March is the time of year when I need to think about ordering a replacement metal halide bulb for my aquarium (~$75). Getting ready for that, I took a look at my Sunpod fixture ($300), and noticed that the bolts holding the glass shield in place had corroded quite a bit. There was a little salt creep edging in under it. Additionally, only 2 of the 12 LED moonlights still work.
Needless to say, I've been shopping around for a new fixture, although not seriously. The 30" length of my tank makes it nearly impossible to find a fixture with mounting legs. Sunpods no longer appear to be in production. A hanging fixture would be quite the hassle in a rental apartment, and I think it wouldn't hide the equipment on the rear of the tank as well.
So I started looking at LED fixtures. People have been having success with them on the forums. There are some interesting options available now. I'm looking at two in particular:
Eco-Lamps' KR92-30 fixture. ($1510 direct from Eco-Lamps).
The Eco-Lamps fixture was compared to a 250 watt halide, a six bulb T5 unit and a legacy LED fixture by Advanced Aquarist. The light output is impressive, rivaled only by the low energy use. It is pretty easy to do some napkin math around bulb and electricity costs of a metal halide lamp to "justify" the purchase of an LED unit. Someone should offer a tax break around this purchase.
I'm looking around for data on the Aqua Illumination fixture. The design and controller features are certainly more attactive than the Eco-Lamps model, and I like how it can be expanded with additional modules if I ever move to a larger tank. But it all comes down to light output.
Just came in my email. A little cheesy and does absolutely nothing to tell me about the features, but it sure caught my interest. I'm really hoping this turns out to be something useful for the sumpless reef keeper!
Reef Builders appears to be on an enviable field trip to Live Aquaria's coral facility in Wisconsin. Having grown up around various aquaculture initiatives that my dad was involved with, I've got an appreciative eye for the fish lab. And you don't get much more high tech than Live Aquaria's coral setup.
Like the smart bloggers that they are, the trip has been broken up into a half-dozen bite sized posts. Here are my favorites:
Like everything else in my tank as of late, the Vortech MP20 is growing itself a fine outer layer of green algae in addition to the usual assortment of encrusting worms. Today I took it apart for a warm water and vinegar dip to loosen some of this stuff. For a refresher course on disassembly (actually very easy), I stopped by the EcoTech website.
I was pleased to see that at some point in the recent past, like Seachem, they entrusted their web presence to a competent design and development team. Great work on the site guys, and great job to EcoTech Marine for realizing how important the web is to emerging companies in this hobby. And bonus points for utilizing video in such a compelling way. Check out this wave:
Two of my favorite reef aquarium blogs, Glassbox Design and Reef Builders have recently been showcasing some exceptional aquariums. I hope this trend continues, as it is a nice alternative to the usual gadget press releases, and it is a much more convenient method of finding beautiful and successful tanks than trying to parse the large forums.
Here I am prattling on about my nitrates rising, completely oblivious to the aging to do item "Buy RO filters for aquarium". Thankfully Ocean@Home posted a reminder that parameter issues often start at the source, the water you put into your tank. Doing frequent water changes to combat nitrates isn't going to help if the tap water is the source of your nitrates. Tonight I'll test my tap and RO output just to verify.
A quick online order from Drs. Foster Smith, and I should have some new RO filters here within the week. I took the opportunity to order a new XM 15k metal halide bulb as well, another yearly maintenance task I've been slacking on. Better late than never!
The less informed may be inclined to think of this as an April Fools joke, but you can in fact train fish to perform daring stunts such as wriggling through a soft rubber hoop. I got my dad the official Fish Training Kit thinking it would make for a good joke, but as the video below shows, fish training is in fact serious business:
The trainer and her star lumpfish (Cyclopteridae one of my favorite cold water species!) are native to the New England Aquarium, and I found this lovely post not from their irregular and uninformative member's newsletter, but via the excellent Zooilogix blog.
I would like to say that seeing an aquarium of this quality fills me with jealousy or a sense of failure regarding my own tank, but who has time for petty emotions when a video like this is playing. You could film a Planet Earth episode in this tank.
I purposefully crafted the cheesy post title to avoid saying the word "blogosphere", but that is in fact what it is: a surprisingly tight knit (some might say slightly inbred, given the redundancy of post material) community of aquarium bloggers has been formed in the past year. I find it a refreshing alternative to cruising the popular aquarium forums, which are rife with repetitive question threads. There is much to be found and learned in the forums, but my patience for parsing through the rest of it has run a bit thin now that I've established a general basis of reef keeping knowledge.
Here is a run down of the blogs I'm currently subscribed to. Feel free to post more, or yours, in the comments and I'll add it in. Also, as my own little blog has finally established some staying power, I've begun work on a custom designed template for it (finally!). The visual is progressing well, but as usual I will get hung up on the code, so no promised ETA for now.
