This issue of
the Advanced Aquarist is, in terms of content, somewhat different
from what our readers have been accustomed to. Typically we
offer a Feature with a series of columns. This issue is atypical
because we are presenting three Features and only a few columns.
Richard Harker's three part series, Is it really in the
water? A critical reexamination of toxic metals, part 3
brings to a conclusion his final thoughts on the whole issue
of metal toxicity first brought before the reef keeping public
by Ron Shimek.
A
recent photo of the editor's majestic angelfish who,
over the last ten or more years, has grown to maturity
in his reef tank.
One of the most
often discussed topics by reef keepers is the transmission
of photons from the aquarist's lighting devices to the photosynthetic
organisms kept in our closed system reef aquaria. What light
spectrum, what intensity, what reflectors best focus that
light, and what light source produces the most pleasing effect
to the aquarist's eye are subjects that are of supreme importance
to aquarists. No two people in our hobby have shed more light
on this subject than Sanjay Joshi, Ph.D., and his colleague
Timothy Marks. So that new material from them is not kept
from the public any longer than necessary, in this issue we
offer two new Features by them: Spectral Analysis of 400W
Lamps: XM, Radium, Osram and Sunmaster, PFO, and SPECTRAL
ANALYSIS OF 250W DOUBLE ENDED 10,000K METAL HALIDE LAMPS AND
BALLASTS. Our hobby owes a great debt to Sanjay and his
colleagues, who have brought the discipline of science to
a major concern in our hobby that was, before their research,
clouded by too much smoke from almost everyone's opinion pipe.
Thanks to them reef keepers can make informed choices about
what lights to utilize.
In this issue
also, Terry Bartelme offers part 4 of his series on Cryptocaryon
irritans, what the pathogen is and how to eliminate it
from closed system aquaria. I don't know of an aquarist who
has not have had to battle what is known as saltwater Ich,
and Terry is doing a great service for aquarists by separating
fact from fiction, and useful from snake oil remedies.
