In cased you missed anything from last week, here’s our weekly recap of the top stories from January 29th through February 4th. This week’s stories include an inspirational piece about the one man army that is Ret Talbot, which will hopefully spur others on to fight for our hobby against those who wish to dismantle it. We also highlight a few articles on aquarium equipment from JBJ and Deltec, and get treated to an inside look at aquarium collecting practices.

• Ret Talbot, One Man Making a Huge Impact on Issues of the Aquarium Trade
• JBJ Unibody LED to Come in Three Sizes
• Different Macroalgae for Different Situations
• Deltec’s Swanky New E-flow Water Pumps
• An Inside Look at Aquarium Collecting

According to a recent article in West Hawaii Today, animal expert and television personality Jeff Corwin recently visited the reefs of Kona to gather footage for three upcoming episodes of his popular show “Ocean Mysteries”. Each episode will focus on monk seals, green sea turtles, and the vast amount of ocean life respectively, and the visit gave Jeff the opportunity to assess the health of Hawaii’s reefs. His opinion: the reefs were “teeming with life”. Corwin described what he saw as a kaleidoscope of life, as he witnessed surgeonfish, parrotfish, and many others thriving in Kona. He indicated that his overall impressions were of hope and encouragement, but that people need to continue to be stewards of the reef.

This assessment of Hawaiian reefs stands in sharp contrast to the picture painted by anti-aquarium activists, who keep beating their drums to the rhythm that the aquarium industry is decimating their fish populations. We realize that reefs all over the world are threatened by many human factors such as global warming, pollution, ocean acidification, overfishing, what have you, but the aquarium industry is not doing the kind of damage many people would lead you to believe. In fact, the term overfishing more often refers to the commercial and recreational fishing industries than aquarium collection. Regardless, it’s nice to have an outsider’s perspective on the reefs of Hawaii, and even more so because Jeff Corwin is concerned about the environment and not completely disinterested in its health.

Story via MASNA.

A short time back, I was privileged enough to sit in on a wonderful MASNA Live discussion centered around the aquarium trade’s battles in Hawaii against anti-aquarium pro-tourism activists. In that talk, someone pointed out that we, the aquarium community, needed to do a better job of fighting the misinformation and moral arguments proposed by those seeking a full dismantling of our wonderful hobby. While I agree wholeheartedly, it was also discussed as to what organization or individual would best be suited to lead such a monumental task. Who would the burden fall on? What individual or group would take on the task of taking on the anti-aquarium activists and the nice little foothold they’ve managed to get in the Hawaiian legal circles?

As I sat and pondered that thought, one name very quickly came to mind, Ret Talbot. For those of you who don’t know about Ret’s work, he’s been doing amazing research and writing great articles about the aquarium trade in Hawaii for organizations like CORAL Magazine and MASNA. He has been pretty much the sole source, or at least the most recognizable source, of knowledge about aquarium-related legislation and high impact issues that plague message boards and blog sites such as this one. On a personal level, Ret has been a huge inspiration. He has been the epitome of what it means to be a one man army and his works have given me hope that the message here on AquaNerd is also making an impact, albeit one with a bit less weight than his.

As I talked to Ret briefly via email, the idea that singular efforts by many different individuals is the key to fighting our anti-aquarium foes slowly dawned on me. More often than not, aquarium keepers ask themselves, “What can I do? I’m only one person.” To answer that question, and others like it, all I have to do is point at Ret’s work. He is just one person, but he has done more for protecting this hobby and informing aquarium keepers about vastly important issues than any aquarium blog or forum website could ever dream of conjuring up. He has taken it upon himself to make an impact. To further get my point across, just look at all of the individual efforts of aquarium breeders and what those have led to. Small strides by basement fish breeders have allowed this hobby to grow tremendously and has given us commercially available aquacultured species that were thought impossible only a few years prior.  We don’t need an organization to fight our battles. Aquarium keepers need to tackle the issues themselves.

Maybe this article is coming off as too much of a man-crush on an aquarium industry giant, but the take home message behind it is: you can make a difference. Your contributions don’t have to come in the form of brilliant articles or fish breeding. You can make a difference just by talking to fellow hobbyists, sharing your experiences, and passing on sound knowledge to the next generation.

