This one was a freebie from work, as we were traveling to meet with a large customer in Silicon Valley. Normally I wouldn't count business travel as a trip, but as we only had one day of meetings there was enough free time to enjoy the city. Additionally, the customer is awesome to work with, and my boss lives in SF, serving as a dedicated local guide.

After checking in at the Intercontinental hotel downtown, I made a beeline for the California Academy of Sciences, which had recently opened and contains a great aquarium. They have one of the largest indoor coral reefs, and I had visited their temporary facility and coral aquaculture center the last time I was in SF.

Labels: Aquarium, Photos, The Monthly Trip

I'm going to pretend ten months having passed since this blog was updated ain't no thing, and follow up on the last note. Since January I have converted my planted aquarium into a coral reef tank (making it 29 gallons, and not the original 15 I had planned), kept a blog about it, and moved to a new apartment. Eye candy to follow.

Labels: Aquarium, Blogging, Photos, Projects, Reef Tank

This past summer I had reached a certain level of success with my planted aquarium. I had overcome most of the algae cycles that plague a new tank, my plants were healthy and forming an aquascape I could be proud of, and the fish were breeding profusely (not that breeding Xiphophorus maculatus is any measure of aquaculture glory, but still, it was cool to see). The tank had reached a mature state where it could continue relatively maintenance free.

Around this time I made what might be looked back on as an incredibly expensive mistake, and started to become interested in reef aquariums. I started at Reef Central, a very active and interesting forum dedicated to reef keeping, and it's online magazine component Reefkeeping. I also ordered two books that are widely regarded to be the best for beginning reef keepers: Reef Secrets, a good general summary of what it takes to setup a reef tank, and Aquarium Corals, a book specifically focused on coral husbandry and species information.



Eventually I settled on using the bottom shelf of my planted aquarium stand, which is equipped to hold a 15 gallon tank below the primary tank, which is 29 gallons. This is small for a reef tank, and may prove to be challenging. Reef systems are much more sensitive to changes in water quality than freshwater systems, so generally the larger a body of water you can keep, the less impact anything can make to the quality. I plan on offsetting this by keeping a very low bio-load, with minimal fish. My primary interest for this tank is learning about the successful rearing of corals and invertebrates, and hopefully this tank will provide the foundation for moving into a larger system in the future.

As a side note, a buddy of mine has setup a great blog about breeding and rearing freshwater shrimp. Take a look: www.breedshrimp.com

Labels: Aquarium, Projects, Reef Tank

I took a few snaps of the aquarium this week to update the monthly photo log, and also to take advantage of some new fish being acclimated to the tank. While they're still in the plastic bag its easier to get a good macro shot because their movement is limited. This is a trio of hatchet fish, Gasteropelecus sternicla, natives of the Amazon and possessors of an unusual trait amongst fish, the ability to "fly" for short distances above the water.

I'm also excited about the quality of the photos, which has improved drastically due to a few changes. One, I got a tripod. Two, I finally started messing with the manual focus on my camera, which seems to deliver much better results than the automatic macro setting for shooting the aquarium. I also tried out a larger range of aperture and exposure length combinations. Not too bad for a four year old digital.

Labels: Aquarium, Fish, Photos, Projects

I went to the New England Aquarium last week and took a few photos. The line was really long, so went inside and became members (tax deductible!) in order to skip it.







A few more photos here: flickr.com/photos/nattarbox. I'm going to resize this column so I can use the Flickr auto-blog-post-o-matic function to send photos here at their full size.

Labels: Aquarium, Fish, Photos