Welcome to Coralite.net

4.9.07 I am not sure why but spring seems to be the preffered month for reef clubs to have special meetings and events. Already this year I have presented for the Denver, Rockford and Omaha reef clubs and I will be going to Maryland and Atlanta in the upcoming weeks. I hope that all my old reefing buddies in the ATL will attend Saltwater U, at the Georgia aquarium from May 4-6. I will be giving two presentations and a demonstration. Please visit this page for more information on my presentation topics.

1.20.07 On February 24, 2007, the Rockford Reefers and Uberfrags.net will be putting on the Rockford Frag Fest in Rockford Illinois. I will be giving a presentation on the importance of water flow for reef aquariums and since the organizers have gone to great lengths to publicize the event, I hope to meet a lot of you chi-town area reefers. If socializing or learning is not enough to get you to come then they also have a treasure trove of aquarium products to raffle off. For more information on directions, registration and other details, be sure to check out their comprehensive website.

1.16.07 Happy new year everyone. Although this new year is very fresh I have not been resting on my laurels. To keep the momentum on my podcasting habit the coral-spawning interview with Alina Szmant was recently released and it is available now via Talking Reef. With the release of my fifth article I have finally completed my five part article series in Advanced Aquarist about corals and water flow. This new webpages contains a summary of the articles and it provides a brief overview of what each writing is about. In the next few months I will be giving some presentations about the importance of water flow to corals for a handful of reef clubs. The first confirmed speaking engagement will be the Mini Reef Aquarium Conference, February 10th in Denver Colorado. I will update the site as soon as other presentations become official.

Special!! In addition to my usual articles and podcasts, I have a special project coming down the pipes. In just a few months I hope to release a unique aquarium product which will be free to all. Once I complete the project I will need a small number of volunteers to test out the product before it is available to the general public. If you would like to be alerted to new developments on this project, please subscribe to the mailing list above.

12.11.06 This is a brief update about a few projects which I have recently completed. The brittle star podcast has just been released via talking reef. Part four of my water flow article series was recently published on advanced aquarist and part five should be out in just a few days. Additionally, my inaugural publication for reefkeeping.com was released last month. It is a simple write up of the coral spawning internship i did in Puerto Rico last summer. I have started working at Premier Fish and Reef in Denver Colorado so for those of you in the area, please come by and chat with me. Also come to see the few hundred corals that the shop regularly keeps on hand.

11.1.6 I think might be getting the hang of this podcasting thing. As promised, the sponge podcast is out now, follow the link for some pictures of sponges. The spawning podcast is forthcoming and I have squeezed in a podcast interview with Dr. Steve Stancyk, in which we discuss everything about brittle stars or ophiuroids to be exact. Since the 'casts are adding up I have written another webpage to keep track of them: Podcast Page. Although I have been busy on the site's new pages, I still have had time to write 4 articles for Advanced Aquarist online magazine. The articles are part of a series on water flow: part 1 explains the effect of water flow on gas exchange, part 2 is a review of the scientific literature on corals and water flow, part 3 highlights some of my own research and part 4 introduces the key points of hydrodynamics. Part 4 will be published later this month and the forthcoming final part which I am currently writing up will try to tie in all of these concepts and advise aquarists on how they can provide more useful water flow for the benefit of their corals. In the past month I lived in puerto Rico, South Carolina and finally Denver CO. It looks like I will be settled in here until I start grad school in the Fall so I will try to find a cool aquarium shop to work at.

9.15.6 Well things are winding down here in Puerto Rico, the coral spawning has been over for a while but we have been maintaining coral spat for about amonth now. Before I came here to PR I was in Wilmington NC preparing for the coral spawning work. While I was there I interviewed Joe Pawlik who is a reef sponge ecologist. My third podcast about sponges will be featured in Advanced Aquarist next month. I finally got some time to sit down with Dr. Alina Szmant to ask her some questions about sexual coral reproduction so my fourth podcast should be coming soon. My powershot and ewa housing have been performing really well, check out the new section where I feature some high res images for use as desktop wallpapers/backgrounds.

6.15.6 Man it feels so good to be done with college (for a while). I graduated from the U of SC and I managed to give a presentation at IMAC during finals week. While I was there I interviewed a couple fo the ZEOvit diehards and I have put together my second podcast. While I was at IMAC I also touched base with Terry Siegel about writing some flow related articles for Advanced Aquarist, here is the first part in the series, look out for more articles in the coming months. In a little while I will be going to Puerto Rico to work with Alina Szmant, who is more or less the God Mother of coral spawning in the Carribean so I hope to get a lot of coral spawning experience to report about. I recenly purchased my first new digital camera, a Canon Powershot S3 with a soft underwater housing by Ewa Marine. I plan to do a lot of diving in PR so I will hopefully get some good shots of Carribean corals to share with everyone. It sounds like it is going to be a busy summer so stay tuned for much more material and updates.

