About
About Coralkin
Coralkin is the warm, honest home for saltwater & reef keepers — real, tested care from your first clownfish to your first coral, where every number is checked and no one is made to feel out of their depth.
Why Coralkin exists
Saltwater has a reputation: expensive, impossibly hard, gatekept behind jargon and "you'll kill everything." That scares off people who'd make wonderful reef keepers — and it isn't really true. The hobby is demanding in one specific way: the water chemistry is unforgiving, and the numbers matter. Get the water right and the rest follows.
So we built Coralkin to be the friend who did the reading and the math — plain-language care you can trust, backed by free calculators that do the chemistry for you, with the honest caveats most guides leave out. It's a sister site to Bognook (amphibians),Baskden (reptiles) and Finfern(freshwater), and it runs on the same principle: you belong here.
What we promise
The rules we hold ourselves to on every page:
- Never fabricate a number. In reefkeeping the numbers are life-or-death, so we never publish a salinity, alkalinity, tank size or dose until it's checked against an authoritative source. Right now 72 of 72 species are fully sourced.
- Test, don't guess. Clear water can still be dangerous. We teach you to read your water and act on the numbers, and our tools run on the same cited data as the guides — they never contradict.
- We triage; we don't diagnose. We help you spot what's normal and what's a red flag — but we're not a substitute for an aquatic vet, and we'll tell you when to get one.
- Safety first. Where something can hurt you — palytoxin on zoanthids above all — we say so plainly and up front, never buried.
- A heart for the reef. We steer you toward captive-bred and aquacultured livestock over wild-caught wherever we can, because a healthy hobby and a healthy ocean go together.
- Belonging over gatekeeping. We explain the jargon instead of hiding behind it, and we correct old store myths kindly — never making you feel bad for having believed them.
The full detail is on our editorial standards page.
Who writes this
Coralkin's guides are written by the Coralkin team — reef keepers and researchers who work each topic carefully and compile it from the best marine-aquarist and veterinary sources available, to a consistent writing and fact-checking standard. We are enthusiasts and researchers, not a veterinary practice. Where a topic needs a vet, we say so and send you to one.
We're working toward named veterinary and expert review of our health content — when a qualified aquatic vet has genuinely reviewed a guide, you'll see a “✔ Reviewed by” line on it. Until then, we're upfront that our guides are team-written and fact-checked, not yet vet-reviewed. We will never fake a review or a credential.
Talk to us — and tell us when we're wrong
Good care information should be accurate, and we take mistakes seriously. If you spot an error, or you think something's out of date, please tell us — we'll check it against our sources and fix it fast, and a correction only makes the guide better.
Or read exactly how we research & fact-check.