News

The marine warehouse websitte is finally fully functional! This particular area we hope to utilize as a forum to pass on usefull information, industry news, store events or anything else that someone may find of interest. I will also be utilizing this page to share the answers to any questions we recieve that may be helpful to a wider audience. Feel free to send us any experiences, questions or comments you may have regarding the store or any fish related topic we may all find interesting. Send them to info@marinewarehouse.biz We also would welcome any pictures you may have of your tanks that you would like to share with your fellow aquarists. They will be posted in the "Readers Reefs" section. Send you pictures to readersreefs@marinewarehouse.bi

 7-18  My favorite question of the day was from a customer who asked me if he could trade in his sand sifting star fish. When asked why he told me someone at another store told him that that his star fish would eat all the copepods in his tank and his mandarin would starve. That is just so wrong in so many ways, but it gives me a good intro to talk about two somewhat overlapping  but different subjects. First off, a sand sifter star is not a copepod devouring devil. He is a very handy detritivore (meaning he eats crud) that spends most of his time un der the stand helping to keep it stirred up and aerated. While he may occasionally get a hold of a happless copepod he is hardly going to clean out the tank. Good guy to have around, unless perhaps you are a "deep sand bed" person. Another topic, another time. Secondly, while I would highly recomend waiting to purchase a mandarin untill your tank is more mature and has a population of copepods and other bugs running around, that is hardly all they will TYPICALLY eat. Most mandarins will eat just about any kind of fresh or frozen small "bug looking" food. Mysis shrimp, brine shrimp and daphnia are excellent. The problem that many people encounter with mandarins is them getting skinny and dying. In my expe rience this is rarely from refusal to eat but simply the fact the mandarin doesn't get his share of the food. These fish are slow, methodical eaters that are easily out competed by other fish. Frequently the rest of the club chows all the food before the mandarin knows the dinner bell has rung. This is the reason it is best to wait for a mandarin till you have a population of natuarlly occuring foods so the fish has something to eat while learning the ropes. Then It is essential to get substitute  food down to the mandarin, while at the same time not overfeeding. Not always an easy task. A good way to get a new mandarin off on the right track is live brine shrimp and a food squirter. Once the fish is used to the feeding routine getting them onto frozen is usually a snap. Obviously, however this fish is not for every tank. Nice, quiet reef tanks are best without a lot of hyper active chow hounds. While we are on the subject of copepods and mandarins, and I am still on my soapbox, I'd like to talk about these little bottles of copepods being sold out there. We frequently get requests for this item as food for mandarins. While they will certainly gobble them this is not a practical solution. The 50 copepods in that bottle could be easily devoured the first night and at up to $20 a bottle that is hardly a solution. If you are thinking of buying a bottle to establish a colony of copepods in your tank, spend that $20 on some good live rock instead. There will probably be 10 times as many copepods hiding in the rock....and you get the rock too! We brought this item in when it first came out, got a good laugh when we saw what it was, and rather than ripping people off stopped selling them. Till next time!

 7-23-07     Had a good one today. And yes, this is for real. A customer called JUST to ask this ask this question. "Can alligators climb trees?" The answer.... Why YES! they do! In Florida you must be ever vigilant as alligators routinely drop out of trees and carry off small children, dogs cats, and compact cars. BEWARE!!!

7-25-07     Todays winner! "I bought some fish last week, they were in a tank next to some yellow fish. What were they?" OH NO! You bought those! It turns out those were super toxic and The Department of Fish and Game picked all of them up and destroyed them. Flush them immediately before they get YOU!

7-29-07     OK, back to a serious question today. One of my favorites...."Whats better, glass or acrylic?" Like everything in this hobby there is no black or white answer....just a big blob -O- gray. There are plusses and minuses to each. The thing you have probably heard the most is that acrylic scratches easily. Yes, it does scratch MORE EASILY THAN glass, but if you had ever seen some of my tanks you would realize that glass can be scratched as well. This is the biggest perk of acrylic, most scratches can be easily removed. They can simply, however time consumingly, be buffed out with inexpensive scratch repair kits. While scratches can be removed from glass it takes "equipment", expertise and can only be done on the outside without tearing the tank down. Other plusses of acrylic is that it is much lighter, can be easily drilled a nywhere you need a hole, acrylic has a higher degree of clarity, and since the seams are chemically melted together they are less noticeable and less likely to leak. Downsides, yes it does scratch more easily, and over time seams can "craze", little hairline cracks form that make the seam more obvious. Acrylic will tend to haze a bit over time with all the repeated scrubbings. Plusses of glass, they will tend to look better longer and will hold up to abuse better. Homes with young kids or tanks in a public area or office environments would probbaly do better with glass. Confused yet? All that considered however, the choice will probably come down to price. If you are looking for a standard size tank, glass is going to be much less expensive and is usually going to be the way to go. If you are looking into custom sizes or shapes, acrylic is the winner. Custom acrylic tanks are a fraction the price of custom glass tanks.

