Achilles Tang

Hmmm... maybe I can consider it... what kind of ballasts do you have to run it?

This is the plan that I have for our booth. 1. Multimedia presentations - using LCD screens to showcase - a gallery of our member's tanks - powerpoint presentation on basic reefkeeping eg. cycling period - powerpoint presentation on the ocean environment and what we can do as individuals to preserve it. 2. Posters: - our Club's name and website - our goals and objectives - our milestones as a club: Saving Nemo campaign - introduction of our website features 3. Flyers: - basic tips given on how to start up a tank - List of mistakes to avoid - some basic guidelines promoting responsible reefkeeping 4. Stickers/car decals: - promoting our club and website address I need people to be on rotational shifts throughout the public days (Sat and Sun) to give out flyers, talk to people, relieve each other for breaks, makan times, R&R walkarounds. I will take my annual leave to man the booth on the Trade Days and promote ourselves to the industry but if I have some company, it would be excellent! I need people to help me with the collation, design and preparation work for the multimedia and printed materials. I need people to help me with logistics in getting the hardware and posters, printed materials assembled, delivered and set up for our booth AND the teardown logistics. I need fundraising/sponsorship for the following Club event expenses: 1. Rental of PC equipment and other booth setup stuff like stationary etc. 2. Printing of posters and flyers/handout materials/stickers/car decals 3. Transportation costs 4. Provision of drinks and refreshments for volunteer manning staff I am open to any suggestions on what we should do, how to achieve them and how to raise funds for this event and will decide on the outcome later. Please feel free to give CONSTRUCTIVE comments as we do not have much time left to plan and make this happen. Thanks! AT

Hi everyone, As you all know, the Singapore Reef Club (SRC) has been invited to support this event and we will be taking up a booth at the venue to promote our club and the hobby. I have also been invited to give a public seminar on the last day of the event and I have selected the topic as: ‘Responsible Reefkeeping: How to be a Conscientious Marine Hobbyist’ It will be addressed to potential newcomers to the marine hobby and amateurs, to set them off on the right foot on their responsibilities as a caretaker of their adopted marine pets. The seminar will address myths, mindsets and give a realistic view about progressing in this hobby. The SRC booth will introduce the reefkeeping hobby to potential reefkeepers, provide basic advice and tips to newcomers and promote ourselves as the local club for all Singaporean marine aquarists to provide mutual support and encouragement, to help people advance in their skills and as a base for knowledge sharing. In light of these objectives, I will be planning the logistic and materials preparation for our participation in Aquarama 2003 and require the combined co-operation and goodwill of our SRC members in helping the club achieve its goals for this event. Please step up and volunteer yourselves as SRC should not be a one-man show but a combination of the unity, brotherhood and strength in passion that you guys have shown this entire year since SRC was launched in Sept 2002! I will detail down the plans and will assemble a committee to help run this event together! Please vocalise your opinions and offer your help early as time is short and we need to mobilise a lot of things asap! It is an honour that we marine hobbyist have come this far to be acknowledged and recognized in the industry and it is my personal honour to have turn the ignition key... you guys rock! Let's make our involvement in Aquarama a BIG SUCCESS!!! Thanking you all in advance, Achilles Tang Founder and Admin Singapore Reef Club

Wait till I fill up the right front corner with some frogspawn/octopus corals first! And my sun corals are opened up! And my clams are facing the camera, and my SPS corals colour up more! And remove my cleaning magnet from my front glass! And most importantly... scrape off every bit of coralline algae off my black acrylic background!

Cookie... if you do a search on cyanide poisoning on the internet... you will find these to be classic symptoms.... a fish that looks healthy, exhibiting bright colours and eating well suddenly dies for no apparent reason. I heard one of the symptoms is the fish's poop is white in colour.

Retook a new pix today... looks much better and closer to what the eye is seeing! Should have played around with camera modes more often! Here's the tank with full 1600watts MH on! Photo's a little big, but I guess it's a full tank view...

Kee.. keep photo size to 700 pixel width max.

Yes... it's called the Berlin method. Using lots of LR to provide the core of natural biological filtration. A Modified Berlin Method is the use of a skimmer with it. No sandbed, just a glass bottom. Detritus should be siphoned out. Some reefers still use this method...

The main clue is to look at the mouth. Fake cleaner fish have underslung mouths.

NO3 should be very low or could even be undetectable after cycling. But once you start stock up on fish and starting feeding your tank... the byproducts of respiration and body wastes will generate minute amounts of ammonia, which is processed efficiently by aerobic bacteria. Thus, harmful ammonia and NO2 is not present in enough quantities to affect your livestock. However, in improperly setup tanks (either through ignorance or space restrictions), there is insufficient anaerobic areas for the anaerobic bacteria to convert nitrates into nitrogen gas. If you can't setup a DSB to deal naturally with nitrates... then you can try packing your tank with lots of LR of the right type (dense and large pieces where the centre is anaerobic). You deal with it chemically eg. AZ-NO3, other nitrate absorbants or by mechanical methods, water changes, denitrators etc.

