advanced aquatics | J. CHARLES DELBEEK
reefkeeping warp speed
y its nature, the marine aquarium hobby is very
dynamic, and these days changes are being tremendously accelerated by the Internet. It seems
as if each month new ideas and new concepts
are generated and debated, sometimes heatedly,
This is certainly the biggest change in the hobby since I
first began keeping marine fish in the late 1960s: the ability
to find and exchange information quickly and internationally.
My first dealings with European hobbyists began when
I met Dutchman George Smit
in 1986; for those who weren’t
around then, Smit invented the
trickle filter and this eventually
led to the use of live rock. From
there I corresponded with Dietrich Stüber, the first to succeed
in propagating staghorn Acropora
in Berlin in the late 80s. I visited
with other European pioneers,
such as Tony Achterkamp and
Leen Dekker in the Netherlands
in 1991.
However, aside from airmail
letters there really was no other
way to rapidly communicate be-
tween European and American
hobbyists. The main method of
disseminating information was
via magazines and books. One of
the drawbacks of this method of
information exchange was that
unless you had copies of these
books and magazines, or had
access to a library that did, you
could not readily find the infor-
mation they contained again. The
result was a lot of good informa-
tion that was never passed along
or was forgotten. With today’s
online forums, e-magazines, and
online search engines it is a snap
to find the information you are looking for. Unfortunately,
so many of today’s hobbyists are unaware of the volumes of
good information that has passed before them.
