SeanF

Obviously I don't know what the guys up north are charging but I have always been able to sell anemones for below what Live Aquaria sells them for in fact most of the stuff at live aquaria is pretty high even before the cost of shipping. This is a supply and demand market sure you can buy stuff online but you never know what it might look like or how it will ship. I think most of the retailers around here do a fairly good job of keeping there prices low. There was a store in Oklahoma City that sold Astraea snails for $4.49 ea. Obviously people that are on the buying end want to buy it as cheaply as possible. Heck I beat my suppliers up about it all of the time. You wouldn't be a good consumer if you didn't want to pay the lowest price for the highest quality but I think you need to consider in all of the factors. Shipping animals in is rough on them. They will generally be in much better shape with less chance of loss the less time they have to be out of a tank. It doesn't do you much good to save 10-20% if the animal ends up dying. We sell a lot online and there are a lot of people that don't have the access to the variety that is available locally and for them buying online makes sense but stores around here do a good job of bringing in large volumes of quality animals at a reasonable price. I guarantee there are not too many store owners around here that are out buying vacation homes and yachts on what they are making.

We will just wait until we have all had a bad day and take it out on some poor unsuspecting corals. I don't know if you can frag the brains with only one mouth. The closed brains Favia, Favites, Diplo and the like are quite easy to frag with the dremel. I always just score them with the dremel diamond wheel because they are usually quite thick and then take the hammer and chisel and finish it off. Acropora aren't nearly as stress relieving to frag they break to easy.(laugh)

Be careful using the dremel to frag zoos. Zoos tend to spray their nasty zoo juice all over the place if you hit them with the dremel. A buddy of mine was fragging some and tried to just cut right through the middle of them and ended up spraying himself in the face. Kinda sucked. I prefer the good old hammer and chisel for them alot less messy that way.

I opted to wait on the 400 watt equivilent fixture to come out later this year. Hopefully I will also be able to get some feedback on the actual led fixture and see what it can really do. I am optomistic but before I have to fork out some of my vacation fund I want to make sure that this thing will do what it is supposed to.

We carry tons of different coral foods. We have the dt's line, liquid life line, reef nutrition line, cyclopeeze line, H2O life line, just ran out of most of the Kent line, carry the seachem reef plus. Pretty much I carry every reef food we can get a hold of.

Doesn't Al Gore still think he won the election? I have seen other programs on the discovery channel that take up both sides of the global warming debate. I would have to agree that I don't think that we have a big enough impact by the production of exhaust to impact the world. If we produce more CO2 then plants and algaes will grow better thus balancing the planet again. Everyone use to talk about the hole in the ozone layer at the poles being caused by greenhouse gasses. Does anyone know why you don't hear much about that anymore? Because it is not scientifically accepted as the truth anymore. Scientists have discovered that we are on the verge of a magnetic pole swap and the weakening of the magnetic fields at the poles are what is causing the hole. It is just like the theory that we are running out of oil. This is bs also. We may be starting to deplete our easiest to process oil but Canada has what they call oil sand that is said to have enough oil in just the one place to support the worlds oil needs for well over 100 years. Studies don't get paid for by people that don't have agendas. Why would someone offer funding for a study if they didn't have something to gain from it. The great thing about this country is the ability to disagree with other people at least in a peaceful manner. On the smoking issue I believe that each individual business owner should be able to make the decision on whether to allow people to smoke in their business. The government sticks it's nose in to many places where it doesn't belong. I am betting a quarter of our tax money could be saved if we didn't have to enforce stupid laws that should be each individuals decision. I am quite glad that we have not had a Democrat as president in the last couple of elections. Clinton had done in the economy and it was on a severe downturn that would have only gotten worse if Gore was in office. Not to mention that the terrorists would have laughed at us as we took the Clinton approach to things and just launched some cruise missiles at them. Don't even get me started on the last loser that the Democratic party nominated. John Kerry completely lacks a backbone. This man saw all of the same intellegence and voted to give the president authority to commit troops and was proud of it until a point in time that it became unpopular and now he is against the war. I don't agree with everything that George Bush does but I know that he is doing what he truly believes is the right thing for the country whether it is popular or not. There has to be something said for the fact that we have not been attacked since 9/11. We have to take a much more proactive role in the world today. People will come to kill us if we do not kill them first and that takes a leader that is willing to do what is right to keep us safe even if it is not popular. I will get off of my soap box now.