In cased you missed anything from last week, here’s our weekly recap of the top stories from January 22nd through the 28th. The stories include our first article from the newest AquaNerd author, Daniel Leija,  as well as some more discussion about the troubles the aquarium industry is facing in Hawaii.

• Setting Them Straight, Fixing Bad Advise from Bad Fish Stores
• Amazing Room Divider Aquarium Install
• Picture of the Week, Marble Mouth Anglerfish
• Vertex Aquaristik Announces Magnetic Cleaners and Probe Holders
• Battle of the Hawaiian Fisheries: Aquarium vs Recreational

Want a job in the aquarium industry but don’t feel like your skills will allow you to compete against biology graduates? Do you have a passion for aquariums but don’t want to maintain them both at home and at work? If the answer to those two questions is yes, then you might want to consider getting a job at an aquarium equipment company where you can use your passion for the hobby to drive a successful career. With the popularity of LED aquarium illumination on the steady rise, job openings for reliable help in the sales and customer service departments for companies that produce this type of lighting are exploding. Looking to expand their operations, Ecoxotic has recently listed a job availability for an “account representative”, which is being described as a position designed to field phone calls and become intimately familiar with their product line to better help customers. The position is full-time and located in beautiful Southern California, where the company is based.

Full job description posted below.

From a San Diego Craigslist listing:

Vista based LED lighting company is looking for a fulltime process oriented Account Rep to establish and maintain the valued relationships with our customers. This role is designed to keep the sales funnel replenished through hundreds of outbound phone calls per week, all documented within our CRM system, SalesForce. Please only apply if you have the tenacity to call every customer once a week to take care of their needs- whatever they may be. They may have a question about our product, need a tracking number, check the status of their order, check our current inventory levels, or place an order. We truly believe steady sales come from consistently contacting our customers, creating a partnership by providing excellent customer service and being their vital resource to generate more sales of their own.

Responsibilities
• Outbound Calling for Existing Dealers and New Dealers
• Documenting every step of the sales cycle in our CRM System
• Customer Service- Answering Incoming Calls and Emails from Dealers
• Up selling New Products and Promotions
• Quote Dealer lighting requirements

Qualities
• Personable and very comfortable on the phone
• Resourceful and diligent
• Process Oriented with the ability to follow directions and follow through
• SalesForce and/or ZenDesk experience is a plus but not necessary
• Willing to learn our product and industry knowledge

Compensation: Hourly + Bonus Structure

The following is the first contribution from our most recent addition to the AquaNerd team, local fish store manager Daniel Leija. Daniel has been in charge of the saltwater section at a local store for as long as I can remember, and we’re excited to have him on board.

Being a long-time employee at a LFS, I hear many great success stories and many customers come in to share some amazing tank photographs. Just like there are positive things exchanged in my day to day conversations with customers, there are also the horror stories. Many beginner aquarists seek the help of fish stores to guide them down the correct path and, unfortunately, many stores throw unreasonable information to customers just to keep them shopping at their store. From my experience, here are some of the things that will surely make any established reefer cringe. It’s a list of bad advice that hobbyists have come into the store regurgitating while attempting to sort through all of the information to find out how to do things right.

I have always had customers tell me that a fish store said it was okay to run their lights 24/7. As experienced hobbyists, we know the consequences of running our lights a few extra hours longer than necessary. Can you imagine running them every hour every day? Our hobby consists of very powerful lighting systems. These lights emit a high output and running them all the time does not only diminish the life span of whatever type of bulb in use and it also raises the possibilities of an algae bloom. Algae depend on photosynthesis to grow, therefore running your lights all the time keeps that nuisance algae well feed. Water evaporation is another issue, in my aquarium I lose roughly three to four gallons of water a week, so if I was to run my lights all the time you could double the amount of water being evaporated. Water evaporates because of heat and what produces heat? The answer would be our lighting systems. Heat is not an issue if you run a chiller, but not everyone owns a chiller. Running that 2x250w metal halide all the time is not that great of an idea anymore now is it?

