High Tide Aquatics

A (belated) intro

IOnceWasLegend

IOnceWasLegend

Frag Swap Coordinator
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Hey, all.

A bit about me: my name is Josh, I'm a huge metal head, I have a doctorate in neuroscience, and I was seriously considering starting a brewery rather than finishing my degree.

I joined here a couple months ago (and promptly became a supporting member). In 2011, I joined the lab that I ended up getting my doctorate from. The first day in that lab I met the guy who became my best friend and got me into building PCs, single-malt scotch, and—nine years after the fact—reefkeeping. In retrospect it's a bit odd it took me so long to start keeping a reef tank, since I've been fascinated by coral reefs since childhood and have been SCUBA diving since 2007, but my wife and I just started our first reef tank at the end of February 2020, an IM Nuvo Fusion 20.

I've been loving this site and the reefing community: everyone's been super friendly, generous, and helpful, to the point that I'm pretty sure that half my equipment and non-fish livestock have come from @hyacinth . :)

Thanks for welcoming me to the community, and I'm looking forward to taking more of a part in it!
 
Welcome, I don’t think I ever made an intro post either so you’ve inspired me. How do you like the 20 so far, any aspirations to go bigger already? It may have been since it was half the size but I was eager to move out of my IM 10 pretty quick.
 
capescuba said:
Welcome to the $$$ sink! Need to see some photos or it never happened ;)
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It's better than the prior hobby, which was homebrewing. At least reefing lets you sell frags to buy more frags...beer just ends up being drank.

And, ask and you shall receive. :) (Ignore the hair algae...battling the "new tank uglies" right now since it's only been up about 7 weeks. It's better than it was!)

(And that frogspawn in the lower right was full and happy right before I tried to take a picture and the shrimp tapdanced all over it.)

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max_nano said:
Welcome, I don’t think I ever made an intro post either so you’ve inspired me. How do you like the 20 so far, any aspirations to go bigger already? It may have been since it was half the size but I was eager to move out of my IM 10 pretty quick.
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So far I'm really liking the 20. I do have aspirations to go bigger, but that's much more due to a desire for stability than wanting something 'bigger and better'.

I spent almost a decade in molecular bio labs, so I'm anal retentive about parameters. For perspective, I built a temperature-controlled fermentation chamber when we had the space and I was at the height of my homebrewing. (Not having access to those types of tools) + (not being able to precisely track a lot of what I want to track just yet) + (knowing that small tank = less stability = larger swings) = desire for something larger.

I know I could plumb in a sump, but that'd just be a stopgap measure since we're (hopefully) looking to get a house in the next year or so and our apartment limits tanks to 30 gallons or less. I deliberately chose something large enough to be interesting, but small enough to be (relatively) easily moved, because I don't want the pain and hassle of moving something big.
 
IOnceWasLegend said:
Hey, all.

A bit about me: my name is Josh, I'm a huge metal head, I have a doctorate in neuroscience, and I was seriously considering starting a brewery rather than finishing my degree.

I joined here a couple months ago (and promptly became a supporting member). In 2011, I joined the lab that I ended up getting my doctorate from. The first day in that lab I met the guy who became my best friend and got me into building PCs, single-malt scotch, and—nine years after the fact—reefkeeping. In retrospect it's a bit odd it took me so long to start keeping a reef tank, since I've been fascinated by coral reefs since childhood and have been SCUBA diving since 2007, but my wife and I just started our first reef tank at the end of February 2020, an IM Nuvo Fusion 20.

I've been loving this site and the reefing community: everyone's been super friendly, generous, and helpful, to the point that I'm pretty sure that half my equipment and non-fish livestock have come from @hyacinth . :)

Thanks for welcoming me to the community, and I'm looking forward to taking more of a part in it!
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Welcome! Always great to have another science geek in the club :) Looking forward to meeting you when we start having face to face events again.
 
JVU said:
Welcome! Always great to have another science geek in the club :) Looking forward to meeting you when we start having face to face events again.
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Same to you! I was bummed I missed the CFM, but I'm definitely looking forward to the coming months.

What type of science geek are you? :)
 
Coral reefer said:
Metal head eh? Nice!
Had concerts for a couple good shows this summer...not looking promising at this point though.
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Yeah; I'm disappointed. We got to go see Sabaton last year, and were looking forward to a few more, but we'll just have to wait until all this settles down.

JVU said:
MD/PhD, and pretty much a sucker for all things science and engineering
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Nice! I worked under an MD/PhD during my post-doc (he was a neuropathologist) and man, I had more than enough when I did my doctorate...doing an MD on top of that just seemed super stressful. But I'm right there with you on the 'sucker for all things science and engineering'. I'm a fan of the phrase, "Boys never really grow up: we just get bigger and better toys," and that was very true in science.

A lab my home lab partnered with purchased a complete rig to do CLARITY imaging, including a computer with something like 30 SSDs back in 2016. I knew the scientific merits of it, but we spent most of the first week geeking out over the PC's specs, figuring out what new things we could try and image, and ended up settling on testing it out with a mouse testicle.
 
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