The major thing that I would worry about is the Western Union payment. He doesn't want the payment via the mail because that would be mail fraud. He doesn't want it via paypal because then you could get your money back from them. There are escrow companies out there that you could try to use so that he wouldn't get his money until you got the jet ski. My guess is that he wouldn't be interested in that though. You might suggest it and see what he says.

Too much inbreeding going on with the clownfish. If you look at the top one in the picture its face is rounded too much. Just sad really if these places are going to breed fish they need to do a much better job of selecting there breeding stock and carefully culling the genetic weaklings. If they keep going down this line then tank raised marine fish are going to be in big trouble once they have been around for awhile.

About a month ago we setup a tank at my daughters school in one of the 5th grade classrooms and half the class stuck around when I came to put the liverock in the tank. They have to magnifying glasses on strings attached to the tank that they use to look for little things. They were even thrilled by the brown algae phase. We just put some snails and hermits in the other day and one kid almost missed his bus to stay behind and watch.

Hey Miles those are Sea Lab blocks not Seachem. Seachem doesn't make a product like that.

I just had someone bring one of those things into the shop the other day that they were having a similar problem with. If you make it down this way I am sure I can figure it out but I cannot for the life of me remember what I did to fix the piece of junk. It had something to do with the air intake. Is there one of those black plastic fittings on the end of the air intake? I have worked on too many different skimmers here recently.

A little off the topic but what business does the state have in running liquor stores anyway. Any other state has liquor distributors and competition in the market but here the state sets all of the pricing. I am willing to bet that in a week I could cut over a billion dollars out of this states budget just in excess bureacracy. It is like I can't cross the street without the state holding my hand. Sorry looks like I need to spend more time in the venting forum. Only had to work 13 hours today at the shop so I guess I need it.

You can average it by going to the different sites but E-bay will calculate shipping on either UPS or the good old Post Office and then you don't have to worry. It also has an option to add a little to the calculated shipping charge for a handling fee. I have sold a few things on e-bay.

Nobody is supposed to know about them yet as they are being unveiled at the show this weekend so I don't think you will find any info out there on them as of yet. Hopefully tomorrow will be the grand unveiling and then there will be e-mails going out to PFO customers with more details about them including pricing. LED's still provide point source illumination. I don't know how stacking LED's will effect the ripples in the surface put I would imagine you would still get the ripple effect.

If you are doing it on e-bay figure out what the approximate weight of your package is going to be and then set the auction up to calculate the shipping for whichever method you choose.

They are supposed to have their own controller that you can hook up to your computer to program dawn to dusk, the color spectrum, and probably lots of other bells and whistles. I just wish they were going to be available before July. I can't wait to get my new toy.

LED do not shift spectrum over time. They are estimating a 5 year lifespan but you may be able to get up to 10 years out of a unit. These units will not actually hit the market until July. I am putting one on order as soon as they actually let me. They will be in a hood type unit that you can hang or support with legs. They are supposed to be similar in out put to 250w double ended bulbs. I told Carla not to break my bank but I need to have one. In 3 years these will probably pretty much eliminate metal halide lighting. You know the price is going to stay up there because they are cutting themselves out of selling bulbs and all the work that has gone on in development over the last 3 years. Just look at it over the long term. Lower electric consumption, no changing of bulbs and the ability to have amazing control over your lighting system. Well worth it.

I definately have not heard of anything through my suppliers yet about these regulations. I have 1000 snails coming tomorrow so I know it is not in effect yet.

I don't think it will be that bad. Most of these laws only really effect the importers. It will just be a couple of more hoops to jump through for them. It doesn't sound like it will be enforced within the US just on imports so we would still have astraeas, nassarius, cerith snails. I hope they don't get to crazy might take a couple of dollars out of my side business. On a side note there is actually an FDA regulation stating that you can't sell turtles under 4" because of the risk of salmonella poisoning because the turtles were kept in dirty tanks and then little kids get a hold of them and don't wash their hands afterwards and that whole nine yards. Then of course there are probably a million Oregon regulations regarding the turtles also.

Ok I will host the first meeting of Aquarium Addicts Annonomous.

