the creative nature

I have browsed through numerous periodicals (magazines!) over the past few years that often show photographs of spectacularly unreal, colorful reef aquariums in Germany and throughout Europe. Many of the images seemed to be of a nearly fluorescent quality…neon hues if you will. I have always been impressed by these artfully brilliant spectacles but I somewhat doubted their validity. How could an aquarist achieve such a color-saturated menagerie of corals? Were these merely photoshop manipulated images or did these aquariums actually exist? In my personal experience, captive corals nearly always seemed to “brown-out” under even the finest lighting fixtures and most advanced filtration systems. Even if they did possess a vivid color scheme, these still did not seem to match the vibrancy of the corals in those German systems.

So what is so different about what they were doing in Germany versus here in the States? My answer came when I read about a technique that called for utilisation of a Probiotic Bacteria Reactor (PBR). This is a module that operates much like a fluidized sand filter but instead of sand or granular media which harbor aerobic bacteria strains, the canister holds one of several food sources for heterotrophic bacteria. …to be cont’