8-22-07 OK I am slacking. Lay off! It hasn't been a WHOLE month. Haven't been getting a lot of good "dumb" questions lately so I will go with an oldie but a goodie. We get this one a lot. "Why is my Tank cloudy?" 80% of the time this is coming from the guy who just set up his tank day before yesterday and wants to know why his tank doesn't look pristine yet. (Like it ever will! Nature is DIRTY! But thats another story.) In those cases the answer is usually a simple one, "new tank syndrome". Almost every newly set up tank will go through it and its actually a good thing. The clouding of the water is caused by a bacterial bloom as beneficial bacteria in the tank reproduce like mad to colonize the new territory. As all good aquarists I am sure know Its bacteria that break down the wastes of the fish not the filter. The filter is just a groovy high rise for the bacteria to call home. It takes several weeks for the bacterial population to grow to a point where they can metabolize the waste load of the tank. Thats why we DON'T put 20 fish in the day after we set it up. Then you also have to remember that after the bacteria colonies have caught up with that load you have EXACTLY enough bacteria to handle EXACLY the populatioon of the animals in the tank at EXACTLY this moment. Which is why we don't EVER put 20 fish in at the same time. Add to the poplulation slowly so the bacteria catches up without the water fowling in the process. There's pretty much only a couple of other reasons for cloudy water in an established tank and unless it's just stirred up sediment or Jr. dumped his milk in the tank it can be blamed on bacterial blooms again. Typically either its overfeeding....a big no no, or something has died, or the maintenance has just been lax and the tank has crashed. The other possibility is that we have done something to reduce or hinder the bacteria. Many medications will wipe out good bacteria like, well, antibiotics. The other thing we see a lot is people OVER cleaning their tanks. Too large a water change or just physically cleaning too much can just remove too much bacteria. Think partial water changes and regular maintenance, not slash and burn! Never change more than a third to at the most half of the water at a time. Preferably don't clean the filter on the same day either. We think we are doing good with a big water change and a new filter cartridge and a thorough vacuuming of the gravel but its too much all at once.

11-5 The debate rages on! The brou-ha-ha over artificailly colored fish continues unabated. These fish are specimens that through a variety of methods have been "color enhanced". In recent years more and more creative and permamnent methods have been found to carry this out. Traditionally most have been either dye injected, dye soaked or actually physically painted. Most of these colors wore off over a few months leaving some naive fish keepers scratching their heads over why the hot pink fish they bought is suddenly brown. Now fish are being tatooed and genetically manipulat ed. This has resulted in much more elaborate color schemes and much more lasting results. We have even seen fish with slogans tattoed on their sides. Can "Eat at Joes", or "PEPSI" be far behind? The most interesting of these new creations is GLOFISH. These are a danio that has been genetically enhanced with anemone genes to glow in surreal colors. They were originally developed to track water flow patterns in the wild. The fish were easy to spot on the wild and are rendered sterile to keep them from breeding. Several places in the US have banned the sales of these fish in recent months, most recently Oklahoma City. We do carry a variety of these enhanced fish although we do shy away from the tackiest. My personal feelings are that if you can't be satisfied with the natural colors a fish was born with get salt water or some lovely plastic fish. But then I guess its no worse than dying your poodle pink. (Which is also illegal in Oklahoma City!)

February 14 : Happy Valentines Day! Don't worry, we are still here I am just a slacker and not keeping this updated very well. Some cool stuff coming in this week. Australian corals like duncans, acans and micromussas. Nice fiji acros and orange zoos. If you are looking for big fish we have a lot of large unusal specimens right now. A big french angel, Aussi tusks, clown triggers, a golden heart trigger....lots of nice stuff. Freshwater highlights : finally a new batch of galaxy rasboras, haven't seen those in months. A lot of nice african cichlids in stock right now too.  

May 27 : Yes I know, it's been a few months since I updated this. But hey, I am doing it now! We all know the economy is in the dumper right now and gas and food prices are high, but hey, we still need our hobbies and our fish still need to be taken care of. It's easy to be distarcted right now and start slacking on our wet pets but we mustn't forget them. What better way to enjoy our air conditioning than to hang out under the cieling fan and enjoy a beautiful well maintained tank? Also don't forget hurricane season is coming and you wanna be prepared for that. We have a full stock of battery operated air pumps, a must to have on hand. Also make sure you have plenty of batteries. Its vacation time too and while I would always recommend a trusted friend or neighbor first, we do have automatic feeders, feeding blocks, and water top off systems in stock. Also still plenty of cool stuff arriving daily. Double trunk elephant noses came in this week haven't seen them in  years and the suribaya acroporas are coming in again and have been fantastic. After a hiccup in the permitting process Tonga live rock is back as well. We also brought in the full line of Reef Nutrition products from Reed Mariculture. This includes Tigger-Pods live copepods, Roti-Feast, Arcti-Pods, and Phyto-Feast.