09-24-2024, 12:03 AM
(09-21-2024, 02:07 PM)FlyingClayDisk Wrote: I had a neighbor once who had this giant aquarium. Not sure how big it was (upwards of 200 gallons or more - He had to reinforce the floor of his house to hold it); it was huge. He had all these big and exotic fish in it, and other stuff like living coral, live anemones, plants and all sorts of stuff. I was stunned at how much work that aquarium was! Changing the water alone was a several day operation (and he never really 'changed' all of it). Adding a single fish, or getting rid of a problem (a specific algae, or some such) was a major operation. Just to add a single fish involved several other aquariums and often weeks of time. I remember I'd be out cutting the lawn and he'd come over and excitedly tell me..."Welp, today is the day that the (x) fish gets to go into the big aquarium!!!"...and he'd be all excited.
One year he bought an even bigger aquarium. He had sh!t scattered out all over his front lawn, back lawn, garage and basement. Some stuff had to sit in the sun for (x) number of days, other stuff had to be conditioned some special way, water had to be added in 2-3 gallon increments and then checked hundreds of times for salinity and 10,000 other things. He'd be getting FedEx Custom Critical deliveries every day from places in the South Pacific. Special lights, special filters, special heaters, timers and backup power supplies. It was endless. His entire house was built around this aquarium. His aquarium had more alarms on it than most people have on a bank vault. If the temperature of that aquarium changed by even a quarter of a single degree, the Pope, President of the United States, and the UN were all notified! No idea how much all that stuff cost, but I'm sure it was up in the middle 6-figure range.
It was a staggeringly beautiful aquarium, no doubt about it, but my GAWD, it was a colossal amount of work! A labor of love I guess. I used to joke with him that he wasn't really married to his wife; he was married to his aquarium!
Edit - Just thinking back on this aquarium now... There would be times when I would come home from work and there would be like five (5) different aquariums sitting out in his front yard, all of them 75% full of water. There would be like (200) empty water jugs in his garage. I asked him what he was doing one day. He said after he got the water to the correct salinity, then he had to let the water sit in the sun for a specific number of days in order to "condition" it so it could be added to the big aquarium. Had something to do with sterilization and normalization. Then, he'd have to move each one of the aquariums inside his house, put them under special lights, and inoculate them with specific bacteria and other organisms so they would flourish. All this before he could start drawing down the big aquarium, gallon by gallon, and adding the treated water to the aquarium in it's place. He only had to do this about once every couple years, but it was a huge operation. All the rest of the time he had these massive filters and pumps which would monitor the water quality down to the micron through various methods (lights, filter substrates, charcoals, etc.). His basement looked like a chemistry lab with all this exotic water testing equipment.
Like I say, it was incredible how much work it was. One day I thought I wanted a nice aquarium; they're so peaceful. But I quickly changed my mind after seeing the behind the scenes of my neighbor's setup! I could go over to his house and look at it, and I'd get sleepy just thinking about how much work it was! LOL! It was definitely a spectacular aquarium though.
edit 2 - Heh, even the lights in this thing were crazy. The lights were on a timer of course, but they just didn't switch on and off like normal lights. Nope! They came on gradually, just exactly like the sunrise at whatever latitude his aquarium was set up for (which if I'm not mistaken was 3 degrees north of the Equator). They shut off exactly the same way. What's even crazier, as the sun rises and sets, the wavelengths of the sunlight change based on the angle of the Sun. Well, you guessed it, this aquarium also did that too! It changed the frequency of the light as the (artificial) sun rose and set. Crazy stuff! (I'd forgotten about all this until now). As I recall, the glass in this aquarium was special too; I don't think any outside light could make it inside the aquarium, so it was its own world. You could see inside of it clear as day, but the fish and plants had no perception of the outside world. Day and night inside the aquarium was completely independent of day an night outside the aquarium; the two had no relationship to each other.
Unfortunately, this whole thing reminds me of a situation with an ex-high school mate who had a husband who kinda flipped his lid (I knew both of them in hs) who started beating her and his kids.
I got them all out of there and a divorce.
But her husband had an awesome aquarium. He abandoned it on divorce, so everything died. FUCK. She tried to give it to me but I just wasn't in the position to take it on at that point in my life, I was very young.
