The Thrill of Aquarium Keeping: From Hobbyist to Professional

As a public aquarium enthusiast, I've had the privilege of working with some of the most fascinating creatures on the planet. But my journey began as a hobbyist, with a small tank that quickly grew into a labor of love. The aquarium is not just a collection of animals; it's a work of art, a technological marvel, and a reflection of one's passion.

My current home aquarium has been around for 14 years, since I moved in with my daughter when she was born. It was built into the wall of our house and took about three years to complete. Over time, I've learned that it's not just about having a collection of fish, but also about understanding the ecosystem, the chemistry, and the art of maintaining a thriving aquatic environment.

One thing I love about aquarium keeping is the collecting aspect. I enjoy searching for rare species, experimenting with different types of corals, and learning how to cultivate them in my tank. It's like a treasure hunt, where I'm always on the lookout for new additions to my collection. I've even shared some of my finds with other aquarium enthusiasts, which has led to some amazing collaborations and exchanges.

Another aspect of aquarium keeping that I find fascinating is the tinkering and problem-solving aspect. As a hobbyist, I've learned to troubleshoot issues on my own, using trial and error to perfect my techniques. It's like being in a lab, where every experiment is a new opportunity to learn and improve. My tank has become a mini-lab, where I can test out new ideas and refine them until they work.

As my tank has grown in size and complexity, so have the technological advancements that support it. The automation systems that now manage water quality, lighting, and temperature are incredibly sophisticated. They've allowed me to focus on other aspects of aquarium keeping, like caring for the animals themselves. But even with these advancements, I still find myself tinkering with new gadgets and techniques.

One of my goals is to create a larger tank, one that's at least 300 gallons in size. I'd love to have a Hawaiian day octopus or another species of octopus as a centerpiece, where I can observe their behavior and learn more about these incredible creatures. The thought of having complete control over the system, with no external influences or constraints, is exhilarating.

Of course, there are also challenges that come with aquarium keeping. Even with my expertise, accidents can happen, and it's not uncommon for things to go wrong. But that's all part of the journey, and I've learned to expect the unexpected. My wife often jokes that I'm not done yet – that one day I'll finally push too far and my tank will spring a leak.

Despite the risks, I wouldn't trade this hobby for anything. There's something about being in control of my environment, about being able to experiment and innovate on my own terms. It's a feeling that's hard to describe, but it's one of complete satisfaction and fulfillment. As I look around at my tank, teeming with life and color, I know that I've found something truly special.

So what's next for me? I'm always on the lookout for new challenges and opportunities. Whether it's a trip to the California Academy of Sciences or a collaboration with other aquarium enthusiasts, I'm excited to see where this journey takes me. For now, though, I'll continue to tend to my tank, experiment with new ideas, and enjoy every moment of this incredible hobby.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enscientists are my matrix and thetweezers for research andexperimentation often don't come up -she'll join my friends - sure hurry andengrave his colors as they visit thelabs and workshops where scientistsengineer custom tools and technologiesto better understand our worldthis is science and progressso one of the things I loved about richis how self-made he is like he didn'tlike go to school for marine biology for20 years and then you know become anexpert at this yeah he just learned bydoingand she cuz he loves it absolutely itshows with every fiber of his being thathe loves cephalopods octopuses coralseverything about the scene yeah and so Ithink the one thing that I think reallyI'm really curious about is how does heactually breed them at home I mean youknow I was a little weirded out by thatlike how do you first of all how do youdo that like what equipment do you needat home and how do you take what's hereat an aquarium and poured it to yourhouse and still maintain it but moreoverjust the mentality of like what does alab look like in somebody's home whereyour breeding octopuses yeah I mean theequipment is one thing you know you needto get the salination right I need toget the temperature right that seemsreally complicated but also like wheredo you get the octopus eggs babies likehow do you I mean this is he got someembryos that he's like you know