Feelers

I think many have built reliable topups. A good suggestion I saw is to have the top up on a lighting timer - have it on for say 5 mins a day. That way even if it did screw up it will only pump for a short period. I think the top up prices are pretty ridiculous.

http://www.petsforum.com/personal/trevo ... poff2.html Thos one looks ok^. Here's a list of DIY topics, Top ups are in the list. http://ozreef.org/diy_links/list/onecat/Projects If you like this sort of stuff Oz Reef here... has some good info. 8)

If your a DIY type person I believe there are some ways to make one for very cheap from memory. I'll have a dig around.

I think you're the only person I've encountered (in real life or otherwise) who spells their name the exact same way as I do. I had to deal with some guy at an internet cafe who registered me as "Alersteil" AFTER I spelled it out letter by letter. The other employee next to the guy couldnt figure out how he came up with that either. :lol: Hey wow tang the tanks are looking much cleaner now! 8)

When I looked at that thread nothing stood out at me as photoshopped. After looking at that first blurry acro shot I can see he probably used it, but I definitly wouldn't call it the worst photoshop ever. I personally think that german guy who has the pastal colurs is far worse, this guy just took some shonky photos and tried to salvage them IMO, I dont think he was too worried about what peoples perceptions were of his colours, especially given his maintence schedual. :lol:

Chimera if you didn't have a way to test K and you were adding it but not doing water changes - possibly it accumulated?

Didnt Chimera stop using Zeovit ages ago anyway?

Now would that happen be speculative or anecdotal accusation Layton?

I think that video was sensationalised a bit! - If he was in that much serious danger his buddy would have stopped filming and helped him out!! I read a report on that attack and the guy said he swam infront of the octopus to block its path of escape from its den(which you can see very breifly at the start; it's in open water) and that it was his fault. For those of you who ever get attacked by an octopus, if you can flip their head upside-down they will release you. :lol:

A video that most have seen but I'm always keen to push to Cehalopd side of things... There is surprisingly little octopus/cephalopod footage around, I would have thought they would make an interesting documantary but I've never seen one. There was a series called "The hunt for Architeuthis" on Discovery channel that followed Auckland Universitys Steve O'Shea trawling and trying to catch tiny ones and grow them. He caught 17 but they all died. He's perfected his technique on common squid that used to be available from live feed on "squid cam" but it seems to be down at the moment. I just read that a group of divers managed to attatch a camera with lights onto a Humbolt squid, and it took the camera down to 1000ft. They also managed to insert a endscopic camera into another animals circulation system, apparently you can see the blue blood gushing around, pretty cool! Apparently its gonna be on the history channel in june next year. Due to the uncertanties of what I'm doing next year I'm not seting up my octopus tank, I might have to sell the tank and stand but I'll keep my chiller and skimmer etc so I can when I get myself sorted. I'll be getting my homemade live rock back from the sea soon for those who are interested, its been nearly a year and I'm really wanting to see how well it went! 8)

Whoa Evil the elite five star club :bounce: , I'll be there soon!

What skimmer came with this tank incidentally? You got a pretty good deal!

Have you still not done your water change? I'd get cracking on that!

You could always put on the oven mits and get baking... :lol:

It's exam preparation week, and I have a report due friday gone. I figured I'd abuse the fact I know the bio department dont collect anything thats due on Friday 5:00pm until the next monday, or in this case next Tuesday! Good intuition! :lol:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKRkP43R8pY Just a rather weird shimp video, apparently they are going to be measuring the metabolic rates of shrimps infected with various bacteria and see whether it affects them or something, its in keeping with global warming as the higher temps mean more bacterial activity (which my microbio soil lecturer was quite concerned about) and there are some potentially serious problems. And this is just cool octo video...

