Reef Ramblings

Since the announcement of SAIA (Sustainable Aquarium Industry Association) we’ve been receiving encouraging mails and calls supporting our vision. The following letter I received by email from a prospective reefkeeper who found out about SAIA after a search for “sustainable marine aquariums” on Google came up with a link to my article on Reef Ramblings about SAIA.

“Tim,
Had tropical fish when I was young, been told cannot do sport this year by my doctor for medical reasons, so as got some time on my hands thought I could use this to potentially set up a saltwater tank.

As it has been some years I thought the industry would be professional now, but can honestly say I was horrified when I checked out the LFS’s. Many freshwater tanks have fish floating around in them, obviously dead for some time (gone furry) and generally don’t look too healthy. Found saltwater conditions a bit better (presume because they are more expensive) but after some research was saddened to find me constantly given bad advice, such as “yeah these Nano tanks are great for beginners, I have 5 fish in mine”, ummm don’t think them 5 fish will last for long in 45 litres!

Have found a LFS with good conditions, and with an interest in the fishes well being and when asked he could tell me where they came from, that his live rock is not natural and can provide me with traceability, but no MAC cert. It seems no one does have MAC cert?

I started off just wanting to try a new hobby out, I do though have ethics, am concerned about the environment and sustainability (I admit though I do eat meat and fish!), the more I read about saltwater though, cyanide etc, the more I find myself in disbelief.

Looks like SAIA could be the answer, I hope it goes well. Can you tell me, can I do this hobby whilst somehow helping conservation? Can I by keeping saltwater fish somehow help conservation? It would be nice if my interest in this hobby could also do good. I have of lately been thinking of getting involved somehow in conservation and if I could do this with my hobby that would be great!

Much appreciated

Keith”

Thanks for your interest Keith.

Your experience in checking out the LFSs is not really surprising, I’d guess that in the UK poorly run shops, giving poor advice, far out number the responsible well-informed ones.

It is sad and distressing to realize that the aquarium industry in the UK is virtually unregulated. Yes, aquarium shops must possess a pet shop license but this requirement is of very little significance; the requirements for a pet shop license vary around the UK depending on the local authority involved, in some areas it seems that the license can be arranged via the phone and just requires the payment of the fee, in others an inspection is carried out (usually by a council employee with no special knowledge of the trade) which seems to merely look at how tidy the premises are, and rarely their local council may require the owner to have a certificate  demonstrating some rudimentary knowledge of pet care (not necessarily relevant to the aquarium industry).
Personally I find this unacceptable, especially where marine organisms are involved.

Membership of OATA, the UK aquarium industry trade association, doesn’t appear to be that effective an indicator of quality, seeing as membership isn’t inspected or policed, with a certain percentage of the membership merely appearing to use membership as a “badge of respectability”.

Nano tanks, ah there’s a conundrum! Aquarists have been keeping small volume reef tanks for years but given the recent popularity of Nanos it’s encouraged beginners with little knowledge to start small reefs and all too often the temptation is there to add “just one more fish”. Shops should know better, but this is actually one area where generally the shops aren’t at fault, rather it’s the over enthusiastic hobbyist. I frequently hear from retailers, that after informing a customer that he or she has all the fish their reef can support at its current stage of development, that it’s not unusual for the customer to return a week or two later complaining of losing fish – that they’ve purchased from another shop after being told not to add any further fishes!! This is an area where the hobbyist needs to be educated but unfortunately only a minority buys magazines or books these days.

MAC membership and certification – the lack of take up in the UK is a further mystery to me. There has only ever been one shop certified in the UK (apparently no longer trading) and I was in part responsible for encouraging this shop to sign up. So the question for me has to be what has TMC been doing over the past few years? Why have they never managed to encourage a single shop in the UK to become certified?
It’s partly due to this failure of MAC presence in the retail sector that has caused SAIA to come into being.

