XPeriment 626

It will take goodness knows how long just to isolate the gene for colours, don't talk about manipulating it. Imagine, what if they manipulate the wrong genes by accident, then instead of colourful corals we get giant mutant ship-eating corals that walk out of the water and smash skyscrapers.... muahahahahahahahahhaah

I'm actually in the process of setting up my new tank and I have a 2'x1.5'x0.5' DSB in the sump area for my 5'x2'x2' tank. It might not be as effective as a full DSB but with a lot of matured LRs in the main tank, a good skimmer, some macroalgae and regular water change I think the nitrates can be kept low. Plus, as per what this thread is about, if the old tank syndrome appears because of nutrient leaching from the DSB, it will be a lot easier for me to restart the sump DSB than if it were in my main tank...just like what Jun Hong said above.

Pardon my ignorance but what's the difference between a remote tank and having a DSB in your sump?

Is there a need for this? Shouldn't the waste from the main tank be sufficient to maintain the bacteria in the remote tank? Seems like a redundant act to put fish in the remote tank.

don't think maroon clown per se will be incompatible with a blue tang. it depends on individual fish. i have kept a maroon and blue tang together and they're fine. however if the fighting persists you might have to take one out.

So was I, but I've changed my mind and you might want to take a look at these links: http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html http://www.apollo-hoax.me.uk/homepage.html

no, got a tankmaker to make a new tank with the same dimensions but thicker glass and proper eurobracing, plus a hole in the bottom for the overflow to the sump. and also got a sump from the tankmaker. added a whole lot of necessary equipment too - skimmer, chiller, T5 lights, fluidised reactor, UV steriliser. might get a calcium reactor but not just yet. the old tank i am decommissioning and selling later on. don't bother trying to drill a hole in your atlantis tank. it's not worth the risk, effort and cost since it is a really difficult and dangerous task if not done by experts with the proper tools. once cracked you have a useless piece of glass. better to custom make a new one to proper specs and sell off the old one.

thought it was already announced in the middle of the year? 1.5 months, with 0.25 month given in july? can't really remember...

yeah he used a graphic program to make this really cool video... got fooled the first time i saw it

If you're serious about keeping more than damsels, get a new tank. Seriously. That's what I did.

oi! I play Counterstrike hor! BH, you don't seem to get what people are trying to say. You gotta learn to walk before you can learn to run. Ignoring AT's advice to start with softies and going straight to exotic SPS when your little research project hasn't even started up yet is not only unwise and potentially wasteful because of how expensive mistakes will be, but it reeks of self-serving commercial and recreational intent. Pardon my saying, but IMHO this is a way of using taxpayer money to fund a personal hobby. I suppose every frag of every exotic coral in the project will stay in your school tanks and no little fragment will mysteriously find its way into the homes of the students involved. Unless of course, the home tanks are part of the research project in which case I guess everything's hunky dory. And whatever you may think of people who say "impossible", putting them down in that way is just as immature. You can stand on your box and proclaim that you will flap your arms and reach the moon, and when people say "impossible" you can call them narrow minded. That's really your prerogative. But when people give you well meaning advice and you respond with more than a little cockiness about your mysterious underground scientists and great system you are going to set up, it gets rather less than amusing. Perhaps you're actually working on a nuclear weapon or a death ray, so the cloak of secrecy is necessary. Other than that, when we ask for some accountability for how our tax dollars are being spent and we get evasive answers, it sounds more like there isn't a good reason other than "a really fun thing to do with other people's money". Maybe when you start working and have to pay some bills you will understand why people are so concerned with these issues. Until then you can continue to dig your heels in and carry on despite all the advice that everyone is giving. At least you won't be the first to pour Singaporeans' hard earned money down the drain.

PLEASE tell me you are not getting these quotes from ATLA*** at IMM.

Unfortunately, I am a civil servant myself. Fortunately, it means I get to see first hand how taxpayer money is wasted. And I mean wasted. Just because a school approves a project does not mean the school gave proper consideration to the likelihood of any real results emerging from the project. Sure, it looks good to MOE that you have "cheem" sounding projects handled by your students, but that doesn't mean you know what you're doing when you allow money to be spent on buying exotic corals. No doubt the principal and whoever else approved the project doesn't fully understand the implications of what they supposedly agreed to. Even the teacher with the "Masters in Aquaculture"... no offence but if that piece of education were so useful it would be better applied to a marine research institute or lecturing in some university course rather than to waste it as a teacher in a secondary school no doubt conducting O level biology at most. BH, do recognise that asking people to donate expensive exotic frags for your brood stock so that you can sell it is like asking people to give you their rare breeds of kittens and puppies so that you can breed them yourself and sell. And all in the name of conservation too. There is a reason why there is a market out there to buy and sell frags. Don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking what a secondary school life sciences facility can do. My good friend won an international young nobel prize award for his thesis on chaos theory when we were in JC1. All I'm saying is that you need to be realistic about what you will probably be able to do. Limited funds (compared to huge marine facilities with wall-to-wall tanks), limited expertise (full-time PhD trained researchers) and limited size (not many students your age will be as well read and committed to the marine hobby as you) will mean your school cannot hope to reproduce the level of work being churned out at big institutes around the world. And there is no running away from the basic courses in related sciences that you must take as a foundation to study the more complex aspects of marine biology. At the end of the day, I repeat my stand on this. If you say the school is doing it for educational purposes, to get students interested and aware of the basics of coral culturing etc, fine. To say it is about conservation and genetic manipulation of corals I think you ought to re-examine your goals a little more carefully. Anyway hope your project is a success, it will definitely be an interesting thing for students. Wish I'd had that when I was in school. Don't be surprised, though, if you find nobody rushing over to donate their coral frags to your brood stock. Just isn't realistic.

