The Puffer Forum

I always read that fish could not see red light. So i bought a red 5 LED wand and suction cupped it to my hood...and my puffers get scared and flee from it....mainly the porcupine does, do you think that's because he has only been used to the normal hood light, daylight and the moon light on the right? If anyone knows anything please tell me

Update, they are swimming in it now. Guess I will observe more than 5 minutes before I ask questions. Was just a new thing to them. Question can be deleted.

No need to delete--that pic is cool enough to keep!

Most fish don't see red light well at all. But there are many spectra with the band labeled "red" by humans, plus there is the big factor of intensity. Many years ago when I was playing with red light (unfortunately pre-LED), some lamp types were abysmal failures for one or the other of those reasons. The one rule of thumb that I came up was - if you can see the tank well enough to make out the fish within the first minute after turning the normal room or tank lights off, the light is far too intense for the tank. If you have to dark-adapt yourself for 5 or more minute before you can fish-watch, the fish are more likely not to see the light.

I would welcome any updates on red LED fish-watching. I would like to play with these myself.

Sort of related, but I found this article quite interesting: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... tml?page=1

I love the moonlights on my reef tank. Still need a flashlight to really see anything in there.

That pic is pretty! I went an did an ebay search and found other lights like those but in different colors. However, some required some sort of power supply and some were made to be placed on cars...

Which brand do you have and were did you get it from?

I got it from my LFS Creature Comforts. It is a 6 LED Marineland Bubble wand, it comes with the adapter and its a 2 piece unit (light plus a little cord with a connector, adapter with some cord and a connector. Cost me $20.
Here's one : http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 602_263622

You can hook an air pump to it if you want, but I wanted my LED lights pointing down so the pump doesn't bubble downwards. I totally recommend getting one of these in red. The light is bright enough you can observe the fish, I do this while i fall asleep. But it is not bright enough to reflect off the water/tank and light up my walls or room to the point where its uncomfortable to sleep, it's kind of like just my fish tank is illuminated. Watching the fish at night in the red dim light is different than just watching them swim, it almost seems like they don't know they are being watched. I took the blue moonlight out and put it in my 29gal tank pointing down on a little pile of live rock with blue xenia and it looks cool.

But anyway get one of these wands! It can go underwater (what its meant for to bubble upward). Its safe and it looks cool. It comes in red, green, blue and white was all I saw, but the red is awesome.