It is awfully hard to pick up 8 boxes of fish in a honda accord though and they don't tow a boat or 5th wheel very well either. The cost of gas is not based on the amount of oil and just very loosely based on the cost of it. Oil Prices going up are an excuse to raise gas prices. So you use talk of oil shortage to drive up oil prices then the oil prices drive up gas prices. The major cause of the rise in gasoline prices is that Shell Oil took the most major west coast refinery off line a couple of years ago. Produce less gas prices go up. You don't have to worry about selling all the gas that you were producing and you get to charge 3 times the amount of money for it. Just wait. If you think this is bad just wait until they start putting strict limitations on Marine animals. When you limit the supply of something the price goes up because there is almost always someone out there willing to pay the price if they really want something. Gas Prices will continue to rise until a point that demand falls off to a point where they are not making as much money as they were at a lower price. It is business and the goal is to make as much money as possible. I know this sounds really bad but most people that start a business do so to make money, if they don't they aren't in business for very long.

I have always found that in situations like this a bottle of Bacardi 151 usually helps more than anything.

Ok while we are on revolutionary thought. Here are some things to think about in a Darwin like manner. Are our efforts to save species actually a good or bad thing. If a species is not able to adapt to changes in it's environment should it be up to us to interfere. Species that man has never has known about more than likely go extinct everyday because of failure to adapt to there natural environment. I once was very active in Species Survival for Lake Victorian Cichlids and have done quite a bit of research and put in some thought about this kind of question fairly extensively. One of the arguements that went on in the species survival was about reintroduction of captive bred species that have gone extinct in the wild. The thing is that once a fish has been kept in an aquarium it starts to adapt to it's new environment and therefore is no longer suitable for reintroduction. To take this to the discussion at hand, would we not be creating weaker corals if we interfered in the natural course of what was happening. This die off is a case of survival of the fittest. The corals that are able to adapt and sustain themselves in the current natural environement are the ones that will populate the reef and the more delicate species will go by the wayside. Such is the way of nature. The planet is a natural system that can deal with gradual changes much the way our captive reef systems can adapt to gradual changes. Ok now to get really controversial. Modern Medicine will be the downfall of the human race. Take a minute to think about this: Fertility drugs are helping people that cannot naturally concieve a child have a baby and in many cases a lot of babies. So these babies grow up to have babies and are more likely to need fertility drugs to have a child and so on and so forth. So the people that have a genetic problem are having more kids because of fertility drugs than the people that concieve naturally. Our medicine is creating a weaker genetic strain of ourselves making us more dependent on medicine. We have to improve our medicine to keep us going. Ok enough deep thought now it is time for beer and cartoons.

It is actually the weekend after Easter the 21st through the 23rd of April. Easter is April 15th. It is a little on the high side but it is fairly close. I haven't made up my mind yet.

I saw a really interesting program on PBS about the earths magnetic poles and how we are on the verge of a swap of magnetic north. So South will be North and North will be South. I believe that some of the things that are being blamed on pollution such as the hole in the ozone layer at the poles may be more likely related to the weakening of the earths magnetic field. Not many people carry compasses anymore but my truck has one built in and on the move out here I think I experienced a switch in the magnetic field. For some reason my compass was reading all wrong(no I wasn't lost). For some reason for a couple of hundred of miles of road that I know runs east/west I was going west but the compass was reading east. It has never happened again so I doubt it was a electrical problem. The program had shown that by going deeper into older layers of rock they can tell that the magnetic poles have changed lots of times in the earths history. It was really amazing to me as I had never heard anything about that sort of thing before. And just to relate it back to the topic of corals it is very similar in that there far more things that we don't know about corals or the earth than we know about them. I heard Eric Bornemann speak out in Oklahoma and he freely admitted that hobbyists are one of the greatest sources of discovery about corals. Coral research in the wild is really in its very early stages since Scuba gear was invented in the 1970's and hobbyists pay very close attention to their tanks for hours and hours at a time. It is hard to stay under water in the Ocean for as long as is need to get a great deal of information about corals but in the aquarium you can observe corals pretty much all the time. Then he told a story about a long day of diving out in the South Pacific and how he got back up to the boat exhausted and was laying on the deck of the boat and the thought occured to him that his job was to go diving in the South Pacific something that most people pay lots of money to go do and he was getting paid for it. He told it a lot better but that was the jist of the whole thing.