Yes. They do. And being LED, they’re going to last longer than halides (every 6 months) and use a lot less electricity, so they will begin to make a difference on a lot of fronts.
I can report the new lights are installed, and look great.
by CJ | Sep 10, 2015 | Journal | 12 comments
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Excellent. Once you get the tank stabilized to your satisfaction, will you be getting a new clam? There is a joint, Pacific East Aquaculture, currently running a sale on wild harvested clams, random selection, for $89.
I spent most of today pulling our glass sliding patio door out, replacing the hamajang rollers and the completely kapakahi track underneath, and reassembling it. Ach du lieber mein Gott in Himmel!! I had to press-gang DH to help me lift out and put back the two huge glass panes, made 4 hardware store trips (the last one was for ONE screw!), drill replacement holes in the concrete to secure the bottom of the frame, and make a fortuitous educated guess about which of the multitude of roller sets would fit properly. The temperature and humidity were both around 85%. Now I can move the door with one finger; before I had to throw my whole weight into it. I am not cooking dinner tonight, or more likely, it will be mostly beverages.
I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me earlier, well, actually I do (1), but this morning the idea popped into my head that the frequency the zooxanthellea want is most likely the same frequency as water’s absorption minimum, ~480nm. So check the emission spectrum if the blue LED in the tunable “spectrum” LEDs, ~480nm. QED!
1) I’m a (very) dextrous male. It’s not so much a property of females nor sinister males, but dextrous males have a prominent left/right hemisphere division in brain functions. The left hemishpere has language and deals with most “everyday things”, while the right hemisphere is aphasic, artistic/musical, and inspirational puzzler. It took a while for the right side to work it out and get through to the left side that’s doing this web stuff.
Paul, you might find it interesting to check out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooxanthellae
And the four pages linked in the middle of paragraph 2:
“Zooxanthellae are photosynthetic organisms, and as well as chlorophyll a and chlorophyll c, contain the dinoflagellate pigments peridinin and diadinoxanthin.”
Too bad you can’t just use standard thread replacement LEDs, but salt water + 120V AC = EEK!
the ‘xanth’ particle BTW is Greek for yellow or yellow-brown.
The predominant light that corals get goes into the blues, which penetrate the depths. If you bring up the reds, which our eyes favor, you may also favor green marine algaes. At least as I understand it. If you want to be invisible in the marine depths, red is a good color…
I’ve heard that many times. I just don’t believe it. If you’re red, then you’re absorbing blue, green, yellow, and part of orange. if the light has had red, orange, yellow and some of the green filtered out of it, then there’s nothing for you to reflect–you’re “black”! If there’s any light at all at your depth, the water is blue and you’re black, you certainly will be visible!
Pelagic, deep water sharks would certainly benefit from being “stealthy”, invisible. Are they red? None I know of! 😉
Just basic physics, folks.
Perhaps it’s a difference of reef/bottom versus open water. Camouflage depends upon point of view. If you’re mostly viewed against the bottom, and if the bottom is dark or has lots of shadows, then dark is good. If you’re mostly viewed against the water surface (backed by sky) it’s a different matter.
I’d expect clams to be at the bottom, and corals to make their own bottom. I realize I have no idea how dark or light the sea bottom is in general, but shadows at least seem likely.
Although I would guess, for photosynthetic organisms, absorbing light energy to be more important than hiding, especially when you live in a dimly lit place.
The question is also what sort of lights you use to illumine them. Sharks tend to wander between depths, and one of the rare—I forget how many gill sharks that they had called deep sea turned up embarrassingly frequenting the piers of the Seattle Aquarium a year or so ago…but other critters like the vampire squid show up as red in the deep explorer’s lights.
Marine hobbyists variously describe cyanobacterial sheets as brown, rust brown, or purple or reddish and though they do have variations, the lights people use on their tanks also vary, so one light can show something as red and another will show it as brown. All the pretty colors of marine life are probably there in some eyes and not in others. I’ve known vegetarian (mostly) rabbit fish, which come with an opal eye cornea (or whatever it is in fish) to take after anything green—even including someone’s green hammer coral, an animal, and not a plant. THough they don’t I think have anything like the rod/cone arrangement we do, those weird eyes may serve to highlight certain wave lengths in ways only a rabbitfish can tell us…
Certainly we see the pelagic predator sharks are light on the belly, dark on the top. Both help them blend in when seen from below and above. But they’re shades of grey to blue, reflecting some light.
CJ, those are the six-gill sharks. I remember a documentary made by Dr Eugenie Clark (who passed away earlier this year) on a submersible dive that showed the “rare” six-gill. Here obit mentioning it is here.
Speaking of lights… today I pulled out the last of the decaying old fluorescent light bars in the house and replaced it with a ceiling fan/light combo. Much better, although I was unable to put in the hardwired dimmer I wanted (changing out the old wiring to allow for the new switches would have been painful [recalling CJ and Jane’s Adventures in Wiring several years back!]) The vacation-based home improvement is now pau hana! May your new tank light system be equally rewarding!
Thank you!
We like the T8 daylights—lights up the kitchen like a surgery, which, as your eyes get older, is a good thing. 😉
After installing the new fan, I was bemoaning my inability to put in the dimmer switch I wanted to our neighbor, who is a jack of all trades and extremely well versed in home repair. He suggested I look into the newest LED light bulbs which have, of all things, tiny dimmers in each one which can be controlled through an app on your smart phone! o_O At $26 each, a little pricey, but if you factor in that they should last 15 years…!
CJ, I sent you an email yesterday with a link to an aquarium fixture, I don’t know if you got it, or not, but thought you might be interested. This is a “tunable” fixture…