Fourth finger? You mean the little finger?

I heard that RO/DI units and their refills are a lot cheaper from the US? By how much?

Do a search on T5, the info is all there, LYFDTW. It's a flourescent tube, except more efficient and thinner in diameter.

Well.... if your water is clean, your LR is well-cured and your tank too sterile, then turning on a good skimmer may actually prolong the cycling process as it will skim out dissolved organics before they have a chance to break down into an ammonia source to start the cycle. That is why it may be necessary to 'spike' a tank with a source of ammonia (decomposing dead prawn recommended) to kickstart the cycle. Using uncured LR should produce enough ammonia to kick start a cycle. You can hasten it further with the usage of a dead prawn. However, too much ammonia produced could end up killing all the inhabitants of LR (eg. inverts like worms and crabs). You can turn on the skimmer to help improve oxygenation or to help clean up the water (if you don't want to do a water change) should a crash occur. But now that your tank is so-called back to normal... you should first ensure that ammonia is truly zero, not just 'low'. NO2 spike should last about a week and a half, give or take a few days. Same for NO3, although the gradual drop to zero is really dependant on the filtration setup you did for your tank. Some tanks will perpetually have a consistently high reading of NO3 because they use canisters, bioballs, wet/dry systems etc, lack of ample LR, no or poorly setup sandbed for the simple reason that these fail to provide a anaerobic environment for the right kind of bacteria (that process nitrates to nitrogen gas). There is really no exact time frame to tell you... every system is different. You should only rely on testing regularly daily/every two or three days in the cycling period (average a month) with good reliable test kits until you are sure every part of the cycle is truly complete. Then SLOWLY stock up or you'll waste time rectifying another mini-cycle.

The top 3 most venomous creatures in the sea are: 1. blue-ringed octopus 2. The box jellyfish 3. sea snake Hydrophis belcheri Yeah right... if you make it through total heart and lung failure first!

I am but a humble member of the Great Al Fragya Fundamentalist Cult! May all who enter our fold be honoured to serve our Calcium Carbonate masters with all our body, heart, mind and soul! Let us open our hearts and wallets and offer daily sacrifices of money and sodium bicarbonate, calcium chloride, calcium hydroxide as we gain our satisfaction from their growth, pleasure from colours and the waving of polyps! May we sacrifice sleep, time and loved ones, yeah even our very food money, just to pursue the ultimate nirvana!

What makes blue-rings so deadly? Blue-ringed octopuses are among the deadliest animals in the sea. Throughout their range in Australia and the eastern Indo-Pacific, several humans suffer bites each year. Unfortunately, some of these are fatal. In Australia where blue-rings occur in shallow coastal waters and can be relatively common in areas frequented by beach-goers, there have been dozens of reported bites and several deaths. Typically, the victim is unaware of the danger and either picks up the innocuous looking octopus or inadvertently contacts it. The bite is slight and produces at most only a small laceration with no more than a tiny drop of blood and little or no discoloration. Bites are usually reported as being painless. Often the victim doesn't even know that he had been bitten. This can make it difficult for emergency and medical personnel to determine the cause of a patient's distress. In fact, there is some question as to whether the octopus even needs to bite to envenomate a human. In cases with prolonged contact, the venom might pass directly through the skin. While most severe envenomations appear to involve bites, I can report developing mild local neurological symptoms after immersing my hand in sea water in which a large blue-ring had been shipped. Depending on how much venom has been transferred into the wound, the onset of symptoms can be quite rapid. Within five to ten minutes, the victim begins to experience parasthesias and numbness, progressive muscular weakness and difficulty breathing and swallowing. Nausea and vomiting, visual disturbances and difficulty speaking may also occur. In severe cases, this is followed by flaccid paralysis and respiratory failure, leading to unconsciousness and death due to cerebral anoxia. Interestingly, the victim's heart continues to beat until extreme asphyxia sets in. Some victims report being conscious, but unable to speak or move. They may even appear clinically dead with pupils fixed and dilated. Not all bites result in the transfer of venom. The severity of symptoms is dose-dependent. Smaller adults and especially children are most at risk. The venom of blue-ringed octopuses is contained in their saliva. In the late 1960s, the primary active toxin was extracted from the greatly enlarged posterior salivary glands of an Australian species of blue-ringed octopus, Hapalochlaena maculosa. These globular shaped glands are situated in the anterior body cavity behind the brain. Ducts from each gland join to form a common duct that passes down through the brain and opens into the mouth cavity. The toxin was characterized as a low molecular weight, non-protein molecule and was named maculotoxin. It was recognized to be similar to tetrodotoxin (TTX), the extremely deadly toxin found in pufferfishes Experiments with rabbits showed that a single adult blue-ringed octopus weighing just 25 g possessed enough venom to fatally paralyze 10 large humans. Subsequent work demonstrated that the maculotoxin is in fact TTX. TTX is found not only in blue-rings and many fishes in the family Tetraodontidae (hence the name tetrodotoxin), but also in several other groups of animals including California newts (genus Taricha), central American harlequin frogs (genus Atelopus), as well as a scattering of invertebrates including a South American tunicate (sea squirt), a sea star, several snails, some xanthid crabs, a horseshoe crab, two ribbon worms, some arrow worms, and a flatworm. It was a mystery why such a diversity of unrelated organisms would all evolve the same toxin, until it was recently discovered that bacteria associated with many of these animals actually produce TTX. This is the case in blue-ringed octopuses. Their salivary glands harbor dense colonies of TTX-producing bacteria. The blue-rings have evolved a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria, providing them ideal living conditions while using the toxin they produce to subdue prey and as part of their highly advertised defense. TTX is a potent neurotoxin that blocks the movement of sodium (Na+) ions across neural membranes by attaching to a Na+ channel receptor and capping the Na+ channel. TTX is particularly effective blocking the propagation of nervous impulses in mammalian myelinated peripheral nerves which produces flaccid voluntary muscle paralysis. This interferes with the muscles of the diaphragm and chest wall and leads to respiratory failure. There is little or no direct effect of TTX on the heart or brain (because it does not cross the blood-brain barrier) until a lack of oxygen causes these organs to fail. One milligram of TTX can kill a person, making it one of the most potent natural toxins known. There is no antidote to TTX. Treatment consists of life-supportive measures including artificial ventilation. This is why researchers in my laboratory studying blue-ringed octopus are required to work in pairs and must be trained in CPR. Patients who survive 24 hours typically make a full recovery, unless lack of oxygen to the brain has caused permanent damage. Interestingly, blue-ringed octopuses are not affected by TTX, probably because they have evolved a slightly different sodium channel receptor that does not interact with the TTX molecule.

