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For those adventurous people out there who own Marine Aquariums, is it hard? Like hard to keep water parameters and are the fish more sensetive? Does it cost more to set up(This is a guess but I'm thinking yes?...)?

Any info on Marines would be nice. I might convert my 10g into a reef if it's not too hard to keep.....

10G- 6 Zebra Danios, 1 Upside Down Catfish
20G- 1 Goldfish
72G(maybe95)- Need Stock suggestions

A 10g reef is hard to keep. There's not much space there to work with so will either require alot of water changes and maintenance or a sump that's even bigger than the display tank. Along with very very careful and researched stocking. Not just the fish but some corals cannot be placed too close together. A larger FOWLR(no corals) is not that much harder than freshwater once you get it setup. It's more work to setup but not to maintain. Cost depends on your setup. A reef will be expensive and even after the tank is ready the corals cost a small fortune. A simple fowlr tank would not be as expensive depending how much liverock goes for in your area and what all you put on for filtration. More filtration generally means less maintenance work but more money to setup. Most marine tanks are still going to cost more than most freshwater tanks no matter how simple your setup.

Thanks sham

10G- 6 Zebra Danios, 1 Upside Down Catfish
20G- 1 Goldfish
72G(maybe95)- Need Stock suggestions

A 10 would be too difficult, IMHO. I started with a 29 gallon and wish it would have been a 55. The bigger the better.

-Josh

Again just an opinion. I'm not turning mine into a reef... I'll keep it as a "small" breeding tank.

10G- 6 Zebra Danios, 1 Upside Down Catfish
20G- 1 Goldfish
72G(maybe95)- Need Stock suggestions

Are you sitting comfortably Fishrockmysox? Then I'll begin. You'll enjoy this.

Apart from the presence of salt, there is another fundamental difference between freshwater and marine environments which contributes to the reasons why marine fishkeeping is more demanding upon the aquarist.

Freshwater fishes have had to evolve to live with change. Their home water are, in the main, subject to a range of seaonsal variations. The concentration of a whole range of dissolved substances in a freshwater habitat changes seasonally, as time moves from dry season to rainy season in the tropics and back again. Levels of dissolved oxygen, minerals, humic acids from decaying plant matter, a whole range of dissolved compounds of organic and inorganic origin, fluctuate seasonally, and the fishes that live in these habitats have acquired the osmoregulatory machinery to adapt to these changes. Indeed, several of these changes have become spawning triggers for several important aquarium fishes - the combination of increased oxygen and decreasing temperature associated with the rains is a well known spawning stimulus for Corydoras catfishes, and mimicking this in the aquarium is a good way of persuading these fishes to spawn.

The marine environment, however, is vastly different in terms of such fluctuations. The great ocean currents of the world ensure that the waters of the majority of the world's oceans are very thoroughly mixed. Those ocean currents move truly vast quantities of water around the Earth - the unit used to measure the flow rate of an ocean current is called the Sverdrup (symbol Sv), and a flow rate of 1 Sv is equals to 1,000,000 cubic metres of water per second. That's a huge quantity of water - the equivalent of 1,000 Olympic sized swimming pools all rolled into one - and ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream can possess flow rates as high as 150 Sv. Put it into perspective, the input of fresh water from ALL of the world's rivers combined into the sea is only 1 Sv.

Any local discontinuity in the concentration of dissolved salts in the ocean are very soon smoothed out by water mixing on that scale!

Plus, the sheer volume of the oceans ensures stability too. The Pacific Ocean on its own has a greater surface area than all the world's land masses combined, and covers fully 28% of the Earth's surface - the volume of water is approximately 614,000,000 cubic kilometres - and that water is moving around constantly (tides due to the gravitaitonal influence of the Moon are one source of motive power), ensuring that the Pacific Ocean is very evenly stirred. Plus, the Pacific connects with the Indian Ocean, which in turn connects with the Atlantic, and that in turn connects back to the Pacific - in fact, from a latitude of about 50 degree south until you hit Antarctica, the Earth is ringed with water. So, variation in the composition of sea water is going to be immeasureably small from point to point on the Earth, with the exception of various near-landlocked seas such as the Red Sea, which has far less mixing associated with it than the connected oceans of the world.