Can you participate in this hobby while aiding conservation? Briefly, yes you can, but at the moment it will require some diligence on your behalf. Indeed there are at least two separate ways of doing so.
The first is the way you started off, questioning retailers about the provenance of their stock, and trying to buy only animals that have been collected in a responsible manner.
The second way would be to concentrate on purchasing only captive bred and / or aquacultured animals. For example, there’s little excuse for buying wild collected clowns when they are readily available captive bred, see Reef Ramblings June/July 2008 for more on this subject.

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Any questions or comments, or if there are any particular topics you’d like to see covered here, please feel free to get in touch with me: tim@midlandreefs.co.uk

Tim Hayes
Midland Reefs
©2004 – 2008

Introduction.

Yet again we’ve had a couple of busy months at Midland Reefs leaving me little time to prepare monthly Reef Ramblings, so it’s another omnibus edition, this time combining June and July.

News.

You might ask why Midland Reefs has been so busy of late; well the big news is that we’ve recently moved into our own new warehouse, closer to home. As you could expect, this has meant something of a chaotic disruption of life for all at Midland Reefs. So, it’s thanks to Jon, Rob, Ruth, and Sue for all the hard work everyone’s put in to make the move a successful one. We’re still not quite as organised as I’d like but given a little more time to get into the swing of things I hope that we’ll soon be offering an improved service to all our customers.

“Clownfishes in Danger of Extinction!” or “Losing Nemo!”

At least that was the way some online newspapers presented a report from Dr Billy Sinclair of the university of Cumbria. It’s fortunate that none of the print papers really ran with this story in its lazy, online form. I contacted Dr Sinclair to find more about his report and he was good enough to forward me a copy of his paper.

It turns out to be a both interesting and disturbing report, detailing a dramatic drop in the numbers of clownfish on the Great Barrier Reef, outside of the no take zone. An example was given of one coral reef that was studied in Keppel Bay, where the size of clownfish populations, that’s the number of fishes living together in a family group in association with an anemone, had dropped from twenty five to just six, in two years.

Studies of the catch data from commercial boats operating in this area seem to back up these findings as they show large drops in the numbers of clownfishes caught over the last five years.

Studying the report, it would appear that the fall in clownfish numbers has been caused by a combination of factors, collection for the aquarium industry at a time when anemones are being lost to bleaching, with a resultant reduction in the number of anemones and their accompanying population of clownfishes.

It’s very worrying to see the reef aquarium hobby’s signature fish apparently under threat. This also reinforces my belief that there’s no excuse for taking clownfishes from the wild when they can be readily bred in captivity.

The manner of collection on the GBR is reasonably responsible, with usually only the Alpha and Beta clowns being collected with the rest of the group being left. This means the female and male are taken leaving the remaining fishes to establish a new hierarchy; the largest or most dominant fish becoming female while the second in the pecking order becomes male.
This sort of collection practice ensures that there’s a group of clowns left to associate with, and protect, their anemone.
In areas where less scrupulous practices are observed all the clowns associating with the anemone can be collected at once, leaving the anemone vulnerable to predation by Butterflyfishes unless it’s fortunate to have new clowns move in within a very short period of time. As clownfishes are not the best of swimmers they rarely travel far from their host anemone as their style of swimming makes them easy pickings for predators. The chances of fresh clowns moving to a new anemone must be rare except where anemones are grouped close together.

A Cautionary Tale.

The other Saturday I was reminded of the importance of hygiene when dealing with aquarium foods. On a Saturday evening I tend to have an aperitif before settling down to a nice meal and a movie. Whilst savouring my pre-meal drink I like to go round my tanks at a leisurely pace, feeding the inhabitants. I take my time when doing this so I can really study each animal to assess their health and condition, I find slowly sipping my drink adds to my enjoyment of the exercise. It’s important to take a little time out and really look at your animals, I feel that far too often people just throw some food into the tank, give the fishes and corals a cursory glance and then go off to do something else, perhaps only paying full attention to the tank when carrying out maintenance.

