Not for me to say. But I think the editor liked them.
To be honest, the problem for all the fishkeeping magazines is getting the balance between detailed articles for those 5% of the readers who keep oddballs and other rare fish, and the 95% of them who keep mainstream stuff like community tanks and reef tanks. Once people become "serious" hobbyists, they often stop reading the magazines because there aren't enough articles about the unusual fish, so a magazine has to concentrate on the things casual hobbyists enjoy. It's a really difficult balance to get right, even for the successful magazines that have been in business for decades.
In the old days you either read a magazine like PFK or else if you wanted something more specific, you joined a club (like the British Cichlid Association, for example) that supplied you with a magazine every few months focused on your specific interest. But now with the internet it's easy for someone to stop reading a magazine and instead go read articles on the most obscure topics on some web site instead. Magazines are finding it hard to keep the readers they have, let alone get new ones.
That's a shame in many ways, but the biggest downside to the freedom of the internet is the lack of consistency. It's never easy to be sure if what you're reading is done by an expert, by someone who plagiarises other web sites without fact checking, or else the site was done by someone who didn't have a clue what they were talking about. At least with a magazine there will have been an editor who will have read through the article and made sure it was commissioned from somebody who had a reasonable grasp of the subject at hand.
On the other hand, there are, for example, three or four really expert pufferfish keepers I know from their work on forums who have gone on to write magazine articles. So if magazine editors keep an eye on web sites and forums, it's possible for them recruit excellent new writers. Another case in point: I believe that George Farmer was an active member on this site for some time before he started writing regularly for PFK magazine on planted aquaria.
Cheers, Neale
Look forward to reading them Neale... Good i hope?
The stupid question is the one that isn't asked.
No, this low level of salinity won't harm your plants. Or at least, it won't harm hardy, hard water tolerant plants such as
Vallisneria, Java fern, Java moss,
Hygrophila, Amazon swords,
Cryptocoryne wendtii, to name but a few. You do have a few red plants there like
Rotala that are difficult to grow at the best of times, and I'd predict failure in that tank even without the salt, unless you have soft water, CO2 fertilisations, and very strong lighting. The salt would merely hasten their demise.
A stupid question here, will adding salt have any adverse effect on any of the plants/moss in the tank? And would you recommend any type of aquarium salt (I guess as long as its aquarium salt it will be fine)
