Next Meeting August 21, 2010

Hi All,

the next meeting will be held at the UCO venue and will be a frag demonstration. In this demo I hope to show you how to frag leather corals. In the past we have done zoanthids, chalices and sps corals but this will be the first time we have looked specifically at leathers.

Leather corals pose a number of difficulties over other types of corals. They do not heal very fast, they are slow to adhere, you can not superglue them to substrate and they come in a vast variety of shapes. Instead of the normal techniques we need to take a different approach.

In addition we will also be kick starting the donor program by fragging out a bunch of zoanthids as well.

All of the corals will be entered into the donor program at the meeting, but will be available for you to take away that night. This means that if you are a member of COMAS, you will leave with several frags.

If you are not a member of COMAS and would like to come along, we would love to meet you and welcome you to the meeting.

Membership for the rest of the year is only $18.50, so now may be the time to join up, or rejoin, and leave with a goodie bag of frags.

Once I get the corals I will post pictures in this thread for you all to see,

Regards,

Paul and the COMAS LT.

June 12th meeting. UCO @ 7.30.

Hi all, at the next COMAS meeting we are going to boldly go where not many have gone before.....
We all know and love the larger animals in our tanks, those that we have selected at local stores and chosen for ourselves. However, these animals make up only a tiny fraction of all the animals in our system. The vast majority of these animals entered our systems as hitch hikers on pieces of rock, or coral, or even water that accompanied those items. Some showed up by an even more mysterious route, being blown into the tank as particles of dust.

At this months meeting we are hunting these characters down using several high powered microscopes. Its time for a microbiological safari. At the meeting we will have scopes that do 4x all the way to 100x magnification. AT 4x the bristles on a worm look like needles. At 100x they look like tank plumbing and even bacteria are visible.

To make this fun, I would like to see some interaction from the members. I am looking for samples of the following:

home made phyto
store bought phyto
sand scooped from a phyto-fed system
sand from a regular fed system
Skimmate- the fresh foam variety being bubbled off the top, not the stuff thats collected.
Sand from a DSB and from the display of the same tank.

This should be a fun meeting, the key players are mysterious and im sure you will all see creatures you had no idea of running around in your tanks.

There will be a thread on RC so you can let us know what you can bring to the meeting.

I hope to see you all there,

Paul.

Photography for the aquarist

Aquarium Photography 101

In getting ready to get the Photo of the month contest going again and give people somewhere to start I've written an article that should help.

Visit any aquarium website or forum and you'll likely see amazing pictures of coral, fish, and aquarium in general. If you want to know how people get those amazing shots well just keep reading.  We'll go through the basics of photography and then some tips that will help you take better shots of your aquarium.  For the tips that I've put together, just click 'Read more'

The February meeting will be held on February 20, 2010 at the Atrium adjacent to the UCO Science Building, beginning at 7:30 p.m.

There will be a demonstration of cutting rock mounted coral frags at the meeting. Chris Jilge will be conducting the demonstration, using the new model of the Inland wet saw. Members are invited to bring corals to be fragged, especially acans, favia and others. Please drop a note to Chris, (Cjilge) to let him know what kind of coral you have. Chris will demonstrate use, cleaning and maintenance of the saw.

The saw will be the door prize in a drawing for members at the end of the meeting.

Chair persons of the frag, equipment and library programs will also be there to answers questions and check club items in and out.