pleaseflipping through a mail-order catalogueright how does it workwelcome to the secret home lab you knowcan I have an octopus should I have anoctopus and I think the answer is yesand no if you're a nut and you reallylove the animal get an octopus rightthey're short lives so you got to beprepared for that they take all thiskind of underlying knowledge of how tokeep saltwater so you have to beprepared for that if you've got that andyou're gonna keep it responsibly and gofor it they're really wonderful crittersbut they're not a critter to be taken inlightly I mean this is this is dumb thisis just not a good idea for most peopleit's not a good idea for me in realitybut it but I love it so you so I do itso this is a tiny male octopus Piercy alesser Pacific shrived octopus and it'sin the back corner right now covered insand that's one of the ways they can'tflush themselves from predators wellthere's a kind of an underneath layerthat I take for granted which is beingable to keep coral in a saltwater tankif you can keep coral in a saltwatertank and everything that you need to doto be able to make that happenthese become pretty easy so if we ignorethat for now what you do every day ismake sure they're alive make surethey're looking healthy make surethey're entertained so one of the ways Ido that is give them live foods becauseI don't want them to get bored if theyget bored they might get surly give thema place to feel comfortable and justkeep checking on them and make themevery once in a while once they're oneggs leave them alone what kind of fooddo they eat they eat any kind of smallcrustacean is usually what they feedthem so either I'll go to the bait shopand get some small shrimp for them or Ican use some freshwater shrimp from timeto time not the best food of a roomdifferent nutritional profiles fromfreshwater or saltwater or my favoritething and the best thing I found islocal crabs so you can go I live inAlameda so you can go down many placesaround the shore and flip some rocks andget some crabs and I feel good aboutthat because I'm not taking that manycrabs so what does it look like whenthey're mating is this a like a involvedexperience for them yeah this is one ofthe ones that we believe I don't thinkwe've done the experiment yet but webelieve is a scary mating so the maleoften will mate on the female on hermantle so very far away from her mouthparts and move his hectic catalyzer arminto her mantle cavity and maintenanceum other mating stuff has been seenrecently so we assume that there'sdanger to the male at that point wenever have enough of these animals to dothe experiment to just leave themtogether and see what happens probablyevery all all all accounts point to theidea that leaving them togetherwould likely end up in cannibalism orstrangulationoctopuses do weird things so when youmade them how do you actually manage themating put them together in a tankusually put them in the female's tank sothe mating so she's more comfortablebecause we're worried about her eatinghim not about him eating her and thenI've got these brushes here little paintbrushes are really good ways tomanipulate them because they don't seemto like how they feel and I've got asmall net that I can scoop them out withso manipulate them like that soft thingsthat are not gonna hurt themdon't want to grab them or pick them upanimals that have black and whitestriped bright coloration in that waythat tends to mean don't touch meand a lot of octopuses have some kind ofcephalo toxin actually we assume thatall cephalopods have some kind of stufflow toxin I don't want to be the one tofind out how potent it is against peoplethe gestation for these guys aftermating is about three weeks so matingtwo eggs three weeks and then it couldbe of another three to four weeks tillthe eggs hatch these are a large eggedoctopus which means their young arebasically a small octopus so they getborn they get hatched and they go downto the bottom and they're easy to feedsmall eggs octopus is going to theplankton that's a whole nightmare wedon't know how to do it or we haven'tbeen very successful at raising thosebut these guys are much easier they'renot easy but they're much easier becausethen you've got to feed them all theyusually hatch in the middle of the nightwhich is also so convenient but I caughtthem actually hatching which is prettyexciting and this one here who'sprobably on his way out is a captivebred one so he was hatched about a yearyear-and-a-half ago he's really old I'vealso got two wonderful photogenic Asstin the system a tiny one over here and abigger one over here and that's just avery cool octopus that's really what gotme into octopuses I had done cuttlefishbefore that in this system that's whatthis was originally built for and Wonderpusses were available and I got one andI was able to keep it for nine months atthe timeand I think was in 2006 and I was ableto get it to do natural behaviors buryin the