Tips

White spots appear on your clownfish overnight and by morning your tang is scratching against the rocks. That is marine ich (Cryptocaryon irritans), and it moves fast once it takes hold. The good news is that if you catch marine ich symptoms early and treat in a separate tank, you can usually knock it out in two to three weeks without touching your display or your corals.What you need A bare quarantine tank, 40 to 80 litres depending on fish size, with a simple filter and heater Reef Revolution Quarantine (18 AUD) to condition and settle the fish before treatment...

Brisbane storm season doesn't officially kick off until spring, but winter has its own habit of knocking power out too, cold fronts, wind events, the odd substation fault that takes a whole suburb dark for a few hours. If you keep fish or coral, an outage is never just an inconvenience. Without water movement and gas exchange, oxygen levels in a stocked tank can drop hard within an hour, faster in a warm, densely populated reef tank. The fix costs less than a takeaway dinner and takes five minutes to set up properly.What you need A battery air pump rated...

Most new fish and coral don't die from disease. They die from the shock of being dumped straight from a bag into water with different salinity, pH and temperature. The drip method fixes that by letting the animal adjust slowly, over 30 to 60 minutes, instead of all at once. Here's the fast version you can do on your kitchen bench tonight.What you need A clean bucket (never one that's touched detergent) A length of airline tubing An airline control valve or a simple knot to slow the drip Dr Tim's AquaCleanse to bind ammonia during transport stress A net...

Here is an uncomfortable truth. Most refractometers sitting in tackle boxes around the country are reading wrong, and the owner has no idea. They calibrated it with tap water once when it was new, never touched it again, and have been mixing salt to a number that slowly drifted. The fix takes about two minutes. What you need Your refractometer A bottle of 35 ppt calibration fluid (not RO water, not tap water) A soft tissue or microfibre cloth A few minutes in good light Calibration fluid is the part people skip. Pure water calibration gets you close, but a...