Guides

Picture a 300 litre reef with a mandarin dragonet that spends its day picking at rockwork and never touches the pellet food dropped in for the tangs. That fish is not being fussy. It is hunting copepods, and if the tank does not have enough of them, it will slowly starve no matter how good the water quality is. Copepods for a reef tank are not a novelty add-on. For certain fish they are the difference between thriving and wasting away over a few months.This guide covers what copepods actually do in a reef system, how to build a population...

An established reef tank gets through a lot of salt water. Most keepers change ten to twenty percent every week or two, and every litre of it starts as RODI water with salt stirred in, brought up to tank temperature and checked on a refractometer before it goes anywhere near the display. The mixing takes a few minutes. It is the RODI run, the storage, the wait for a batch to dissolve and stabilise, and keeping the next lot ready, that stacks up across a year of Sundays. Gallery Aquatica delivers natural seawater to homes and businesses around Brisbane so...

Most filtration confusion in Brisbane fish rooms comes down to one thing: people buy media without knowing what problem it actually solves. Someone has a canister stuffed with carbon and no bio media, or a sump full of bio balls and a filter sock that hasn't been changed in three weeks. Winter is a good time to sort this out properly, because lower tank temperatures mean bacteria colonies are working a bit slower and your media stack needs to be pulling its weight, not sitting there as dead space.This guide walks through what mechanical, chemical and biological media each remove,...

Winter in Brisbane means shorter days, cooler tap water and heaters cycling more than usual, which is exactly when a controller earns its keep. July is when the problems tend to surface: a tank temperature that crept down overnight, or a dosing pump that kept running while you were at work. If you have been putting off buying a Neptune Apex system because the range looks confusing, this guide breaks down the Jr, base A3 and Pro options along with the probes and dosing gear worth adding.Table of Contents Why bother with an Apex at all Apex Jr vs base...

Here's a common way to lose half a frag rack overnight. Alkalinity drops to 5.2 dKH, so you dump in a large slug of buffer to get it back to 8 dKH in one hit. By morning, three SPS colonies have gone pale and started sloughing tissue. This is one of the most common and preventable mistakes in reef keeping, and it comes down to moving alkalinity too fast rather than too slow.Why Fast Alkalinity Swings Crash pH and Kill Coral TissueAlkalinity and pH are linked through the carbonate buffering system in your water. When you add a large dose...