Taken off http://www.barrierreefaustralia.com/the-gr...ngedoctopus.htm General Information: With a beak that can penetrate a wet-suit, they are one little cute creature to definitely look at BUT Don't touch. The bite might be painless, but this octopus injects a neuromuscular paralysing venom. The venom contains some maculotoxin, a poison more violent than any found on land animals. The nerve conduction is blocked and neuromuscular paralysis is followed by death. The victim might be saved if artificial respiration starts before marked cyanosis and hypotension develops. The blue-ringed octopus is the size of a golf ball but its poison is powerful enough to kill an adult human in minutes. There's no known antidote. The only treatment is hours of heart massage and artificial respiration until the poison has worked its way out of your system. The venom contains tetrodotoxin, which blocks sodium channels and causes motor paralysis and occasionally respiratory failure. Though with fixed dilated pupils, the senses of the patients are often intact. The victims are aware but unable to respond. Although the painless bite can kill an adult, injuries have only occurred when an octopus has been picked out of its pool and provoked or stepped on. SYMPTOMS Onset of nausea. Hazy Vision. ( Within seconds you are blind.) Loss of sense of touch, speech and the ability to swallow. Within 3 minutes, paralysis sets in and your body goes into respiratory arrest. The poison is not injected but is contained in the octopus's saliva, which comes from two glands each as big as its brain. Poison from the one is used on its main prey, crabs, and is relatively harmless to humans. Poison from the other gland serves as defense against predators. The blue-ringed octopus either secretes the poison in the vicinity of its prey, waits until it is immobile and then devours it, or it jumps out and envelops the prey in its 8 tentacles and bites it. First aid for blue-ringed octopus bites Pressure-immobilization is a recommended first aid. Prolonged artificial respiration may also be required. May require supportive treatment including mechanical ventilation until the effects of the toxin disappear. There is no antivenom available in Australia. Mouth to mouth resuscitation can keep the victim alive and the poison gradually wears off after 24 hrs, apparently leaving no side effects.

Fighting poison with poison? Nah... I don't anyone has been able to develop an anti-venom for BRO bites yet.

If the skimmer is turned off during this stage, please provide sufficient water circulation so that enough oxygen is provided during the cycling stage or a tank crash may happen if too much ammonia combined with a lack of oxygen overwhelms and kills too much living creatures in the LR. Too many people forget common sense and wonder why everything dies during the cycling stage.

Possible. But you are better off using T5 for such a tiny tank. The heat from a MH is no joke and temp fluctuations with such a small water volume could be fatal unless you have a good chiller operating fast enough to cope with the heat.

There is NO anti-venom for BRO!

In the wild, anthias chase zooplankton to eat. Try Cyclop-eze, it's an excellent food for anthias with good trigger response. They react and hunt down every red speck of copepod. I have never seen a fish reject it. Even my large Tang will suck them in.

You should ask Danano or Robe... I think both have dived in the US region before.

Merlion, can you repost this info in a separate thread? Give it an appropriate title... like 'how to get to blah blah blah'? Thanks!