Another conversation I have with misinformed customers, usually once or twice a month, is the placement of Yellow Tangs in aquariums significantly smaller than what this fish requires. Many stores do give the okay to customers about certain fish going into their tanks just to make a sale. The minimum tank size I recommend to any customer for a Yellow Tang is usually no less than 100 gallons, sometimes even a 90 gallon depending on the amount of swimming space in the aquarium. Even though Yellow Tangs might be able to live off frozen foods or flake food, a truly healthy specimen is one that is provided with natural food. This means enough rockwork for them to graze on or seaweed sheets to supplement the tangs with the essential nutrients for it to thrive. Before you recommend any kind of fish that requires special needs, do not hesitate to ask and inform the customer of such details.

Injured Fish at Petco...Would you take advice from the guy running this tank?

Customers have corrected me when I mention to them that I highly recommend cycling their tank more multiple weeks plus before adding any fish. Their correction method was to tell me that another “expert” told them it was completely ok to set up a saltwater and place fish in the aquarium roughly an hour after initial set up. There is more to this, they continue to tell me that they purchased a Lion Fish, a Blue Tang, and a dozen Damsels, that the fish store sold to them knowing their tank was not even set up. This bad information if abundant in the freshwater aquarium hobby, and it’s a model most new freshwater hobbyists go by when setting up their aquarium, but there’s no room for it in the saltwater side of the hobby.

We all know that flatworms are not only unpleasant to look at, but depending on the species, they can be threatening to the aquarium. Well, a customer came in very concerned that he was losing many of his Zoanthid colonies. My first suggestion was to bring me a sample of water and even some of the Zoas so I could attempt to determine the issue. As all this occurred, his water tested out perfect but when I took a look at the Zoas, the culprit was looking right at me. Not only did the customer have Zoanthid eating flatworms, but he also had Zoa eating spiders and Zoa pox. I was then told by the individual that the store he got them from told him that these critters where completely a good thing to have in their system. Supposedly they would go around and clean the Zoa colonies. Now if that did not make you cringe, I have something that will get to your last nerve.

We had a bubble tip in one of our coral bays at the store, and a customer came up as I was spot feeding the anemone and told me, “I wish I could get my nems to live that long; they don’t even make it a few hours so I quit.” I then started a conversation attempting to help the customer out. I asked him about water parameters, lighting, feeding habits, tank size, rock work, you name it. Well, the customer then revealed to me that all of his five anemones he purchased at Petco. I then questioned the customer about his acclimation method and if he knew the salinity that Petco was keeping their tanks at. The guy knew what he was talking about and I was just about to give up when I decided to ask him what exactly he was doing when he got home with the anemone. The customer explained to me that he would arrive at his house begin his acclimation process and once that was done with he would release it in the tank. Then he went on to tell me that once he put up his acclimation buckets, he then super glued the anemone to the rockwork. Bingo! I asked him why he was doing this. He told me it was what the fish guy at Petco recommended for him to do.

I know most of you are probably are either at Petco complaining or re-reading the last paragraph because you still cannot believe what was just read. It is unbelievable the amounts of wrong information that is out there. One person giving out wrong information is all it takes to discourage the many new aquarists joining out hobby. If you don’t know the answer to question it is better to simply say you don’t know and allow for others to help. Fish stores are not the only source of incorrect information. Many forums can contain very helpful threads but also have information that is very irrelevant and miss

Being an extremely busy individual, I don’t have a lot of time to do too many things outside of my normal routine. With my day job zapping most of my time and energy and the AquaNerd Blog consuming the rest, I have little time for either my family or my aquariums, let alone any new time consuming activities. This lack of time has caused me to miss out on quite a number of opportunities in the saltwater aquarium hobby, one such being the enjoyment of amazing aquarium related resources such as the Reef Threads podcast. I should frame that statement by saying that I’ve know about the podcasts for a while now, but as I said, a complete lack of time has prevented me from sitting down long enough to pay any amount of attention to one of their lengthy shows. Fortunately, through a little intervention by the powers that be, I had that opportunity to soak up an entire show from beginning to end without interruption. At my day job, my company is starting a major project. This project is so big it requires that I be at work at least two straight weeks, followed by a single day off, and then two more weeks. This vicious cycle is supposed to last through March. As luck would have it, there have been some issues occuring during the nighttime hours which have caused me to spend the previous two nights at work, completely alone, trying to solve these issues. During a pretty long stint of downtime, I decided to open up the most recent Reef Threads podcast and let the information flow over me. After all, it was 2 am and I needed a break from the tasks around me. As I sat there and listened to Gary Parr and Christine Williams discuss current events in the aquarium industry, I started to wonder why the hell wasn’t I glued to this resource before. They spend a good 45 minutes talking about nothing but aquariums, offering inciteful thoughts about current news, talking authoritatively about the history of the hobby, and presenting information in a very digestable manner. I have to say now that I’m a fanboy of Reef Threads and I am suggesting to everyone that they need to stop what they are doing and go listen to their show. Download a podcast to your favorite mobile media player or crank it up at your work for all to hear. It’s a great show that’s definitely worth taking the time to listen to.

