Marine Background Stories

[AC2020x]

Hey, I haven't seen any threads like this so I figured I'd make one. I was just curious to see how people got interested in making a marine aquarium. How long did it take you set up your first tank. Any background information or anything that made you decide to make a saltwater tank? You can pretty much put down any information you want! How old you were? How many tanks you planned on having? How many you have now? Did you start with Freshwater? Do you still have freshwater? What your first tank was? Pretty much any background info. Just curious and can't wait to hear how some people got started into this hobby!--
-- Thanks!

[snappyguy]

I started with a 46 bow front tank. Took about a week total to cycle and then added corals and fish slowly over a few months. Eventually I went into the coral business, which led to another 250 gallons of volume, but I closed when the economy tanked. I started with freshwater and still have a fresh tank. Here's a pic of the 46 at its' peak during a cyano outbreak. Grrrr...

http://i319.photobucket.com/albums/mm456/snappyguy/Tank-1.jpg

[Ace25]

Back in high school I helped out in the marine bio room writing software for an old IBM PS/2 computer to take pH and temp readings of the tanks over a serial port. That was my introduction to marine tanks... 1990-1994.

1994 I graduated and bought a 29G setup at Wal-Mart.. did freshwater for less than a year.. wasn't interesting at all.. so I moved to brackish and did F8 puffers for about a year... still not that interesting so I moved to SW predator tanks.. puffers.. did that for about 7 years with a 29G, 55G, and a 10G just to house feeder fish and from what I know now, I was doing it ALL wrong, but they all lived fine and were returned to the LFS after 7 years in my tanks and went on to live many more years in bigger tanks. In 2001 I decided to take a break when I moved... lasted about 6 months without a tank and I had that itch to set one up again so I started my 29G back up into a reef tank.. many many failures in the early days. Lots of learning to do. Still... to this day I am still running the original 29G that was my first tank. It is now in my bedroom as a softy reef tank but still going strong. I also have my 75G that I got in June 08 that is now my primary tank.

[mcsassy]

It all started when my ex gf and I bought a betta fish together one day from petco. We named him Skittles. Skittles lived inside a vase with bamboo and we got tired of cleaning his house so often, so we bought him a one gallon tank with an under gravel filter, a plant and a castle. My girlfriend then got a female betta and we named her Cherry and she lived at her house. Then we found out that petco was selling the mini bow 2.5 gallon on sale for the same price as the 1 gallon and we returned the 1 gallon after about a month or so and got that for the same price for skittles. A few days later, she goes to petco and finds out that the 5 gallon mini bow is even cheaper and decides to one up me! Time to upgrade Skittes' house to...a MANSION! We thought this 5 gallon tank was the biggest thing on earth. She returned Cherry to petco because she would always play dead and was a little snob. She then bought a male betta and we named him Starburst. One night when she was in the shower, Starburst was killed after a pillar fell on him...RIP.

Time went by and I got a red eye puffer and a scat and moved skittles to a 2 gallon glass rimless tank and housed the scat and puffer in the 5 gallon. My girlfriend then bought a bumblebee puffer and a scat for her tank. She named the puffer Poofy. One day her scat died and we decided it might be better to get a bigger home for Poofy. We got him a 14 gallon mansion and decorated it so nicely and set it up in her room. As for me, I gave away the scat and puffer because Skittles didn't look too happy in his new home and put him back in his nice comfortable mansion.

Then came the jump into saltwater. We had made friends with someone who worked at petco and he was our go to person at this point. We thought saltwater was so hard to take care of, so we veered away from it for some time until our friend said he can take care of everything for us. So after talks and research, I took the dip and bought a 72 gallon reef ready set up and the roller coaster ride started from there.

Many floods, leaks, dead fish and lessons later things got very nicely under wraps and steady. Then came moving time. My family had just bought a house the next street over from my girlfriend and it was about a 15 mile move. We lost about 11 fish from the aftermath of the move and it was an awful time, since we name all our fish. Most importantly though, Skittles made it just fine.