sand and before that they weregenerally thought to be impossible tokeep so and actually there was a lot ofthis was before I had my job and therewas a lot of tension between me and somecephalopod researchers about the idea ofyou know you shouldn't have theseanimals because we don't know the statusof their natural populations and youknow are a lot of hobby is gonna startto demand them and we're gonna start todeplete their populations so I was veryI guess I would say scientific in it andeverything I wrote up about it because Ialways think knowledge is better thannot knowledge would have a bigdisclaimer for them for you know theseanimals are not easy to keep itshouldn't be your first animal we don'tknow their natural populations we don'twant to over collect them don't getthese unless you're not essentially andthen talk about them and that seemed togo a long way to making academics takeme more seriously which was reallywonderful and then I was listed as oneof the authors on the Wonder Plusbecause it turns out their patterns areunique to each individual's so you canactually get the patterns in aphotograph and go back later and look atthe same animal where the wonder plusnative to then wonderful some native tothe South Pacific so any food a lowwater shallow water yeah so you'll seethem in the Philippines you'll see themin I think they've been seen inAustralia definitely in Indonesia thegreat great animal in the wild they werephotographed for a long time before theywere given a description and that's whythey have the kind of whimsicaldescription of wonderful photogenic Asstso now that you've kept this wonder Plusdown for you this is a few years backyou started doing it are we actuallyseeing hobbyists actually keep walkingmore wonderful no it goes in littlewaves but the the static the world haschanged right so while the Internet ishorrible in some ways for informationsharing it's also pretty great forinformationsharing and the word seems to havegotten out that octopuses are notsomething to get on a whim and thatseems to have taken root then and Idon't see nearly as many octopuses Iused to see offers for sale anywhere oreven collective because I'm alwayslooking at the importer lists as welland we just don't see as many as we usedto which i think is so great that'sgreat that people aren't keeping asopposed to it's great that they're notkeeping them on a whim so we kind ofhave this supermarket model of animalsand I don't like that there's no reasonto have to go browse to get an animalI'd like you all to switch to acollector order or order to collectsystem where you call up somebody say Iwant this animal and they go get it foryou instead of always having them readyin case someone wants them and we kindof have seen that shipped with octopuseswhich is great and there's a few otherfish we see that was as well which isgood because you know hard to keepanimals you get a bunch of them inthey're hard to keep you want to getthem to people who want them so gettingthem to the people who want them as soonas they want them is really the way todo it I think what you see at theaquarium or here is essentially the samething that's the same mindset behind allof it and this the filtration mind setsthe same that separations the same if Iwere if I were setting up a breedingsystem at work for these octopus itwould look almost exactly like this so Icouldn't get I couldn't get traction tohave these guys at work because they'resmall and they hide all the time so Iset it up here myself keeping all thistogether is not just putting in somepumps and some saltwater it's reallyhaving an understanding of what youthink is happening in a saltwater systemso everyone's got a different idea ofthat so as long as you have your idea ofit and you can support that idea and arewilling to change over time becauseyou're going to that's great so onceyou've got that underlying idea you canbuild that system to support that ideaso I am a big fan of automation becauseI am lazy and and and and now that myreal job during the day is doing thisdoing this at home is less exciting andmy wife will tell you that I'll say Ispent hardly any time and my wife willsay he spends hours and hours and hoursdoing all of them as a person and with afamily we like to go on vacation so Ilike to travel and then I also traveledfor workso that's compounded so what I want is alot of automation that I can control andsee while I'm not here to be able totroubleshoot the system if there's aproblemso things I think are important is goodwater quality so I want a good proteinskimmer I want some carbon dosing to beable to get bacteria to be using up thenutrients I don't want in the system youwant a lot of bacterial areas justeverything in the tank gives bacteria aplace to live I want a lot of lot ofwater motion and good oxygenation so Iuse a lot of wave making devicesI want stability overall so I haveautomatic top off that I can trust so itkeeps the