Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Reef Aquarium Lighting: An Experiment in Color Temperature
Reef Aquarium Lighting–An Introduction to the Experiment Over the next several blog posts, I’m going to explore the topic of reef aquarium lighting. For many reef aquarium hobbyists, lighting will be one of the most expensive pieces of equipment in their system. Lighting is expensive to purchase and to run on a daily basis. For…
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Rotifer Culturing at Home: Continous Cultures
Rotifer Culturing at Home: Continuous Culture Set-Up and Protocol Growing rotifers as a continuous culture is easy to do, but requires a small amount of work, almost every day. Unlike batch culturing, where the goal is to culture the most rotifers possible in sequential batches, the goal of continuous rotifer culturing is to create a…
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How to Culture Rotifers: Batch Culturing Protocol
Culturing rotifers at home is fairly easy to do. Rotifers are a great food source for newly hatched fish larvae and for some filter-feeding invertebrates. Ironically, the rotifer organism itself provides very little nutritional value to the animals that eat them. It is the content of their guts (the food they eat) that provides nutrition. As…
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Rotifer Batch Cultures
Rotifer Batch Cultures Culturing rotifers with a batch culture technique is akin to a manufacturing process. Instead of focusing on creating a stable environment to keep a relatively low-density culture thriving over a long period of time, the objective of a batch-produced culture is to maximize the yield of the culture over a short period…
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Rotifer Cultures: Continuous Rotifer Culture and Production
Rotifer Cultures: Continuous Rotifer Culture and Production There are two popular methods of culturing rotifers—continuous culturing and batch culturing. Each method has its own pros and cons, but the next two posts should help you decide which method is right for you. The focus of this article is to describe the process of continuously culturing…
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Equipment Needed to Culture Saltwater Rotifers
The first step to culturing saltwater rotifers at home is to obtain a starter culture. If you can’t find a hobbyist (or breeder) growing rotifers locally, you can find them online—just type ‘rotifer cultures’ or ‘live rotifers’ into the GOOGLE search bar on the bottom left margin of this page, and you’ll find a number of…
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Culturing Saltwater Rotifers–Introduction
Culturing rotifers is easy to do at home. In order to get started, you have to obtain a starter culture. If you don’t find automatic success with your homegrown rotifer culture, don’t worry. It took me a few weeks (and several crashed cultures) to get the hang of it. If you decide to try this on…
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Dosing Phytoplankton
Phytoplankton are small photosynthetic organisms considered to be one of the building blocks at the base of the coral reef food chain. Many filter-feeding invertebrates depend on phytoplankton as a significant source of nourishment. Within the saltwater reef tank, however, phytoplankton are generally not present in abundant numbers. As a result, advanced aquarists often dose this valuable living food…
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Small Polyp Stony Corals (SPS)
Small Polyp Stony Corals Small polyp stony corals (SPS) are what many people think of as the conventional reef-building corals. As a group, they are some of the most beautiful and some of the most difficult to keep, often requiring high flow rates, provided by powerheads, intense lighting, and optimal, stable water chemistry. Probably the…
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Quarantine Tank for Saltwater Fish
Next to the protein skimmer, the quarantine tank is one of the most important pieces of equipment you can purchase. Adding fish to a tank without the proper quarantine period is like playing Russian Roulette with your fish tank. You can get away with it for a few rounds, but after a while the odds…
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