I guess I should have been paying full attention when preparing the food, my usual mix of PE Mysis, Cyclop-Eeze FreezerBar, and DT’s Oyster eggs. Imagine my surprise when I took a sip of my drink and encountered something slightly chewy and fishy … Yep, you guessed it, I left my drink right next to the jug where I was mixing the frozen foods, agitating them with a baster until they’d separated out. My previously tasty aperitif, I now realised, contained rather too much Mysis for my taste!

Product News.

We’ve added some great new products to our range of late.

There’re the new fantastically efficient Hydor Koralia Magnum circulation pumps, see last week’s online article for more on these.

We now have the second generation of the Hydor Performer skimmers in stock. These have been upgraded and improved to produce a drier skimmate and come with the fitting kit and feed pump included in the price. With each of the larger skimmer pumps drawing 26 watts or less, it makes them the skimmer of choice for the Cost Conscious Reefkeeper. Interestingly we’ve been seeing quite a few shop staff purchasing these for their own use after seeing how well they perform on shop systems.

If you use Poly Filters on a regular basis you might like to take a look at our new PURA pads, these are about twice the area of a regular Poly Filter for around the same price. The manufacturer has had these filter pads independently tested against others on the market and the results indicate that the PURA pad out competes the others, both in quantity of pollutant removed and the speed with which pollutants are removed. Another one for the Cost Conscious Reefkeeper! We’re getting these into the shops at the moment but won’t be adding them to our online shop until next month when we’ll also post the details of the independent testing.

Hints ‘n’ Tips.

Although at the time of writing the weather seems to have deteriorated I’d like to remind you about the perils of warm weather. At this time of year reef aquaria can often reach potentially dangerous temperatures. This brings with it two distinct problems: heat induced coral bleaching and depleted oxygen levels.

Saltwater has a lower capacity for carrying dissolved oxygen than freshwater, as temperatures increase this carrying capacity reduces, in a reef with poor gas exchange the level of oxygen in the water can easily drop low enough for animals such as fishes and mobile invertebrates to asphyxiate.

I’d suggest checking that all pumps are working properly and efficiently and making provision for increasing your water movement in case of a prolonged period of hot weather. Making sure that the surface of the water is sufficiently agitated will both enhance gas exchange and aid temperature control via evaporative cooling. I’m currently recommending around a centimetre of “wave height” on the surface of the water, you’ll find that this will also enhance the effect of glitter lines, especially in an aquarium lit with fluorescent lamps.

Although you can mitigate the effects of high temperature induced oxygen depletion by increasing gas exchange, this will only go part way to helping corals to survive. This additional water movement can greatly enhance your corals chances of survival at higher temperatures and may be all that’s needed in some reefs, but ultimately you need to control the upper temperature reached in your aquarium.
It’s unfortunate that the cost of cooling a reef can often be as great, if not greater, than the cost of lighting it. Some reefs may need some form of cooling for the best part of the year owing to the way they’re lit. Your choice of methods of temperature control includes: refrigerant based chillers, evaporative cooling chillers, fans, air conditioners, and extractor fans.

Refrigerant based chillers and evaporative cooling chillers are the most expensive options.

Air conditioners are also expensive but they do have the bonus of controlling room temperature, which you and your family may well appreciate (it may also be a selling point to ”the significant other”, who may well have objected to the purchase of that expensive aquarium chiller!).

Extractor fans are useful to a degree but may make little difference once the room temperature is the same as outside.

Fans can be usefully employed to blow along the surface of the water to promote evaporative cooling, they’re cheap but do remember to take care in their placement as the last thing you want is a mains fan ending up in the aquarium! If possible choose a low voltage fan for safety.

Fans can also be extremely useful with enclosed aquariums and may improve how the tank runs on a daily basis, rather than just at times of high temperature, by improving gas exchange at the surface.

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Next week I hope to be bringing you another article in the ongoing series: The Cost Conscious Reefkeeper.

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Any questions or comments, or if there are any particular topics you’d like to see covered here, please feel free to get in touch with me: tim@midlandreefs.co.uk

Tim Hayes
Midland Reefs
©2004 – 2008