I recently got a couple Red Sea endemic butterflies, a C. semilarvatus and a C. fasciatus. The original plan was to get a pair of C. semilarvatus from someone that my maintenance guy knew, who has seven in a 700g. He decided not to part with his fish, which I can understand, so I went and got the two that I have from DD. Last week I get a call from my maintenance guy that he a line on a number of C. semilarvatus from an importer and could get them for $70 apiece. These fish normally retail for...

Something that occurred to me at the time I was making my post was a comparison to hard drives, how a drive is advertised as being 400GB but in the computer it is shown as being 372.5GB. Thing is, the situation with aquariums and with hard drives are for completely different reasons.

Hard drive manufacturers define a gigabyte as 1 billion bytes. 1,000,000,000 or 10^9. Computers operate in powers of 2. The way the operating systems are designed, a gigabyte is a power of 2 that...

I have a background as a trained lab scientist - Ph.D in Toxicology. Measurements need to be precise, but more importantly they need to be accurate.

Precise = How many digits of precision the value has, so 10.2983 is more precise than 10.4

Accurate = How close the reported value is to the actual value. If the actual value is 10.35 then 10.4 is more accurate than 10.2983

There are two places where measurements get me in this industry. One is the reported...

I find myself with some free time and desire to start blogging again.

Lots of things have changed since that last post. The tank got upgraded to a 300DD I think later in 2011, thanks to a bonus at work. Zebra eel had a fatal run in with the fire urchin, which was painful to watch.

In early 2012 I got a Platax orbicularis (round or orbiculate batfish) along with another volitans lion. At some point Chris, the LFS guy who by that point was doing regular maintenance...