reported as feeding on brown algae, while those from the Mediterranean are considered specialists, feeding instead on the invasive seagrass Halophila stipulacea. Representatives from Greece have been studied chemically, but specimens from the Philippines haven’t been researched—offering a great chance to add another chapter to our understanding of the area’s biodiversity. —Carissa Shipman, PhD student at University of the Philippines Diliman by Rich Ross | May 16, 2014 | Corals, Equipment, Fish, Science, Seahorses
When I tell people that we’re in the field collecting saltwater animals for display and research at the aquarium, most of them imagine that the actual catching is the hard part. In reality, the hard work starts after we collect the animal. Keeping animals healthy in the field—and then healthy while en route back to Manila for a 14-hour flight to their new home in Golden Gate Park—entails an entire slew of life-support equipment (LSS). We have that stuff at the Academy, obviously, but right now we’re out in the field. Where it’s too hot. Where there isn’t a store to buy what we need. Where we have to constantly battle a continually moving colony of fire ants that appeared right where we set up our equipment. Fortunately, all the pre-planning we did to prepare for this is paying off. Want the laundry-list of what came with us on the plane? Two 200-gallon inflatable kiddie pools (plus a third, just in case), 220-bolt air and water pumps, rolls of tubing, nets, containers, coral-holding devices, fish-holding cups, seeded biofilters, and an assortment of valves, glue, patch kits, rubber bands, cable ties, etc. We knew we’d need to keep water temperatures down in the pools so the animals could survive (from 94 degrees to a reasonable 82), so our original plan was to give the pools water-changes every few hours, which would have required many trips hauling 5-gallon buckets of water 30 feet back-and-forth from the shore. Luckily, our hosts were able to find a powerful sump pump and modify it so it could stay in the ocean while plugged in. We were also able to connect the two pools via four siphon hoses, basically turning them into one body of water. Then we able to fabricate drains in the pools, which gave us not just cooler temps, but also stronger water flow—much better for the shallow-water corals (which are, as the kids say “money”), two coconut octopuses, and selection of fish we’re caring for (which includes ghost pipe fish and white mushroom coral pipefish). And today we’re going to attempt to collect pigmy seahorses. Many of the fish collected deeper than 300 feet have a gas-filled swim bladder. When they’re brought to the surface, the pressure on them decreases and the gas in the swim bladder expands in the same way a sealed bag of chips does when you take it on an airplane. When the bladder expands, it can damage the internal organs of the fish—which is, well, very bad for the fish. Traditionally, collectors have used a hypodermic needle to relieve pressure from the swim bladder, but that’s a less-than-optimal solution, resulting in unreliable survival. To combat this problem, we designed and built a fish decompression hyperbaric chamber based on some larger designs that have been used for collecting cold-water rock fish. Our design is light, relatively portable, and the collection chamber itself doubles as the decompression chamber. The deepwater team collect the first deepwater fish yesterday, and our chamber is working very well. Tomorrow morning, Aquarium Team One heads home to the Academy with the live animals we’ve collected. Packing and shipping them is a story in and of itself, which I’ll try to write up on the plane. Next week, Aquarium Team Two arrives for more collecting with a focus on the deep-water fishes. I’m looking forward to getting home, unpacking the animals, and seeing what the second aquarium team achieves next week. —Rich Ross, Aquatic Biologist 
