Tag: aquarium techniques
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How to Frag Coral: A Beginner’s Guide to Your First Frags
Do you keep soft corals in your aquarium? Have you ever bought a coral frag from your local fish store or a fellow hobbyist and wondered where it came from? Have you wondered how to frag coral in your aquarium but weren’t sure where to start? Then you’ve come to the right place! We’ll go…
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Vodka dosing in a reef tank
This sounds like a strange concept–and it is–but it works. Vodka dosing in a reef tank is a proven method to improve water quality by removing nitrates and phosphates from the water. Let me share some of the benefits of vodka dosing in a reef aquarium with you by answering some common questions: What is…
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How to Drill a Glass Aquarium
With a little confidence, some patience, and a variable speed drill, you can put a hole in your tank. (A hole you WANT in your tank – not the accidental kind) I’m serious. Sure, you could buy a pre-drilled tank from your local fish store or pay someone else to do the job for you.…
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Bare Bottom Reefing
Bare bottom reefing If you are setting up an aquarium in the near future, one of the decisions you will have to make is whether you want to go with a bare bottom. I’m not kidding. Bare bottom reefing is the rage these days—so if you don’t want people to make fun of your DSB,…
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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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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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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…
