angelskates's Blog

This is the saga of our salt water tank adventures. We have explored ALL the alternatives for keeping salt water creatures alive in our home.

My two grown sons love to collect little creatures where ever they go. Twenty years ago they started a tradition in our family of collecting ocean creatures whenever we went to the ocean. Naturally, we read books, we asked experienced aquarium keepers and we purchased HUNDREDS of dollars worth of equipment, chemicals, special food, filters, lights, live rock, the list goes on and on.

Nothing we brought home lived very long. The live rock seemed OK, but everything else eventually died, disappeared or both.

I quit letting the boys bring home sea creatures, since we did not seem able to keep anything except a rock alive and I could not stand to see the little fishes and things die needlessly.

Fifteen years ago the boys found hundreds of pen shells on the beach and as we were cleaning them we discovered that the little blobs of dried up mud inside them were actually sea anemones. Live sea anemones. You guessed it. They talked me into letting them try once more, but this time they wanted to do it their way, not the high tech way. I thought that since these creatures had survived being washed up at high tide and stranded on the beach in the sun that surely they would have a chance in a tank.

Soooo

The boys collected sea water. (a mistake according to the books) They put the water into a ten gallon tank at home. (too small say the books) There was no filtration system. (I added a corner filter box containing a bag of ChemiPur.) We hooked up an aerator and a couple of air stones.

The anemones thrived, all thirty of them. Once a week we fed them a bit of raw shrimp from the grocery store. We used a bamboo skewer like you would use for a small shisk-a-bob and gave a small piece of shrimp to each anemone. The boys loved feeding the anemones.

My youngest son took one to school one day in a paper cup for pet day. That afternoon he put it back in the tank to tell its friends about its day at school. It actually seemed to wave its tendrils around a little more energetically that night. Maybe it was glad to be home.

Eventually, we added other wild sea life to the tank, little fishes, hermit crabs, snails, small crustaceans, and our most interesting addition, a cluster of barnacles. The tank was crowded, but they did not seem to care. We hatched brine shrimp for the filter feeders and cultivated a nice wall of green algae on the back wall of the tank. We did water changes and changed out the resin. We kept the tank going for several years, until a move required that it be dismantled.

All in all it was the most successful tank we have ever run. I do not know that I would recommend it as a general method for everyone, but it worked for us. It cost very little to set up and I am grateful that I let the boys talk me into it.

The point being that running a technologically complex salt water tank was a chore and never worked as well as our natural tank. It is possible to maintain a salt water tank this way, although, I would not purchase expensive creatures to live in it. I think that one of the reasons it worked so well was that we were just trying to mimic the environment that our critters came from.

Even as I write this, there sits a ten gallon tank on my kitchen table with the latest acquisitions from our trip to the beach last month. It is a natural tank, no technology, and all the little snails, crabs, anemones and fish are thriving in their new home. Even some of the seaweed seems to be surviving. I do not know what kind it is, but it is bright green and looks like long, thin leaf lettuce. It is very pretty and gives the fish (we think they are some kind of damsel fish, very pretty with stripes) a place to hide.

Salt water aquariums are beautiful and the variety of creatures available for them is endless. Try one.

ENJOY!

UPDATE

July 2007

I have recently learned that this style tank has now come into popular use and is known as a nano tank. Fancy that...

Angel