Achilles Tang

The Dispar Anthia super-males were amazingly coloured!!!! Imagine this - yellow orangy bodied, pink heads, bright red dorsal fin with blue-lined tips, bluish pelvic fins.... AWESOME!!!!!

One of my favourite anthias - dispars!!! HUGE SCHOOLS!!!

Another shot... with almost the whole body out! Chasing down some cardinals!

Let's just say that this was a REAL EYE-OPENER for me! I have NEVER SEEN as much marine species in one place anyway else in all my past dive locations! Sipadan truly deserves the reputation of being one of the MOST RECOMMENDED diving paradises! Here's my first ever Blue Ribbon Eel!

This year, the Aquarama event appears to be smaller than two years ago but it did look crowded enough to me during the Trade Days with quite a number of industry people looking at the latest technology & products in livestock packing, food products, pumps, chillers, lightings, livestock and other aquarium-related products. From my walks around, the freshwater crowd will be rather pleased as there is a quite a wide range of FW stuff like planted tanks, arowanas, discus, goldfish, bettas to get them excited. For us marine lovers, stuff to look out for are the new improved Macro skimmers (needlewheel and venturi skimmers) and light pendants that on display, the Aquamedic booth (look out for the 3m tall skimmers on demonstration!), Guisseman lighting pendants. There is also an Italian brand called Hydor carrying an impressive range of pumps. What caught my eye was a rotating attachment that you attach to a powerhead or water outlet (it comes with adapters) for random current making. It is saltwater-proof and takes very light pressure to start working! Concept is similar to the SCWD where water current moves a gear to move the nozzle. There are about 5 marine tanks at Aquarama (could be a bit more) set up by different people including Pacific Marine, Coral Farm and Aquatechnic. There are also many kinds of tank designs that are displayed at Aquarama which are very impressive. Some of them are wall-mounted like a plasma screen (although whether it will actually support a marine ecosystem long-term is debatable). There is an octogonal tank at the Pacific Marine booth that is very very nice (central overflow). Foodstuff... the Argent booth is a must visit, not only for their range of Cyclop-eze products but their krill and brineshrimp stuff as well. They also carry fish medication, books on the hobby such as coral propagation. For those who culture zoo and phytoplankton... go check out the microscopes! They also have refractometers for sale (rathe ex though!) The supposedly cheap pricing for their Cyclop-eze is apparently for the Trade Industry visitors only, I am not too sure if Public Visitors will actually get that good a price. Oh well, visit Aquarama tomorrow and Sunday to find out! As for marine livestock, aquacultured marine livestock like blue-lined angels, monos are found at a Taiwanese booth. The Sri Lankan contingent this year is a lot smaller and they did not bring in a lot of marine livestock to show (to my great disappointment). I did see a small tank where the Blood Shrimps and Cleaner Shrimps are HUGE in size! The Singapore Reef Club booth had its fair share of visitors who dropped in to say hi to Morgan, Joe_P and myself. It was an honour to have a Norwegian reef expert, Svein Fossa, drop by to commend us. An australian reef club visitor also came by and so did a Canadian importer who enjoyed talking with us. A Hong Kong reef club dude by the name of Samuel also dropped by today. Quite a few familiar faces from the LFS industry dropped by as well! We have two LCD screens, one showing a DVD on marine life that will leave you drooling and the other will show a photo gallery on our members' tanks since we can't set up a show tank without going against our ideals about not stocking up till the cycle period is over (unless Danano is willing to carry over his Nano tank! ) This weekend, the SRC booth will be choc-a-bloc with lots of goodies from our sponsors to aid in our booth fund-raising! (The official SRC T-shirts for fundraising, unfortunately, will not be available for sale in time for Aquarama due to communication breakdown over the last few day's downtime as we were shifting into the new server). Fortunately, I was able to round up some sponsorship from our sponsors and I hope we'll break even at least! Look out for stuff that you can buy with discounts AND where the sales proceeds will go into the Booth Fund. So please show us your support there! Thank you! Anyway, our sponsors for the booth will be offering the following for sale: 1. T5 tubes - eAquaNature.com 2. DT live phytoplankton and PE Mysis (frozen) - Reef Associates 3. Kalkwasser - Reefez 4. Titanium/Reef Relief Chillers 5. TUBBY (automatic water top-up device) So come on down and meet up with your fellow marine hobbyists! Looking forward to seeing all of you there at Aquarama and I really miss talking to you guys over the one week's forum communication breakdown. We will be giving our brochures/flyers to interested people who wish to start a marine tank and we will also be on hand to give advice when asked. We hope to also talk to as many such interested hobbyists to visit our website and to promote a better understanding of the marine ecosystem, the hobby and knowledge-gathering so as to better the lives of their marine pets. Let's go reefing!!!! SRC!!!! Warmest regards, Achilles Tang Founder/Admin Singapore Reef Club

Hi everyone, Those who wish to help out at our booth at Aquarama, just come. We'll roster people on the spot as I think we have quite a fair amount of helpers already. AT

Hi guys, The explanation for the slow access was due to our previous host's provider doing some reconfiguration during the maintenance period. Things went awfully wrong for them and affected many websites including ours. Hopefully, with the move into a new and reputedly reliable webhost, our troubles are over!