salinity the same I've got acalcium reactor so it keeps thealkalinity the same I dose kalkwasserwhich also keeps the alkalinity the sameand and a lot of system volume I likebig water volume because the bigger thevolume the more stable it is soeverything in this room comes from onewater source which is on the other sideof the house under the house and thatwater comes in there it's actually splitit comes into this tank and to this tankfrom this tank it drains into this tankwhich strains into this tank which thengoes back under the house all the way tothe other sidethis set of cubes drains into this setof cubes which drains into this tankwhich strains into this tank this tankhas a pump in it that feeds this tankwhich then drains drains again drainsagain and then goes back into this tankwhich then goes back under the houseand there is the heart of the system Iguess it's more of a torso of the systemso we're under the house now in a40-inch crawl space which is a greatplace to put a bunch of noisy stuff andthe stuff that might leak so the messunder here no one ever sees but me theif it floods down here it's not aproblem because we're at ground leveland this is where the heart and pumpsand the basically that the organs of thesystem actually live and right over hereis what we call a sump and this isreally part of this if they're justseparated and I like a big sump on asystem because it's a big water volumethat just is sitting so this is the thewater gets processed here and then itflows through these two tanks and itsettles I need to try to send it sets atthe bottom and then it gets pumped outfrom another pump and it goes to thesystem in the other room both of thesystems in the house like 4050 feet awayand then it flows back through and comesback over into these two pipes over herewhich is what gets it into the systemthe different components down herethere's a lot so I'll just name them offreal quick there's protein skimmer thisprotein skimmer does exactly whatseafoam is what when you see seafoam onthe beach that's exactly what this iswe're recreating that in a smallcontained area and that's a bunch ofprotein a bunch of goo in the waterthat's combined with bubbles and thosebubbles have coalesced into a foam whichthen comes out the top of the neck ofthat thing and goes into a bucket whichthen I can come out to drain so that's agreat piece of equipment that does a lotof the filtration naturally and thenthere's a lot of biological filtrationall the rock that's in the tank and alsohas got bacteria in it and that bacteriaeats up the fish waste and whateverammonia and nitrate or nitrite is in thewater there's a calcium reactor whichhelps keep the calcium and thealkalinity at the same levels we want itto be there's a cop loss or mixing binjust calcium hydroxide and they'll mixwith fresh water that gets dosed intothe tank and that's also for alkalinityand calciumthere's vinegar that gets dosed by thisdosing pump which helps grow bacteriawhich helps keep some newlevels down this is actually anexperiment for me right now this isdosing lanthanum chloride which helpsbring down the phosphates which is alsoan experiment for me right now and Ithink that's pretty muchoh and then over here and even furtheron the other side under the house thisis a reservoir of fret of freshsaltwater so when I need to do a waterchange the water comes from these tanksgets moved over to here and behind youand an uninteresting gray bin is afreshwater reservoir the the filters onthe door are actually filtering twothings the one on the left is a carbonreactor or and you can put various mediabut I just use granular activated carbonand the other five pieces of equipmentare filtering any water I need for theroom so fresh water so any top off rightthe salt doesn't evaporate it's justwater does and that gets put back intothe tank that way then we've got heatersthere's heaters that we heat up the tankmostly I just keep the heaters in thedisplay tanks because heating down hereis silly and then I've got various waysto make all of this work together soI've come to find out alkalinity what Ithink is the number one parameter I wantto keep stable and at the level I wantit set at primarily this system drives adisplay coral tank and alkalinity isvery important for those corals sothat's my main goal now there's otherthings that are important I just thinkalkalinity is kind of the most importantso the calcium reactor what happens hereis water runs through it and co2 isdosed into it lowering the pH dissolvingthe media inside liberating the calciumwhich then gets into the tank and usedso I think that gives a nice baselinefor calcium levels and your alkalinitylevels and I'm finding that kalkwasserreally helps really punches and keepsyour levels where you want them to beyeah I'm running experiments in here allthe time this is this is a constantscience project yeah this is one of thefun parts about it I mean besides havingmad