Articles

A drop of water. This is royalty-free image from Pixabay. Automated Water Changes Automation is all the rage these days, with a sizable percentage of reefers believing that a controller is essential to the keeping of a reef tank. It's not, but it is a nice-to-have as long as you are sensible about what you expect it to do for you ….. and not do for you. For those of us in the hobby long enough to remember when there was essentially NO automation, the things that modern technology can do...

The author of this article, David Smith, has a small zoanthid business in Youngstown, Ohio. He is an expert on the care of zoanthids and did a special piece for us on how to frag zoanthids effectively. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Tips on Fragging Zoanthids Here, I will highlight how I go about fragging zoanthids because that's what I specialize in. I will also highlight a few products that I like to use during this process. To begin, I would like to start off by saying that the...

Book Review: What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins by Jonathan Balcombe Publisher: Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition (stated), First Printing edition (June 7, 2016) Language: English ISBN-10: 0374288216 ISBN-13: 978-0374288211 ~Longlisted for the 2017 PEN / E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award ~One of the 10 Best Popular Science Books of 2016: Biological Sciences, Forbes ~One of the Week's Best Science Picks, Nature ~A "Must Read"...

Beginner Series #2: How and Why Do Water Changes Work? What Happens If They Don't Work? Or How to Attain Majchrzak Status This article is to provide beginners with baseline knowledge of why and how water changes work and when they fail in restoring critical water parameters, so that dosing alternatives might be employed. I will also address many misconceptions about water changes. Image 1: Junior's Reef by Gary Majchrzak. A system that the author has always emulated. Photo is used with...

Clown Triggerfish, Balistoides conspicillum. Photo is from the Reef2Reef archives, courtesy of @Darryl, ©2019, All Rights Reserved. If you're new to online discussion forums or just new to Reef2Reef, this article is for you. Much of the information that I'm going to give you, here, is already published on the forum. However, it's not all in one place, and if you're not very fluent in forum usage, the information is not always the easiest to find. Forums are fun. And the R2R forum is...

Banggai cardinalfish. Photo is from the Reef2Reef archives, courtesy of @MarvinsReef, ©2019, All Rights Reserved. Banggai cardinalfish, Pterapogon kauderni, are native to a small area around Indonesia. They are very popular in the marine aquarium trade and considered endangered in the wild. A few years ago, there was a lot of discussion and debate regarding whether these fish should be included in CITES II. It was finally decided to make some recommendations to the Indonesian government...

I’ve been keeping reef aquaria for a very long time. My first reef tank, softies and zoanthids, was set up around 1987. What folks newer to the hobby may not appreciate is the dearth of equipment choices that was available to us back then. I built my first skimmer, not because I wanted to, but because the commercial options were so limited. There were no wavemakers, precious few lighting options, and certainly no algae scrubbers. We were forced to be resourceful, and do-it-yourself was...

Drum Roll Please! We will be bringing back Reef of the Month starting right now. It is with great pleasure and admiration that Reef2Reef awards Michael J. Cuttone from New York our Reef of the Month Award for January 2019. Mike's forum name is MJC, and his build thread can be found here. Below you find out all kinds of information about Mike's tanks and overall system and some exquisite photos. You can read his comments and advice, and savor his humility. Congratulations, Mike...

As all serious reef aquarium hobbyists know, light intensity is an important consideration for a successful captive reef. This short article will examine how light intensity decreases as water depth increases in an aquarium the depth often maintained by hobbyists. The Swedish researcher Nils Jerlov was a pioneer in defining the optical qualities of oceanic and coastal waters. His work involved a scale of meters and could be applied to very large private and public aquaria. However, most...