Articles

15 Steps to Starting a Saltwater Aquarium: The Lasse Method Display Tank. Photos are all courtesy of Lasse Forsberg. ©2019, All Rights Reserved. INTRODUCTION There are many methods to start a saltwater aquarium--each major aquarium product manufacturer has its own. Common to most, however...

Note from the Editor: Some time ago, our resident electrical guru, @Brew12, wrote a good article on the forum at the beginning of a discussion thread about using ground probes for your aquarium. As soon as I saw the article, I recognized that this deserved top billing. So, here, below, is our...

Mussels. This is a royalty-free image from Pixabay. This is Part 2 of our article on Shellfish Poisoning Syndromes. We'll pick up with the fourth subtype in our list. 4. Diarrhetic Shellfish Poisoning It’s a bit odd that this type of shellfish poisoning is labeled “diarrhetic” when ASP...

A mussel farm in Croatia. This is a royalty-free image from Pixabay. Preface: I’ve always been a bit leery about eating shellfish. In the 1980’s, when I lived in Europe, I ate more than my fair share of raw oysters, cooked mussels, and crab. I knew that shellfish can make people sick, and I...

There are really two kinds of snorkeling that people do in the Keys. The most common is taking a charter boat out about 5-10 miles offshore to one of a dozen nice sections of the barrier reef that has large coral colonies and lots of tropical fish. These are very protected and the water varies...

Hi everyone! Thank you for taking a look on the forum at the Adelson illusion (Adelson 1993) shown in Figure 1 (left)! It created some great discussion that caused me to redraft the entire follow-up article! Indeed, we did couch the question differently than Edward Adelson. We asked the...

A shipwreck off of Honduras. This is a royalty-free image from Pixabay. Artificial reefs are something we hear about on a regular basis. There is a growing interest in creating artificial reefs for a few reasons: because of the destruction of natural reefs, which is hopefully slowing down, and...

Seawitch submitted a new Article: Cartoon Caption Contest #3 IT'S THAT TIME AGAIN!!! Tomorrow is February 1, 2019. My, how time flies when you're having fun. Welcome to the R2R Cartoon Caption Contest #3. Put your thinking caps on, sharpen your pencils, and give us a caption for the cartoon...

Simon Ellis (R2R member @ca1ore), a Connecticut reefer with 30 years of experience, is a frequent contributor to the Reef2Reef Articles Section. He recently wrote the article about building your own Algal Turf Scrubber (ATS), and the article about automatic water changes. He's the perfect...

The class, Cephalopoda, falls under the phylum, Mollusca. While cephalopods are not commonly kept in home aquariums, they remain an extremely diverse and interesting group. Many of the cephalopods are very short-lived (octopus), many are very difficult to keep alive in captivity (squid), some...

From time to time I like to reflect on what I’ve been through during my reefkeeping years. From almost day one of this marvelous hobby, I was told, “You have to have patience” or “If you don’t have patience then you might as well stop." This got me thinking as of late. A good friend of mine...

Live rock. This photo is a royalty-free image courtesy of Adrianna Calvo from Pexels This is an article for beginners. Since I didn’t see a sticky or article on this topic, I decided to tackle it myself. There are lots of differing opinions on how to cure live rock, and I’m going to explore...

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...

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...

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...

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...