We’re adding a new feature to our website this week in the form of a weekly roundup of our most popular posts from the week before. We realize that a lot of new articles get published to this site every week, and sometimes these articles get overlooked as there’s just too much aquarium talk to wrap your head around. So here’s our top five articles, in order of popularity.

• Father and Son Duo Charged with Coral Poaching
• Blue Striped Tamarin Wrasse Passes Through the Diver’s Den
• Excess Carbon Dioxide Causes Clownfish to Act Drunk
• ZEOvit Now Tackling Coral Munching Flatworms
• Cherry Corals Invades Europe

ATI Aquaristik has recently released their new Fiji White Sand onto the European market, and it’s not the typical calcium carbonate substrate found filling most saltwater aquaria in the hobby these days. Instead, this high purity sand is composed of 99.6% pure calcium and magnesium, and is said to be one of the cleanest substrates on the market today. In addition to being clean, the sand’s bright white coloration is also very reflective, bouncing diffuse light back up into the water column and providing more illumination to your corals. The reflected light will not be intense by any means, but it will undoubtedly provide more light energy to the undersides of corals, which often lose coloration as the branches above become more densely packed. The third major selling point to the Fiji White Sand is the density of each grain. While coming in at the small grain size of 0.3 to 1.2 mm, ATI touts that the sand is heavy and won’t get blown around in high current water flow. Larger grain aragonite is not a great choice for aquariums since they tend to trap detritus, so it’s nice to see a fine grain with a little weight behind it that won’t turn into a sandstorm when we fire up the powerheads.

Like we mentioned above, this sand is only available in Europe, though we do expect a US debut eventually. The retail price is set at 18.00 € per bag, which is just a shade under $25. For more information, please see Advanced Aquarist or keep reading below for a translated product description from ATI.

Translated from ATI Aquaristik:

The Fiji White sand is characterized by many positive features:

First Highest purity:
Our sand is 99.6% pure calcium and magnesium compounds, making it one sen cleanest materials that you get on the market today.

Second White and very high reflectance properties:
Due to the high purity of the sand is particularly white. This is for the total brightness of the aquarium is very advantageous. Corals get so similar in nature, a higher proportion of reflections off the floor, which is very beneficial for corals. The Fiji White sand is ideal for light-hungry corals with Aqaurien because these stations will also receive a higher proportion of diffuse radiation from below.

Third no extreme drifts more:
Because of its higher density than comparable Aragonitsand of Fiji White sand is much harder and better around it remains current.
Application:
We recommend a layer of approximately 2cm. DSB at least 8-10cm.
Due to the small grain size of sand is good for an accumulation of fluid in the substrate Detrius avoided.

The sand should be washed before use in the aquarium several times well. The existing dust content, which is always produced by friction during transportation etc. should be washed out as far as possible. To do this, rinse the sand as long as no more until the water milky / white and is mostly clear.

Supposed hybrid blacktip shark off the coast of Australia

According to a recent AFP article, a team of scientists has found the first documented case of hybridization between two different species of sharks. This hybridization was discovered between two species of blacktip sharks, the Australian blacktip and the common blacktip, and the find has been backed up with genetic testing. The Australian species, as its name strongly implies, is a species limited to the warm waters around Australia’s north and east coasts. The common blacktip can tolerate much cooler temperatures and is found worldwide. It is speculated that the Australian blacktip species is adapting to global warming by breeding with the common blacktips, which will likely result in a range expansion for the shark, allowing it to move into cooler waters along Australia’s southern coast. To date, 57 hybrid specimen have been documented, and it is said that some of these hybrids are multiple generation hybrids.

This is certainly an interesting find in the scientific community, but I’m honestly a little surprised shark hybrids haven’t been documented in the past, especially given all of the attention sharks receive from researchers.