3.24.6 So I have just published my first podcast through talking reef (thanks Rob) and I am excited to hear how it is received. As mentioned in the segment, I will be attending Symbiofest in Athens in about a month and I hope to record material for an additional segment soon. As always, love to hear what everyone thinks. coralite at gmail dot com.
Updated:I just added new images to the Acro Macros, Octocoral Macros, and Misc Macros galleries.

3.18.06 Well, it's now spring break of my final semester as un undergrad and I'm looking forward to presenting at IMAC right before I graduate. I will be presenting my results on the flow study I have been working on for about two years. You can expect to see a full write up on my project after I present the research. As I am wrapping up many of my projects at my school life I have begun to undertake new projects at home and on the web. About 4 weeks ago I got a tattoo of an octocoral on my left arm. Visit the link to learn more about my process of designing the tattoo and getting inked. Since the beginning of the year, Gary White and I have been leading the Advanced Discussion forum at zeovit.com. We have interesting, scientifically founded discussions of coral biology and reef biology, Gary is an abstract posting monster and we are slowly building a nice collection of threads. More recently, I have started contributing some recordings to the Talking Reef Podcast. I recently did an awesome recording with a zooxanthellae researcher so look for that to be published real soon.

New Additions!!!

HIMB Coral Workshop and More Meso PIX (3 more galleries added 10.3.05)

9.22.05 Oh my what a crazy month its been. I returned to school a couple weeks late, had a few weeks to get organized with the reef club and the school marine science club and then I boogyed to MACNA. WAMAS did a great job of putting on the conference and although I really should have stayed home and done some work and studying, many years from now I'll remember the many friends I made and caught up with but I won't remember the C I am gonna get on the upcoming exam. I won first place in the MASNA photo contest in the coral category and my image will be used in their new Aquarium Calendar. All the while I have been working very hard to finish up the myriad of pages I started when I came back from hawaii. I was very fortunate to be able to borrow another camera and underwater housing at HIMB and I have a slew of very nice pics from my stay in the Aloha State. I feel kinda of lame putting up so many pages with just pictures but its so much work to type up text when I do that at school all the time. I should also be adding many additional images to my mesoscope picture gallery very soon. I have certainly getting much better at using the meso to take pictures so, for the picky viewers who thought my first round of images were crude, please do take another look at the new pictures and dont hesitate to tell me what you think.

8.7.05 I have just made a round of updates and additions to several pages. I have some new pictures in the zooxanthellae page and I have created a page about my Paratilapia bleekeri. In less than a week I will be going to Hawaii to attend the Coral Molecular Biology Techniques Workshop where, among other things, I will learn to differentiate the different types of Symbiodinium using genetic analysis techniques. It will be a 2 week coral research geekfest but I am looking forward to it and I hope to return with lots of info and material for the site. Alas, when I return I will be starting my senior year of college a week and a half late. I am looking forward to being president of the Marine Science Undergrad Society and vice president of Students for Ocean Sustainability and a short time after I get back from Hawaii I am going to MACNA. This is going to be a busy time for me but I will update the site as much as I can. In the meantime please enjoy and feel free to let me know what you think.

5.25.05As this website has grown out of a personal webpage and into something more useful and meaningful, I have come to realize that the scope of my ambitions for this site could greatly benefit from more people to help. It is my hope that with more people focusing on different aspects of the site that more can be achieved without sacrificing the main product. I am and will be recruiting various aquarists and scientists to contribute in their area of expertise. I have also been amassing a contact list of aquarist which I consider to have a certain degree of experience and or enthusiasm with certain groups or species of corals and I will soon be contacting them to see if they would like to do a profile for their particular coral. If you think you might like to contribute please feel free to contact Jake at coralite@gmail.com.

5.10.05 The site is very new but please don't hesitate to take a look around. There are a ton of great links already and my bios is done for now. I plan to produce a list of coral research publications dealing with different aspects of coral biology, coral physiology and reef ecology. The publications will gradually be accompanied with a brief description of the study and an analysis of how the conclusions pertain to aquariology when applicable. I will gladly accept publication suggestions for the coral research list and I invite other aquarists to submit synopsis of coral publications as well. I hope that in time this site will become an essential resource for aquarists who are interested in coral research and how a more scientific approach can help us to continue to push the envelope of reef aquarium keeping. Please feel free to contact me at coralite@gmail.com with any comments or suggestions.