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.

Labels: Fish, Link, New England Aquarium, Video

After the nine thousandth call from the New England Aquarium informing me that my membership was about to / had expired, I figured I might as well march over there and renew it. They have a good sized coral tank, and I was looking for some photos I could use for raw material while working on the design of this blog.

It was interesting to observe the tank now, after five months of research into setting up my own tank. Previously it had been fairly inspirational, but now I was able to identify some short comings, or at least what would be viewed as such by the reef tank elite. Bubble and hair algae was rampant throughtout the tank, and the fish and invertebrate diversity was relatively low for what would be possible in a tank of that size. That said, it is still a beautiful aquarium and only one of the many tanks worth spending some time with at that facility.

Click any of these photos to head over to Flickr where you can get a larger view of them.

Labels: Algae, Invertebrates, New England Aquarium, Reef Aquarium