I Am Not Buying Any Corals For 3 Months!
Ok, I am in the middle of a self-imposed pledge…..I am not buying any corals for three months! Why am I doing this? Because it will force me to minimize the amount of […]
Avoid Chasing Numbers
I have been keeping reef tanks for 25+ years and during a good chunk of that time I tested calcium, alkalinity, nitrate, pH and salinity on a regular basis and that was about it. I hardly, if ever, tested for magnesium or phosphate and my SPS were healthy and happy.
225 Gallon Reef Tank Maintained With […]
Blue Squamosa Clam – A Mollusk With Wow Factor
Years ago when I first entered the hobby I was mesmerized by a giant blue clam at a LFS. It was about 5 inches and I had never seen a blue clam with that type of pattern. I was told it was a Blue Squamosa clam, considered at the time to be the holy grail […]
Rapid Tissue Necrosis (RTN) – A Reef Keeper’s Nightmare
Your tank is on cruise control and all SPS corals are in a happy zone, growing and thriving like you had always imagined. Then one day the lights come on and your eyes zero in on a dead coral. What the heck? How could that happen when everything was going so well?
Reef keeping can be […]
How to Maximize SPS Polyp Extension – Top 5 Tips
Is good polyp extension necessary if you want to have success with SPS corals? Not necessarily. However, if you dig fuzzy sticks then there are a few things you can do to fulfill this desire. Here are my Top 5 Tips to Maximize SPS Polyp Extension:
Avoid Fish with a Hankering for SPS – Perhaps this is […]
How I Averted a Complete Tank Crash
A few months ago my tank was spiraling downhill pretty quickly, as I was mysteriously losing a large number of corals, including many LPS colonies and SPS frags. I probably lost 50% of my corals […]
Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure
According to Murphy’s law “whatever can go wrong, will go wrong”. Unfortunately, given the complexity of the hobby, there are a number of things that can go wrong while keeping a reef. Sometimes human error […]
Be Organized When Moving a Reef Tank
There are only a few things about the reef keeping hobby I dread and one of them is moving a tank. Oh boy…..what a pain! One of my most memorable tank moves was when my wife and I left the big city lights of New York City for the leafy suburbs of Westchester, New York.
At […]
Local Fish Stores – A Vital Part of the Reef Tank Ecosystem
When I first started in this hobby many years ago I frequented a few local fish stores to pick the owners’ brains to better understand how they achieved success with their tanks. […]
Top 5 Mistakes Made by Reef Keepers
As I detailed in an earlier blog post, there are certain things a reef keeper can focus on to maintain a successful reef tank. But there are also things marine aquarium hobbyists should avoid doing to optimize […]
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