Like a lot of kids, I fell in love with the ocean at an early age.  I was a card carrying member of the Cousteau Society and a sticker bearing the Calypso logo adorned my bicycle’s down tube.  Wherever I went, I had the ocean on my mind.

I’d sit in front of my small saltwater aquarium and imagine being the plastic diver bubbling up from the bottom, finding the treasure, swimming with the sharks.

Jacques himself sent me newsletters every so often.  Along with my fish tank and occasional trips to the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Ocean Life, I kept my dreams alive between real visits to the seashore.

If you go  on any reef aquarium forum you will more then likely here of people that have algae in their tank that they cannot control. This is especially true amongst new reef  keepers who always seem to struggle the most.Most of this algae can be prevented and is usually caused by easily avoidable actions on the part of the tank owner.

Avoid Overstocking

This is such a common problem and one that is so simple to avoid. Paying close attention to the amount of fish you have in your system is critical to keeping algae at bay. Fish not only produce waste that in excessive amounts can fuel algae, they also use oxygen. And when oxygen levels drop algae will usually begin to grow.

As a good general rule of thumb start out with a clown fish sized fish for every 8-10 gallons of tank volume. Additionally wait a few weeks between fish additions to let the system react. Then test your nitrates and phosphates and see if they have increased. Testing a few weeks after every fish addition will give you a good gauge if your system can handle any more fish load.

GrrlScientist is an evolutionary biologist, ornithologist, birder, aviculturist and freelance science and nature writer. She's also runs the extremely popular Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted) since August 4, 2004.

I am an ornithologist by training, and an aviculturist by experience, but before I started keeping and breeding birds, I kept fish, and I still keep fish now. In fact, the first pet I ever kept and bred were fish, and they were wonderful teachers for developing both a sharp eye for detail and a disciplined husbandry technique that was extremely useful later when I started keeping and breeding rare parrots. Like most aquarists, after keeping a variety of freshwater tropical fishes for five or six years, I began looking around for a group of fishes to focus my energies upon. Because I worried about the environmental ethics of keeping wild-caught coral reef fishes, I instead chose to specialize in two distinct groups, one of which were the brackish water rainbowfishes from the South Pacific Islands
(where, not surprisingly, my research birds also originate).

Magnesium is one of the most overlooked properties of your reef’s synthetic seawater and although this is one of the most important factors considered in growth and health of most stony corals. Just like calcium and alkalinity magnesium is depleted by your reef inhabitants. It is also an important factor in maintaining stable calcium and alkalinity levels.

Just like all other ions in a reef tank you want to produce levels as close to natural seawater as possible. For this reason maintaining a level of at least 1290 to 1400ppm of magnesium is critical. Speaking from experience most stony corals will show lack of growth around 1100ppm and start declining in health at around 1000 or 900ppm.

Today I'm starting a weekly column that will take advantage of the new Comparison Shopping tool at The Reef Tank... My goal with this column will be to emphasize the importance of researching before buying anything, livestock or equipment, for your tank.

This week I will focus on Protein Skimmers. I checked over 50 products in this category and was surprised to find that the price differences amongst stores was limited to about 20% for most products.

Having said that, I found a few brands of protein skimmers where the price differences between stores - for the same product - where as high as 50%.  Amongst these, the  Current USA Fission Series (take for example the Fission Recirculating Skimmer), skimmers by CPR Aquatics (e.g. Bak-Pak 2R+) and the skimmers by Coralife (e.g. Super Skimmer - Needle-Wheel System up to 65 G)

One other thing that surprised me is that in about 20% of the products I checked, I found offers for used equipment for half or less the price!  I am aware not everybody likes to buy used stuff, but in times like these... is good to be aware of all your options.

Eddie is a high end coral exporter in Indonesia and has his own blog, My Coral Adventures, to share his coral hunting adventures with the world as he takes trips to find high end livestock for good customers. When we last left Eddie, he was taking and incredibly interesting aquacultured coral hunting trip in Northern Bali...

And now for Part 2...

Our first stop is this old delapitated fish grow out station.  It is used as a base for aquaculturing certain species of acros.

Owen James is the founder & editor of AquaDaily, a site that provides daily tips and news to aquarists of all kinds.

Back when I first set up a saltwater fish tank, invertebrates in captivity were a rarity. Most marine aquarists kept only fishes, using undergravel filters and a drawer full of copper-based fish medicine – deadly to all kinds of corals, shrimps and other invertebrates.

Twenty years on and we’ve almost come full circle. Most new saltwater aquarium keepers are attracted specifically by the chance to have a little piece of a coral reef in their living room. Even fish-only tanks tend to use living rock as filtration.

I say ‘almost’ full circle as very few people consider setting up the modern equivalent of a fish-only tank – that is, an invertebrate-only aquarium.

Take fish out of your aquarium and your reef will certainly lose movement, colour, and a variety of ecological niches, particularly the useful algae grazing properties of fish like tangs and surgeonfish.

If you thought you couldn't get enough of ocean acidification since Miriam's post, think again! There's so much more that you just don't know (at least I didn't) and Lina Hansson and Jean-Pierre Gattuso from the EPOCA Project Office in Villefranche-sur-mer, France are on hand to tell us exactly what we need to know to keep our marine organisms and ecosystems safe.  Read on to find out what you can do and make sure to check out the additional links found at the bottom of the page.

Besides global warming, another consequence of man's use of fossil fuels is receiving increased attention from the marine scientific community. Ocean acidification has been referred to as “the other CO2 problem”, a much less known but potentially as dramatic result of the approximately 79 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the atmosphere every day, not only as a result of fossil fuel burning but also from deforestation and production of cement. Over the past 250 years, the world's oceans have absorbed about one third of the CO2 released due to anthropogenic activities and thus acting like a sink for atmospheric CO2, playing a key role in moderating climate change. Without this capacity of the oceans, the CO2 content in the atmosphere would have been much higher and global warming and its consequences more dramatic. Whereas the chemical consequences of this CO2 uptake are well understood (decrease in pH and shifts in seawater carbonate chemistry) the biological impacts of ocean acidification are poorly known.