Ok everyone, here's the latest status update. 1. We are obviously not going to have the T-shirts ready for the Aquarama exhibition. My apologies if you are disappointed about this. Due to us being let down by our last host, there was no way I could retrieve the order list to get the qty, colour, sizes etc to even remotely guess how much to print. 2. As such, the fund raising has been undertaken by approaching corporate sponsors. So far the response has been good. There will be sales of some products such as Reefez kalkwasser, DT live phytoplankton, PE Mysis, T5 tubes, TUBBY devices etc where proceeds will go into the booth fund raising. Please render your support by purchasing these items! 3. Please note that the cost of the T-shirts has been revised. My initial quote for the T-shirt at $20 was way underestimated as the cost of a FULL COLOUR printed T-shirt is close to $20 already. The quote by Bwilly was for T-shirts with simple logos bearing only 1 or 2 colours that can be easily silkscreen printed. My design incorporates photo-realistic graphics such that only direct iron-on type of printing has to be done. Therefore the cost of each T-shirt is now at $26 dollars. 4. Please double and triple-check that the latest Order List post bears your details as it may be omitted when a few people are cutting and pasting the list onwards. 5. Now that the pricing is changed... I am restarting the order list again. For those who have already passed me the $20 per T-shirt, I can begin to double-check that your payment has gotten through. Remember to pm me your details such as method of transfer, bank a/c number, time/date, your initials and amount so I can cross-reference. The balance $6 will be collected when you receive your T-shirts. Let's restart the ORDER LIST again! (T-shirts at $26 now).

Depending on where you stay, it is possible your water supply has readings of nitrates and phosphates. If in doubt, get a RO/DI unit!

I think the sting of a carpet is probably unmatched by the sting of tube anemones.

If you study proper culturing methods, the hatching of brineshrimp cysts has best results if the eggs are always in suspension which is achieved through the slow bubbling of air causing good water circulation. Oxyen saturation should be high too... which without air bubbling... you can't achieve. The best specific gravity for hatching brine shrimp is 1.010 to 1.020. Some reef tanks are maintained at 1.025. So what I do is I take out enough tank saltwater and dilute it to 1.010. If you could post a pix of this supposedly hassle-free BBS hatching gadget? It would be interesting to see how it works compared to the tried and tested DIY coke bottle hatchery which is extremely cheap & easy to use too.

Final underwater shot of my tank, right looking at left end.

My favourite staghorn acro... finally a really nice closeup shot made possible with my underwater camera housing!

An underwater closeup shot of my pink acro!

Guys... guess what... I took out my Ikelite underwater camera housing and decided to take some never-before-attempted-by-me INSIDE the tank shots! This is takes away the restriction I had before in the past from shooting extreme left-to-right and right-to-left (as my tank is an in-wall concept, viewable only from the front). This underwater shots have also enabled to me to get much closer shots of my corals! Here's a view of my right end...

It's a coral obligate. Meaning that it survives by only eating the polyps of SPS corals. Sadly, that means it's highly unsuitable for reef tanks as it will starve to death if a hobbyist buys them. I still wonder why the LFS bring them in... only newbies will buy them out of ignorance or lack of research. Not directly saying you, qtrigger... but... it's too late anyway since you bought it already. You can try your luck with brineshrimp... you may turn out extremely lucky?

Try getting a very large specimen and a small specimen. If the larger one doesn't kill the smaller one, chances are.. they will pair up.

For CBS, the larger will often be the female.

You can your luck with chromises. They may not even school together after some time when they are comfortable in your tank. IME, anthias are the best bet for nice-looking small schooling fishes..

The Iwasaki 50k only comes in 150w if I am not wrong... are you able to get 400w 50k down under? The blueline e-ballast only overdrives the Radium bulb as it is actually a 360w lamp. I think the Ushio Blue is driven closer to spec with the 400w so it should last a bit longer. I do miss the whiter look of the Radiums though.

CBS are aggressive... anything that comes near them gets a taste of their claws. Small fishes that they can catch will become lunch. Cleaner shrimps will give them a wide berth. Mated CBS are a wonder to behold as they will spawn every fortnight and they go everywhere together!

Okie.. guys... we already got the general consensus about how most of us feel about these kind of shops. People have different ways of doing business and they have their own customers. Let's not make things more difficult for them now that they can see for themselves the feedback from customers. It's up to them to decide for themselves whether they feel the need to improve or not. And it's up to us to patronise their shops or not based on our own experiences and expectations. Those of us who are friendlier with them can perhaps encourage them to do better. Competition in this market is already tight.. those who take the trouble to improve & attract a customer's goodwill will undoubtedly be the winners.

The bummer about DSB is that it takes up a lot of depth.... in your case, you have a 2 and half feet height... so no probs! For grade #0, 4 inches should be sufficient... if you don't mind losing 2 more... go for 6 inchs!

A lot of reefers base their designs on the Durso standpipe... which I am using.... Check out this site on Durso standpipes here!

The pipe is to extend the opening (where water flows from overflow into sump) higher up in the water level instead of right down at the bottom glass pane.