In the tropics, where coral reefs are found, not only is the chemical constitiution of the oceans remarkably stable, but the temperature is too. Indeed, the coral reef environment has been one of the world's most stable environments for 50 million years. Consequently, marine fishes have not had to adapt to major change - the coral reefs are bathed in billions of gallons of seawater whose chemical composition undergoes minuscule changes even over timespans encompassing geological epochs. The fishes of these waters have therefore not needed to devote energy to evolving mechanisms for coping with change, as has been the case with freshwater fishes. Consequently, when they DO encounter fluctuations for whatever reason, in the wild, they simply have vast spans of ocean to move into away from the temporary disturbance, and that temporary disturbance is soon massively overwhelmed by yet more cubic miles of new sea water moving in via ocean currents.

This means, of course, that in the aquarium, much more scrupulous attention needs to be paid to controlling water chemistry and its variations than is the case with freshwater fishes. That is the biggest hurdle to overcome - maintain stability of your sea water in the aquarium and a large percentage of your battle is won. However, the volume of water in an aquarium is hopelessly inadequate as a 'piece of ocean' because the volume difference between even the most colossal public aquarium and the real-life oceans is many orders of magnitude apart. If the vast aquarium in Japan that was set up to house Whale Sharks in captivity is, literally, just a 'drop in the ocean', then your typical 55 gallon home reef setup is subatomic in comparison.

Therein lies your management problem - small volumes of water are much more e to fluctuations than large ones. While in the freshwater aquarium, this tends to matter less because the fishes are pre-adapted to change, in the marine aquarium, it becomes a critical issue. Which is why maintaining a small marine aquarium is a difficult challenge even for a veteran aquarist, because the degree to which water variation has to be controlled within a very narrow band in order to keep marine organisms happy makes for an interesting mangement exercise to put it mildly in a volume as small as a 10 gallon aquarium. This is why marine aquarists are advised to begin with the largest system that their house floor and wallet can support - the larger the volume of water, the easier it is to manage the fluctuations that are inevitable in an aquarium and keep them within the 'safe zone' for marine fishes.

A 10 gallon nano-reef is possible - but it's a challenge even for a veteran aquarist, because of this unholy combination - small volumes being subject to large sudden fluctuations, combined with an intolerance of those same fluctuations by the inhabitants. A successful 10 gallon nano reef is possible, but such a system is usually very intensively managed (it's the aquarium equivalent of the intensive care ward at hospital) and places severe demands both upon the aquarist and the management technology employed. A 55 is a considerably easier prospect, and of course, if the budget will run to a 125 or larger, that is easier still to manage.

Even with the largest setup you can afford and install in a practical fashion in your home (and most people consider 180 gallons to be the upper limit on practicability - beyond that, the logistics of such elementary procedures as water changes take on the aspect of heavy manual labour) there will still be fluctuations present, and controlling those fluctuations will remain your primary task as a marine fishkeeper. Ensuring that ammonia and nitrites remains nailed at zero, nitrates don't pop up above 10 ppm, phosphates are controlled if you're keeping live corals, and that calcium is maintained at a high level for those same live corals are just some of the tasks you can look forward to. The fact that we know about this, and can devise solutions to these management problems so that keeping marine fishes alive is possible at all, is in itself quite an achievement. An even greater achievement can be witnessed being accomplished every day in the marine aquaria of successful marine fishkeepers, who apply that knowledge (along with the associated physical and intellectual labour) to the task of maintaining, in the confines of a glass box, a thriving community of organisms that bears sufficient resemblance (to the untrained eye at least) to a coral reef to produce a 'window on the ocean' effect in the living room. It can be done, and several people here do this every day and have done for some years, but be under no illusions that the effort required is definitely greater than that in freshwater. The basic task - keeping water parameters within safe limits - is the same, but the margin for error is correspondingly narrower, and the effort required to keep within that narrower margin of error correspondingly greater.

And now, after reading that, you can take a very well earned coffee break.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

lol osmoregulatory? BIG words...BIG explanation!! Thanks for the info When I move out and get my own place then I'll look into a Marine Aquarium That was very well written. I give it 3 Thumbs up!!

10G- 6 Zebra Danios, 1 Upside Down Catfish
20G- 1 Goldfish
72G(maybe95)- Need Stock suggestions