Captive Aquatics: An Aquarium and Ecology Blog

How to Frag Branching SPS Coral

This guest post by My Reef to Yours Coral Frags will teach you all about fragging branching SPS coral!

Fragging live SPS is easy and is a great way to share coral frags with your friends. This article will cover most branching SPS such as Acroporas, Birdsnest, and others. If it has branches, we can frag it safely.

Photos: Singer Island Dive & Artificial Reef

Well, this is my first post as me, although you've probably seen my pictures posted here.  My name is Hallie Carter and I'm an environmental ecologist, photographer and dive master currently living in FL! I hope to provide interesting pictures of marine life to compliment those posted by my friends who are living in the southern hemisphere!

I had a a great bridge dive today off the coast of Singer Island, FL! The visibility wasn’t great at first, but once we hit slack tide it improved immensely. We checked out the new artificial reef which was very popular to a lot of schooling fish. We also found a juvenile jack-knife fish, batfish, and even an orange seahorse. 

Notice the difference in biodiversity compared to the previously posted great barrier reef photos where Mike and Merritt are.  No two reefs are the same...anyway, on to the pictures!

Hawksbill Sea Turtle Photographed

Our friend Haille is a dive master and environmental ecologist currently working off the Florida coast.  She also happens to snap spectacular photographs that we shamelessly share here!  The hawksbill sea turtle is a beautiful and smaller species of sea turtle that's unfortunately been hunted for ornamental purposes in the past. 

Cairns! (Ecology & Tons of Photos)

In between research we decided to take a vacation to Cairns and got a lot of photos.  We stayed on a semi-private beach where a mangrove estuary met the ocean.  Tidepools were everywhere with a variety of gastropod and barnacle species as well as trapped blennies, gobies, and damsels.  Rock anemones and crabs were abundant as well!  Cairns is very close to the great barrier reef (see photo taken from the air above) and close to some of the several island research stations I visit for collecting trips.  More photos: