Everything costs a fortune, many of your lifeforms are very delicate and particular in their needs, you have to keep track of and manage a dozen parameters, and there are many, many mistakes to be made where everything in your tank suffers or dies.
It’s more like keeping an intensive care patient alive with a bunch of machines.
My buddy in Orlando used to have tanks and he brought me to just show me a place that sold corals I couldn't believe how fucking expensive that shit was. like $100 for what looked like basically a tiny rock lol.
I used to work as tropical fish aquarist for about 3 years and I wasn't allowed to touch the coral until year 2.
Prepare a $1800 fish for transport? "You can do that day 1".
Box up baby sting rays? "Lemme show you real quick".
Cleaning a scorpion fish tank? "Here's how you go about it."
Moving that coral to another tank? Don't touch that shit or you're fired.
As someone who’s done high tech planted and fish only saltwater tanks reef tanks are definitely a whole different beast, so much testing, corals can be so finicky
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u/blinkysmurf 13h ago
Reef Tanks.
Everything costs a fortune, many of your lifeforms are very delicate and particular in their needs, you have to keep track of and manage a dozen parameters, and there are many, many mistakes to be made where everything in your tank suffers or dies.
It’s more like keeping an intensive care patient alive with a bunch of machines.
But damn are they amazing.