Months went by and things started turning sour with my lover and while we were "on break", Skittles passed...RIP. We put him in a bag of Skittles and buried him under the willow tree in our backyard (our favorite tree). A couple weeks after we officially broke up, she called me and told me that Poofy had died too and we couldn't help but think they both died due to the end of our relationship. I bet they are hanging out in a giant pond together though now somewhere, so it's cool.

All this happened over the course of a couple years too and I left off at about six months ago. I am now down to one lone fish. It's just my blue spotted puffer right now in the tank with a frogspawn coral and a whole lot of wave action with my vortech pumps. I will be restocking soon enough as water conditions have never been better and stable. Hopefully the hobby is able to grow and get better over the years.

Thanks for reading my story!

[cam191919]

one day bout 4 years ago i got the itch for fish. i started with freshwater but this being such a reef friendly town i knew id have to get SW soon or my head would explode, lol. i was so worried that keeping saltwater would be like surgery compared to FW that i got an 8 gallon all in one tank for 200 dollars... and then i had so much trouble stocking it i almost gave up. finally i ended up with two occ clownfish and them surviving gave me enough time to learn much more about SW and fish stocking in general. i found a 46 gallon tank ready to set up on craigslist and all the weight was off my shoulders, i still haven't bought much fish despite the space i have. i sold the clownfish to a women with a 70 gallon with two nems, i set up a tank for peppermint shrimp because i liked them, then i found a mantis shrimp and gave him a tank, and with the predator fish in the 46 i converted a 5 gallon jug into a tank for shrimp and made use of the lights on the biocube and started a reef. and now saltwater out numbers fresh as i convert a 35 hex to SW for a snowflake eel

current stock
46
dwarf lionfish
2 fringed filefish
mushroom scorpionfish
bandtooth conger eel
and the only normal fish, a raccoon butterfly
oh and a gorgonian i found on a tire floating in the bay

8
4 tiger gobies
and a plenty of softies, check the sig

10
6 peppermint shrimp, check the sig...

6.6 its in the sig as well...
dark mantis shrimp
and the baby sheepshead he refuses to eat

[rdfriend]

I have always had a love of animals and have had many different kinds of pets over the years but had not really seriously considered having a saltwater tank. I have always been fascinated by them and a good friend of mine had one at one time but went through many dead fish so I never dived in. My wife and I have a cleaning and handyman business and one of our customers had a 125g that was a basic setup, crushed coral, dead coral decoration and 4 fish. They had a company that would come in once a week and change the water and swap out the coral. When they decided to buy a new house and move they didn't want to deal with the tank anymore and knowing how much I liked it they asked if we would like to have it for free. Of course I was intrigued but wasn't really sure it was a hobby I wanted to get into especially since I already had a couple of expensive hobbies, golf and going to concerts. After talking it over with the wife I decided WTH, let's give it a shot. The "free" tank soon turned into an immediate $500 purchase since I had the company they were using tear it down, store it for a month until I was ready for it and then deliver and set it back up. I originally had them taking care of it and I won't even go into what I went through with them, that is a story for a different thread, but suffice it to say it wasn't long before I decided to take care of it myself so I began reading everything I could on the internet and soon found this site which has been invaluable and probably the reason I kept going. Since then I have torn the tank back down, replacing the crushed coral with sand and upgrading just about everything. New lighting, revamped the sump to replace the bio-balls with socks, protein skimmer, better water flow, live rock and so on. Over 2 years with many mistakes and triumphs later I still feel I only know a tiny fraction of what there is to know about this hobby but at least I am having better success. I now have the same 125 and a 56g tall. I have had a few different tanks that I have started and sold and also now have a 10g with 2 chocolate chips stars because when I added a yellow sand anemone for a porcelain crab, that lost it's condylactis home to a powerhead mishap, one of them climbed on within hours so I had to isolate them. I have treatened many times to give up but know that I am hooked and find it hard to imagine not having any SW tanks even though sometimes I feel like we have a zoo with 5 dogs, 2 cats and a bearded dragon that we are taking care of for our son until he gets out of the army.