For those who would like to know more about your friendly blogger, I have been interviewed by the community blog at The Reef Tank, a web site for home saltwater aquarists. In the interview, I talk about some of the peculiarities of aquatic plants and algae (including an explanation of the title of this post), what some of my formative aquatic experiences were, why I started this blog, and how an aquarium is like a hot tub. There’s more than enough to read there, so in that spirit, I’ll end this short post with an interesting picture of a red alga. Yay algae!
In spite of its sexual disability, this red alga is still very happy to see you. Close-up of Laurencia sp., a seaweed from Hawaii. Photographed by Eric Guinther. Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. Click image for link.
p.s. Speaking of algae, I just painted my hall a color I’m calling “kelp green”, but which has been less charitably described by some interloping visitors as “baby poop green”. It’s kelp! Kelp, dang it!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Sorry Monty — I accidentally deleted your comment because it got sent to my Spam folder for some reason. However, I fished out the text and am posting it below. Hope that’s ok! Jennifer
Montagu Douglas Halls
sharkandcoralconservation.com
Submitted on 2010/01/11 at 1:10am
Hi Jennifer, You really are an enthusiast !! Would be interested in talking to you (maybe via e-mail: contact@sharkandcoralconservation.com ) about spreading awareness of coral reef deterioration and the impacts os excessive shark depletion as far as the USA is concerned. Best wishes – Monty Halls (Senior) Sec. SCCT – website http://www.sharkandcoralconservation.com
Wow. I love your blog, and I loved the article over thereeftank.com…
Isn’t life-on-earth cool? What boggles my mind, now that I’ve been into aquariums for a few years is the diversity of life on earth, that I managed to ignore for 30 years of my life. I just read a book called “The Reverend Guppie’s Aquarium”, which is a book about eponymous words, words like “Frisbee” that enter the language because they were originally a person’s name. A chapter on the history of botany, and various plants that were named after various interesting people, including Fuchs, for whom the Fuschia is named, and including Hieronymus Bosch, Linnaeus, and many others, was very fascinating. There’s an aquarium book called “Dr. Axelrod’s atlas”, and a tetra species described mid-20th century, with the name “axelrodi”. I just think that’s cool.
Your blog inspires me to take a closer look at microscopic sized life. I’m very interested right now in hair algae. It grows in most aquariums, and is quite a “nuisance”, but it’s also a fresh green food, rich in nutrients. I’d like to understand the water chemistry that promotes the growth of various kinds of algae, and take the “if you’ve got lemons, then make lemonade” attitude towards my tanks. If algae grows, great, I’m going to study it, instead of giving myself a stroke worrying about how to prevent Life from happening, I’m going to enjoy it (within the limits, of course, of what’s healthy for my pets).
Something aquarists often find, is that our little cubes of glass with a small amount of water inside cannot come close to reproducing the amazing natural environment around us. If we could build a 10-million gallon indoor freshwater biotope, and study it, oh the things we would learn! But for now, I am happy to learn what can be learned from observing the little “slices” of nature that we keep in glass boxes, for now.
Warren
(Found you via http://www.thereeftank.com/blog/plants-and-professional-aquariums/)