Aquarium blogs I'm currently subscribed to:
www.aquadaily.com Good general purpose aquarium blog, with information for fresh and saltwater enthusiasts.
www.pacificeastaquaculture.com Blog for a coral importer and retailer that I have not yet ordered from. Great behind the scenes posts about the retail facility and importing operations.
www.aquatic-eden.com Planted tank specific, featuring "aquascapes of the week" which are great eyecandy. Makes me miss having a planted tank!
www.glassbox-design.com A great blog, with both industry coverage and personal insight logging the progress of a very beautiful tank. The design and modernist slant is personally appealing as well.
www.advancedaquarist.com Excellent and professional articles updated monthly. Great source of information for the reefer.
designandreef.blogspot.com Similar to the Glass Box, great documentary blog of a design orientated reefer and his nano tank construction, along with various posts relating to design and aquariums.
blog.reefiris.com A blog from Keith updating the progress of his development for Reef Iris, a very promising website project that allows people to funnel their internet-capable controller information and other tank information into a community site. I think this will become a great alternative to forum build threads as it progresses.
www.reefbuilders.com The ultimate blog for industry news and product information.
blog.marinedepot.com Official blog of Marine Depot, a high quality online store for reef products.
www.oceanathome.com Another good hobbyist blog with a range of aquarium information.
blog.fragd.it As a web geek, I love a creative URL. As an aquarium fan, I love a useful blog. Fragd.it is both.
Live Aquaria is easily the best site for ordering aquatic life, with unmatched quality and shipping, as well as a stay-alive guarantee. I've been a big fan for quite some time, and the majority of my reef's inhabitants originated from them.
They've just added an RSS feed for their Diver's Den, which provides what-you-see-is-what-you-get specimens on a first come, first serve basis. The feed should let you keep tabs on their stock without having to remember to check the site.
Now I just need to get them signed up on Brightcove for all their videos.
Update: The only downside is that unlike browsing the actual site, with the RSS feed you get a view into things that have already sold! So waking up this morning, I discovered I was too late to get in on these beautiful Montipora color variations! So sad.
A little over a year ago, on my first trip to San Francisco, I stumbled into a temporary aquarium space for the California Academy of Sciences. They had an enormous, two-story coral reef setup, along with an aquaculture facility for propagating more corals. Talking with the staff informed me that the tank was a test to see if coral could be grown in captivity at extreme depths, and the propagation facility was for growing out colonies to populate a much larger tank that would be located in their permanent building, scheduled to open late in 2008.
Being out there for business this week, I took advantage of a few spare hours to get over and check out the finished tank. Unfortunately there wasn't much stocked in the form of corals yet. I'm not sure if they are adding species in slowly or what. There was an enormously large and diverse population of fish however, along with some other innovations. A large sand bed with a full grown mangrove tree was attached to the aquarium. A walled off section for sharks and rays, as well as a shallow lagoon area was also attached to the tank. The reef tank is impressive in size and ambition, but as all reef keepers know, it will take several years to reach it's true potential.
The california coast tank was also quite large, and featured an enormous wave box. From what was visible, it appeared to work on the same principal as the systems common to home aquarium. But check out the size of these waves:
My favorite section of the aquarium was the staff picks. Here small aquariums and terrariums were set into a wall, featuring a favorite species or biotope of each staff member. There was an incredible reef tank here, with a coral wall built along the left hand side leaving dramatic open space through most of the tank. Very cool.
Below are some photos I snapped, and there are a few more to be found on my Flickr account.
My favorite tank design:
Primary viewing window for the reef (there are several others):
Some of the reef lighting. There was another tier of lights above this, as well as natural sun lighting through the roof:
Reef Builders was having a contest to win a new light fixture; entry was as simple as leaving a comment on their blog. Shockingly, I actually won! This is great because:
1. I never win anything. 2. I had been thinking about getting this fixture anyway.
This is essentially the same light as my Sunpod, featuring a 150 watt metal halide, but with the addition of two actinic power compact bulbs for extra color and a more emphasized dawn/dusk effect. Additionally, with the hanging setup I will have more control over how high off the surface the light sits.
This should go very well with my new controller. What a great start to the new year!
I find it interesting how often a career in design seems to intersect with a hobby for reef keeping. Certainly when browsing reef hobbyist related websites and communities, there seems to be a much larger percentage of designers than one would expect to find.
Design and Reef is the blog of what appears to be a very talented industrial designer working in Manila. The aquarium related posts are interesting and unique to this blog, but also be sure to check out the sofa that the author designed and had built. I imagine in Manila it is much easier to find affordable craftsmen capable of brining a designers plans to reality.
I've started reading yet another (RSS is a wonderful technology) online aquarium magazine, www.advancedaquarist.com. Informative and well researched articles from smart people is a great counterpoint to some of the things you read on internet forums.
Being a gadget lover, I'm always drawn to posts about reef keeping technology. The controllable Vortech pump should be a familiar item to anyone involved in keeping coral, but unless you've seen one in person its hard to understand just how powerful the pump is, and how minutely the controller allows you to tinker with water flow. Check out this article about defining waves in general, and making them with the Vortech.
Moving a tank is no different than moving the rest of your household: success requires careful planning, execution, and having the necessary materials on hand before begining. In July we will be facing this challenge when moving to a (fantastic) new apartment. Fortunately we have a month of overlap between leases, so a full day can be devoted directly to moving the tank without distraction.
Have freshly mixed saltwater on hand, both at the packing point and the destination. You'll want clean water to bag up your livestock in, and clean water to fill the new tank. Moving liverock and disturbing a sand bed will put a lot of detritus in the water, and you don't want things to sit in bags while your RO unit slowly makes new water. Stock up on supplies. Trash cans for moving water. Big tubs for your liverock, submerged. Bags for livestock, and coolers for them to be placed in. Towels, filling supplies, and everything else you might imagine you need. Making a trip to the store for extra containers while your reef is half packed will not be helpful, so get more than you'll need at the start.
