Feelers

The best light for coral growth is a yellowish white (they are actually "wanting" red light but that would look horrid), but noone really uses those colour bulbs on their tank(as the only colour) because they look ugly. Remember the blu-er the bulb the less can be used for photosynthesis. MH's are generally considered far superior, but they make lots of heat and use heaps of electricity. I think what many do is use MH's supplimented with t5's to get the colour light they are looking for. Mhs also have more penetrative depth, meaing you can have corals deeper down. Having said that their are some amazing tanks with only t5's, running as many as can physically fit above the tank. Remember this is just for SPS stoney corals, if you just have LPS softies go with t5's, you will be able to get the colour scheme you want and you wont have massive electricty bills, from memory reefs bill from his tank alone was $3000 if I remember correctly!

Check out this site, it's a reef forum dedicated to mini tanks. http://www.nano-reef.com To quote their online glossary... It's a awesome site, some of the galleries are very impressive.

At $520 you might aswell go for the full size Deltec, it's not really that much more expensive. At $420, it's a different kettle of fish. I think $520 is too much for the skimming capacity, although there's also the question of size for fitting on small tanks.

Well you get additional lenses with the ones he's looking at also, they are "semi DSLR", in that you are getting many of the features, but without the optical viewfinder. I imagine there's a pretty massive prive jump to an actual DSLR, and then lenses would cost more aswell?

Correct, :lol: I'm waiting on my uni results, then I'll think about getting a job. On the auction I was $11,000 short, oh well next time. The search is working, it seems to find the older threads I searched for, so its waaay better than it was. It was just a passing thought, it wasnt supposed to be incredibly exciting news, however I did included a picture of a voracious predator that kills and eats members of its own species just to keep you interested. The trouble I go to... :lol:

Just testing the search, it couldnt find my above post by using the term praying mantis , so it still isnt perfect. I couldnt do a search to find this thread title either.

Well I had given up on the search, it was so useless it was far faster to go back through all the pages to find what you were looking for. Give it a go, it's going ok at least, before I doubt it was even possible to find things (I think the topic lists were not accessed for searching much like looking for reports in an empty drawer ie, completly useless). I had a few searches and it did pretty well. I just thought I might point it out because I think everyone will be in the same boat as me, and just given up completly. :bounce: And here is a picture I took today of a praying mantis who is about as long as a 10c peice. That is all. :lol:

Another bonus with a sump, is that you'll have everything ready for a marine system...(when you come to your senses) :lol:

There's probably not much point in adding vodka if you dont have a skimmer. Otherwise you'll just be causing blooms and adding even more food with no way to take it out.

If your cannister filter leaks the whole display will empty down to where your intake is, I think a sump is safer. The only things you have to watch are the flow back when the pump is off (which is easy to work out) and that you have a redundancy for the flow being blocked, (which is easily dealt with - the siphon and backup pipe). They are both really safe, I havent really heard of anyone having issues with either.

http://www.melevsreef.com/what_sump.html Above is the best info I've found on sumps etc. A sump would be sweet, you can add a drip tray/water fall over bioballs and have your own wet/dry which is the best type of filtration (and for cheap). You'll also have an overflow which means that the surface will be constantly "skimmed" so you won't get any surface film. I think salties are more willing to use sumps because plumbing is a more integral part of marine keeping (and skimmers are often sump only - where else can you put it?). Freshwater systems are generally more plug and play; instead of drill, silicone, measure pipes, pvc glue etc as it tends to be with marines. Heaps of people are put off by sumps, there's also a lot of options around them which can make them quite confusing, but they are actually very simple after you get it.

TM this might make things easier! As PJ said above Dpreview is an awesome site. Here's a neat feature of their site, a side by side comparison of the camera's you listed. http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/compare ... s&show=all And they all got about 4 1/2 stars, but it shows all their features etc with links to the reviews. Oh and when you read their reviews make sure you read the rest of it (there are multiple pages which isn't made very clear at all).

I just got a Sony DSC H1 and its awesome. I'm looking at getting a few lenses for it and you guys might laugh at this "lens" option on Ebay... With these sample pictures... Haha man I laughed when I saw this! Anyway back to the camera thing, they generally have a few professional reviews that compare all the similar models, but with the H2 you are in the bracket above me, so I don't know who was the winner there, all I know that the H1 was very good for its price and I love it, lens options included. :lol:

I'm pretty sure they mean that you have two pipes... One is a full siphon and is adjusted until it keeps the water level stable. The other pipe is just a backup, so that if things go wrong it will take the water, (it doesnt normally have any water going down it).

Well, I'm very much in, perhaps we could put a wager on. :lol: Layton how long did yours take before you think it changed anything? It would be a nice little experiment, but at the expense of your nitrate levels for a little while longer.

I'm in!

I'm looking forward to seeing whether JDM's nitrates will be reduced as in Laytons experience. I think it will.

Thats the thing though - if you call it a sterilizer it has to sterilize everything (or close to). You wouldn't want a surgeons scalple being 2/3 sterile. :lol: The parasites like whitespot are real tough to kill, remember that the wider the gap you get an exponential falloff coupled with the increased water acting as a slight buffer along with other detrius/particles that can block out the light adding to the sheilding effect. There is an industry accepted standard, I'm pretty sure the Pondmaster UV units are technically UV clarifiers?

The pond ones arent rated as sterilizers, they have a wider gap between the bulb and the wall which is good at killing mass amounts of algae which is their primary purpose. However to kill everything like the parasites (which are real bastards) this distance is very important. It would still help though, and I think they are much cheaper. Also anther thing Layton pointed out many bulbs are made of quartz, so you loose 50% of the killing regardless of having a quartz sleeve.

Hey Brian I havent seen you on in ages, from memory you left around the time that everyone was getting banned! Do you still have a marine tank? How did the ocean werx stuff work out?

Found a nice page with a bit of info from the NZ frog society. http://www.otago.ac.nz/Zoology/research ... index.html While I also agree that putting animals that arent native back into the wild is generally a bad idea, current wisdom indicates it might be beneficial. The other thing is these frogs are thought to be going extinct back in OZ, so ironicially you are helping an endangered organism. To hell with bureaucracy I say, get raging. :lol:

What's the deal with the New Zealand native frogs? I know they are very unusual in that they have their tadpoles develop within eggs(are all the natives like this?), but has anyone ever treid breeding them? How rare are they and I'm guessing they are protected. Anyone heard of any renegade native frog breeders out there raging against the machine? :lol:

Well I would have picked the shrimps to die first off. So its only SPS. Perhaps there is some metal which interferes with them specifically, maybe blocking a vital enzyme or something. Are there any metals known to interfere with the building of their calcium skeletons etc? Appart from being much more fragile in a general sense they must have some pretty big differences from your LPS considering they are all ok. Does anyone know of toxins that are SPS specific? Do you know whats in the bearing Chimera? Laytons the guy to ask about this stuff.

I know of someone who had an octopus killed by a rusted bearing/shaft in their return pump. I dont think heavy metals floating around can be anything but bad. Do you have cleaner shrimps Chimera?

Are you sure this thing isnt a nudi also? Those big things on the head end make me think it is a nudi?