scientist tooeverywhere so I'm constantly looking atdifferent levels and trying to decidewhat's important what isn't importantwhat anecdotally is action actuallymatters and doesn't actually matter andthere's a so much anecdote in this stuffbecause it's really hard to run you knowany kind of real regimented test so Ilike to test things that people thinkare important and find out if they areor not so one of the things that peoplewere able to control and test for in thelast ten years has been phosphate sophosphate became the new thing thateveryone was trying to control I neverwanted to control phosphate because theearly ways to control it were a realpain and labor intensive and I don'twant to do labor so I left my phosphatesget really high 20 times I think 50times what people recommend and have noproblem in my tank so what's going onthere what's why is that possible Idon't know I mean it could be lots ofreasons it could be stability youranimals are adapting to the parametersyou put them in I feed an awful lot soI'm sure that's got a lot to do with itI that's definitely got a lot to do withthe phosphate but the animals aregetting a lot of food as well I alsokeep my uncle initi very high so itcould be a lot of things going on thereit's been high for several years nowfour or five years and I'm like I'm thatguy everyone points to and says look hecan do it now I'm gonna try to bring itdown and see what happensso this is a system over here to doselanthanum chloride mix 10 I'm right nowI'm doing 10 milliliters of a lanthanumchloride to a liter of all fresh waterand it gets dosed right now I'm dosing30 milliliters a day and it goes intothe skimmer where it's exported so itfinds with the phosphate and makes aflocculent which you don't wanteverywhere in your tank it can bind tothe glass it can bind the pump parts soit's going right into there coming rightout which if this experiment works outis a great lazy way to be able to do itall so it's an easier way a moreefficient way I want to be efficientbecause I want to do I wanted works Martnot hard and I want it to matter whenI'm workingso we'll see I've already lowered thephosphate to from 1.58 that's a numberthat any reef person will probably goone point five eight they want to keepit at 0.05 or less so it's gone from onepoint five eight down to point ninetytwo and now I'm gonna kind of maintainit there for a while and then bring itdown even more slowly these are calledthe dose dosing pump from Apex Neptunesystems makes this they also make thecontroller I use that runs the house andthese pumps are really hip becausethey're controlled by a controller soI've got six channels of dosingpossibilities I go to my computer and Ican set them all at once I can set themfrom my phone if I want to and they willautomatically dose throughout the day- whatever levels I want them to dothese these two are actually doingconstant water changes so they'repulling this one's pulling water out ofthe tank to drain this one's pulling itout of the reservoir into the tank atthe same rate and this one's pumpingvinegar in and this one's pumping coughsare in these are really really cool verylow-power very little voltage which isthe same thing and this is the actualperistaltic part the tubing and whenthese go bad after a year or so you justpop it off pop a new one on I'm very lowmaintenance super easy to use so we'rein the bathroom this is the the theextra bathroom we have in the housethat's also the back entrance to thetank and this is where the brains of thetank are and I didn't plan it this wayit just worked out really perfectly weput a new door in and this area becamereally great space for controls and overthe years it's changed a lot and whatyou see is this uh DJ power strip andthen this controller this is a modelmade by Apex Neptune systems and apex iscalled and these are the two things thatreally make everything go this is thepower of the distributed system I stillbelieve in not having all the eggs thatrun a system in one basket so the mainpumps are on here they're all labeled sowe know what it is there's an exhaustfan as well and just the pumps that arereally the actual hearts of the systemthey're on their own circuit I don'twant thatto be touched by anything this thingthough now the apex controls almosteverything else in the system now it's aphenomenal little piece of equipmentit's really evolved as well over theyears and basically it does two thingsbut just three things it's got a lot ofprobes attached to it so you can get abunch of automated readings throughprobes which is much better than doingtitration tests it's also got this thingcalled an energy bar which is basicallya bunch of controlled outlets it's alsogot some various speed outlets that comeout of there in 24 volt power as well DCand you can control many things that wayit's also got these little modules thatcontrol specific things this one makessome pumps specifically go faster orslower