Karma heed no notice, I don't know why you got the rather rude end of the stick but rest assured you'll find most on this board will be very glad to help you out.Its quite a network and everyone seems to help share frags around and trade various bits and peices etc. I've only met two posters from these boards and both have been really friendly and incredibly helpful. You will also find that people in the salty section tend to be rather argumentative, (which I enjoy) much more so than the freshwater section. I do actually have a theory as to why this is (anecdotal,speculative and totally unproven mind you :lol: ) , but I think the requirements of successful reefkeeping are a bit of money and for those who pay close attention to detail, so the hobby natually lends itself to guys( and gals) who are generally well off and are used to running their own businesses and getting their way, so lots of strong opinions etc. Bare in mind this isnt a critisim of anyone, I think everyone's great! And its a huge generalisation - for example I'm a unistudent with no money. So, just take everything in the marine section with a large pinch of salt. 8)

For anyone interested in global warming I'd highly reccommend "An Inconvenient Truth" (Al Gores movie). I read a few reviews from different science groups and they all said he presented the facts accurately. There's a guy in the Bush administration who is one of Gores biggest critics (in the movie he makes a brief appearance saying that "global warming is the biggest hoax ever to be pulled on the American public") and his reply to the facts presented in the movie was so poor it didnt meet the scientific journals criteria to be published. Anyway an interesting fact from the movie, there was a study done in 2004 of all the scientific articles that contain the words "Global Climate Change" in their keywords. Out of 918 article abstracts, not a single one of them said that humans were NOT the cause of global warming(a big ploy of the Bush admin). So Gore makes the point that while 0% of peer reviewed science says that humans have not caused global warming, 53% of publications in popular media suggest this. George W. has stated that he "probably wont watch it", which isnt at all surprising. I'm glad he's finally almost out - and much less popular to boot. You will probably find it shocking and very sad, (well I did) but it does give a bit of hope too. 8)

That still seems quite expensive- are they exepmting you from the tax or just the added constituents? For example for me to make 20L of alcohol in my still at 95% including all the sugar, yeast, carbon, electricity etc, probably around $60 off the top of my head. The governemt on the other hand can take natural gas and add water. It doent get much cheaper than that!

Well its the perfect excuse to get into diving sooner rather than later. 8)

Methanol is a lot more expensive to manufacture than ethanol. Reef how did you get your "ethanol licence"? how much do you pay for it? Is there a big rigmarol to go through to get it or is it relativly straight forward? As it stands I think one bottle lasts a pretty long time, 5ml a day means a bottle will last 200 days which is a lot cheaper than pretty much everything people add to their tanks.

I dont know how well bacteria (or your fish or corals for that matter) would do metabolising isporopanol. With vodka you are basically feeding empty carbs, if they could they would be adding sugar (but that screws things up). Isopropanol is probably a negative instead of a positive when it comes to promoting bacterial growth, but thats just a guess.

I think they are getting at the fact that if they were released into the wild they would not likely survive because of their low fertility rates. Check this article... http://www.practicalfishkeeping.co.uk/p ... p?news=220 ""Two days after buying them, I had a nice tank full of baby danios clinging to the walls of the 10 gallon tank. The largest fry started glowing under a black light at 10 days old. At 23 days, I transferred them to a larger tank and counted 192 individuals. Terry has also been successful in crossing his GloFish with other aquarium strains of the Zebra danio: “Crossing with short-fin spotted, long-fin gold, short-fin zebra, long-fin zebra, short-fin gold, and long-fin blue have all produced red and green glowing offspring (but not 100% of any one spawn).†But unfortunately if you breed them you cant sell them . Imagine being sued for selling fish you bred, man would that suck.

Many of those glofish do glow on their own, you dont have to use a blacklight. I dont think many normal fish would glow in UV, lots of marine things do though. The other thing is I dont think its a good idea to have a UV above the tank for very long. I was interested in getting scorpions(until I had my dreams crushed by MAF regulations -heard that story before haha) when I was younger and found that they too glow in UV, but that they will get tremendous sunburn. We have uv lights for various things at uni, one of the bulbs is used to check for flourescent dyes. My postgrad friend didn't wear the welding helmet thing one time (only for about 3 mins) and he was sunburnt all around his eyes,face and lips. :lol:

Well I think genetic modification is the bees knees, I rekon the red glofish look awesome, not so fussed on the green. One thing that should be pointed out, these glow in the dark fish were developed for testing pollution levels in streams and rivers. They were not developed with commercial factors in mind, however someone realised that there was a potential market for these. Everyone loves gold fish - they are in my opinion far more genetically modified than these glofish. Remember that the glowing is only down to the presence of one protein, it can arise through selevtive breeding also, except that would take thousands of years, just like the goldfish's evolution, and probably involve numerous other unwanted mutations. I think in 50 years genetic engineering will be so wide spread that noone will care about it anymore. They were pretty popular on release! And they are fertile apparently! If I was paying $25 for a zebra danio I would sure as hell want them to breed.