try kwong lim framemakers along kelantan lane. they do a lot of fishtanks, both freshwater and marine. reasonably priced too.

yah very ex... now with reefing hobby cannot buy these toys liao first one is Abominus of the Terrorcons (Osama robot!!) second one is Bruticus, of the Combaticons third one name is stated. Computron of the Technobots fourth one is Defensor of the Protectobots fifth is of cos Devastator of the Constructicons sixth one is Menasor of the Stunticons seventh is Predaking of the Predacons eighth is Superion of the Aerialbots Can't believe I so no life...

see whether got wear pink nail polish

no wonder people advise me dun get anemone. walking corals. piangz.

No offence BH, but I think you gotta be clear what your objectives are. There's no way the budget of a secondary school in Singapore can contribute meaningfully to conservation efforts of corals, considering the scale at which destruction is taking place. If it is for learning and basic research, that's one thing. You can't repopulate a reef with brood stocks. I agree with AT, studying how to increase the survivability of corals in harsh water conditions or improving viral resistance are far more useful than colour tinkering with halogens. In addition, looking for "fine specimens" that LFS keep for themselves sounds commercial and not scientific in the least. People consider specimens "fine" because of shape and colouration. This has no relation at all to importance of the specimen to the ecosystem and what part it plays in the bigger picture. If you go down that route, you will have a nice collection of "fine specimens" which will be ultimately useless for conservation or even mere research since the "not-so-fine" specimens (optically) are equally, if not more, important to the ecosystem. If you intend to conduct a serious study on this subject and to educate other students on it, you will do well to have a broad mix of corals rather than just zoom in on the "nice specimens".

actually you are right, and i think there are many reefers doing that method, and i am switching to it too. The idea is that if your return from the chiller goes direct to the tank, it has 3 benefits: 1) chilled water goes directly to main tank, making cooling more efficient 2) acts as extra pump to increase the rate which water is cycled through the entire tank and sump setup 3) in case of main return pump failure, acts as a backup to keep some kind of flow going, though much weaker. still better than nothing. as to earlier comments by clowntrigger about how increasing flowrate makes it slower to cool down his tank, it is not strange at all. it makes perfect sense that this should happen. for heat exchange, the rate at which heat is transferred from a warm object to a cooler object is related to the difference in temperature between the two. i.e. if you put a warm cup into cool water, the water will slowly rise in temperature and the cup will slowly cool down. But if you put a boiling hot cup into freezing cold water, the temperature of the water will rise much faster and the temperature of the cup will drop much faster. because of this, if you have a slower rate of flow, your chiller return water is coming out much colder into your tank and the heat from the warmer water is being absorbed into this chilled water at a much higher rate than if your chiller return water is not so cold. similarly, the warmer the water going into the chiller, the faster the rate at which the heat from the water is removed by the chiller. thus, if fairly warm water is constantly going into the chiller, the cooling effect is more efficient than if colder water is going in. if your flow rate is higher, it increases the chance that already-cooled water in your main tank finds its way back out of your tank into your chiller, and then you get inefficient chilling. hope you guys arent too confused... cos i am almost confused myself!!

congrats!!!

i find it hard to figure out the problem wihout having any clue as to your setup. what size tank? what filtration method are you using? how much live stock do you have?

sad to say i also kena suckered by that idiot from Atl****s. complete waste of money. now i am scrapping the useless tank he provided and making a brand new one with sump and everything. many thanks to the numerous bros in SRC who helped otherwise i will have a fish-graveyard in my house. For example, he gave me a bunch of "starter fish" to put inside as soon as tank set up. At that time I knew nothing about cycling the tank. He said "fish sure die at the start, must put more see which survive". Guess what, out of 18 fish, 4 survived. FOUR!!! for the first week i was scooping out dead fish EVERYDAY. Made me darn angry After several months of biding my time and talking to a lot of people and reading reading reading about marine fish, I now know I have a piece of crap in my house and have to re-do the system basically from ground-up. Don't go by IMM much nowadays but if I see him again I will give him a piece of my mind

No offence Liverpool & Man U fans both agree... HOULLIER SUCKS now your life won't be so easy loh... got Benitez liao...

haha!! beat you to it in posting the score!