this lets me monitor power levelsor the light levels on the tank thismakes some lights do a moon cycle thisthis is actually running anothertemperature probe for another reasonthis is a wireless module that controlsthese Radeon lights from Ecotec marinewhich are these fabulous LED lights nolonger am i doing you know four hundreda thousand fifteen hundred watts ofmetal halide so all of this now whichused to be a bunch of timer strungtogether by a bunch of power strips andand and and extension cords which wasjust a nightmare of worried thateverything was going to burn down hasbecome much less of a nightmare we'reactually using this system for a coralspawning project we're working on atwork at the aquarium but that's thefirst time we've used this particularkind of system which generally thoughtI'm the public aquariums is I'm this sothat's what I do and these have nowgotten to the point where they're goodenough to be able to to to help me do myjob rather than be another liability formy job there's also a larger scaleautomation that's used for the biggertanks as well but any of the automationin essence is the same but I'm thrilledthat I've got this at home and we'reusing it at work as well because it's agreat systemthis is the show take yeah this year buthow long have you had this here thistank has been here for about as long aslong as we've lived in the house 14years we moved here when my daughter wasborn some of these corals were actuallyfrom the old house Wowso this reef has been been largely withyou this entire time yeah I said thisthis whole thing was broken down oncewhen we made it a built in about threeyears into us being in the house youbuilt it into the wall but all thesethings just went into another tank inthe house until the work was done thenit all went back in this all seems alittle crazy a little crazy there'sthere's two things I love about thisstuff I love the animals I mean theseare animals they're basically rocks thatgrow that's that's cool on its own andthey're beautiful on their own and thefish are beautiful in the interactionand there's a collecting aspect you knowwhich corals do I have and can I makethem grow and look good and thrive andshare them with other peoples so that'sreally fun the other part is it's just abig tinkering maker project that neverends it's it's lab bench science in yourhome that you can keep making better andbetter over time and it's reallyintriguing it's really fun its addictingand it feels like you're gettingsomething done so you've pushed fromjust having a show tank to having a laband it's so ever expanding where doesthis go from here are you at the limitsof where a hobbyist can go no there'sdefinitely more limits bigger is one ofthe ways to go I dread the day and Ilook forward to the daythis tank springs a leak right cuzeventually it's gonna happen something'sgonna happen that this tanks gonna gobad and it's either I'm done which mywife says you're not done or we gobiggerso so lessons I've learned in thetechnology that's changed and themethods that have changed over the last15 years tell me I want a tank that'sabout three or four feet deep three orfour feet tall and this is a good lengththis is pretty fine if I go very talland the water is a foot down I can makea huge wayin the tank which I think will be veryexciting of course that balances thingsyou got to get in through the top andyou've got all that distance so at thatpoint it's got to be big enough to getinto to be able to do a lot of themaintenance but yeahbigger would be the way to go on thisand so having this stuff here the tankin the home lab gives me a hundredpercent control of everything so work isgreat we can do amazing work atCalifornia Academy of Sciences but it'snot all I am not the god of the systemsthere are other people who have to playwith them there other people have inputon them here if I want a pump I just geta pump at work if I want a pump I got toget permission from a lot of people toget a pump so here I can experimentwildly and do whatever I think isnecessary and keep animals that we'renot interested at work because they'renot good for display that's the maindifference is I'm in complete control ofthe system there is a couple places I'dlike to go with octopuses the largerPacific octopus is always one I want tokeep working with it we can get more ofthose and work doesn't want them I'lldefinitely take them here and in RoyCaldwell's lab I really want to crackhow to raise those because that's such agreat animal the other place I'd like togo here in that room in the in the labis to have a 300 gallon tank where Ikeep a Hawaiian day octopus or anoctopus I Aine that's a big that's anoctopus is octopus right that's a smartoctopus that's a strong octopus and Ireally like to I really like to workwith one of those for a length of timewhere I'm in control of everything andsee what I can get out of thatexperienceand I used to be a juggler for 15 years\n"