FAQ/Care Sheets - Your help needed

[Chris]

This is an idea i've had for a long time that has never come to light yet. The advantages for us will be two-fold as well.

One of the aspiring goals of this club are to help improve the conditions of the local shops. One way of doing so would be to convince them to provide more information about what they're keeping.

A valiant long-term goal would be for us to help provide care sheets so that they can be displayed in local shops and potential customers can read a little information prior to making a rash decision.

The short-term benefit would be an awesome database of information to add to our site. As we slowly come up with more and more data, the long-term aspect of the project would become more feasible.

The format would essentially be similar to the layout of Scott W. Michael's pocket guide book except our care sheets would also apply to Inverts. as well.

Now for legal reasons, we can't simply copy the information directly from Scott Michael's book, but to give you an idea on how it's formatted it's similar to the following:


Scientific Name
Common Name

Maximum Length:
Range: (Location)
Minimum Aquarium Size:
Foods & Feeding:
Aquarium Suitability: (A scale of 1-5)
Reef Aquarium Compatability:
Captive Care: (General information)

If we were to create such a project, we would need to adopt our own guidelines, or slightly modified ones for the information to follow. I'm hoping I get receive some actual support with this one since it's not a project that would take up a lot of your time. Creating a caresheet for a single fish shouldn't take you but a few minutes after some proper research.

Let me hear your opinions/thoughts guys & gals.

;)

[MikeP]

Chris I would be happy to start on this at least for fish and invertebrates. It's just getting started that's the hard part - I have a big reference library on marine life / reefkeeping anyone interested can consult if they are serious about this project.

[Richard]

I think this is a great idea! It would be nice to have more on the faq than the same information that can be found in any good book. One of the best books I have is a book on australian pythons by Dave and Tracy Barker (breeders out of Boerne). The thing that makes it such a good book is that they have a 'NOTES' section on each species with personal observations/experiences on care, breeding, temperament etc.

Richard

[Chris]

Good to hear others are interested.. that's a positive start. ;)

So does anyone have opinions on a good format? I would personally like to include an "average size" or "max aquarium size" for fish. Max sizes in the wild for certain fish will never be acheived in our tanks.

Comments?

[Chris]

Adding Richards suggestion, we have something similar to the following:


Scientific Name
Common Name

Average Length:
Maximum Length:
Range: (Location)
Minimum Aquarium Size:
Foods & Feeding:
Aquarium Suitability: (A scale of 1-5)
Reef Aquarium Compatability:
Captive Care: (General information)
Observations:

[MikeP]

I've picked up a lot from Scott Michael over past few weeks in the lectures he's given in that MACO course - let me go over my lectures again and pull out a few things -

Aggression: territorial? Fight with conspecifics? etc.
Dangers: (example many venomous fish like coral cats and foxface , huma triggers will bite etc)
Lighting: (some fish like squirrels, cardinals some anthis do much better in dim lights as opposed to bright reefs)
Health issues - some fishes you can not use certain treatments for (copper on scaleless fishes) or are prone to certain diseases (tangs and ich, clowns and brooklynella).

I'll think of some more tomorrow and we can decide what to use.

Also pics are nice but we probably can't cover every species with what are kept by club members.


Is this something we coudl have as a backend in say MS Access? If so we coudl get a template and just start populating it. Assuming we would have this searchable.
If we agree on a format and can get a template made I'll start creating files with the basics (latin name) and we can add on information as we go.

[Chris]

Mike, if possible it would be a database using MySQL since that's what postnuke and this forum already use. I'll search tonight and tomorrow for a pre-existing module... otherwise I may need to just create something myself.

I like your additions... If we make everything as complete as possible it would be all that much more helpful. ;)

[Chris]

Is there no one else interested in this idea? Things don't just happen on their own people... you actually have to participate. :roll:

[MikeP]

Chris - if you have a barebones form idea I can start making some entries in excel or access and we can always export them to SQL later. I thought about this a bit - I can do most of the writing and information input the only trick will be getting photos of all the fish. There may be a few public domain ones but other than that have to rely on what members can contribute. Let me know - facing 12 boring hours at work tomorrow I can start on it.

[Chris]

That was kind of the idea Mike... coming up with what all we want still.



Scientific Name
Common Name

Average Length:
Maximum Length:
Range: (Location)
Minimum Aquarium Size:
Foods & Feeding:
Aquarium Suitability: (A scale of 1-5)
Reef Aquarium Compatability:
Aggression:
Lighting:
Health issues:
Captive Care: (General information)
Observations:


Any others? Should we take a few off?

Still trying to get opinions here. ;)

[Louis]

How about breeding? Sexing? I think you've pretty much got everything else covered ;)

[Andrew]

I'd be interested in helping, though I don't have much reefkeeping experience. Let me know what I can do.

Andrew

[Chris]

Okay how's this for a final listing?


Scientific Name
Common Name

Average Length: (Aquarium length)
Maximum Length: (Wild max length)
Range: (Location - Which oceans?)
Minimum Aquarium Size: (Recommended minimum gallons or swim space)
Foods & Feeding: (Meaty foods, veggies, etc...)
Aquarium Suitability: (A scale of 1-5, 1 = hard to keep, 5 = very easy)
Reef Aquarium Compatability: (Compatible with inverts?)
Captive Care: (General information)
Observations: (Health issues, Lighting compatibilities, general observations)

We can go ahead and start off with fish listings and move on to corals at a later date. Sound good? ;)

[MikeP]

Chris - sounds good - I can start doing some data entry today. If I do it in an excel spreadsheet would that work ok until you finalize the format in SQL? I can always export it as delimited text or whatever and pull it in later.

[RedDragon]

If there's any thing I can do to Help out Chris, just give me a holla I would love to help out in any way

[RedDragon]

or you know a better idea Chris, have members do there own fish, every reefer knows about there own fish so why not have member fill out the info on the fish they have that would bet a good way to have every one in on this one, like I have a hand full of fish fill out the form and send it to you every one dose this we will have a good data base and the ones no one has well some one finds out, only my idea tho