Why do so many people leave the hobby?

[Brandon Chi]

How about we talk about how people try to leave the hobby but are not able to because they get sucked back into it! It's like drug you just can't know kick. [emoji23][emoji23]

 

[Lowstorm]

Honesty is the best policy.

Most of my tanks that I've taken down are due to failure. Usually its because after a year or so, I get lazy, things die off, I get ticked off and quit... for a few months.
My most recent-before this one- was due to catastrophic tank failure. The tank itself broke. But I kept the bare bones of my setup, because I knew I'd be back.

I think now that I'm a bit older and wiser, and realize I NEED a hobby to keep myself sane, that this tank will be one for the record books. I plan on going slow. Its been 2 months since I got the tank and its still 'dry'!!!

I mostly see people getting out because of tank size. Big tanks are hard to manage. By 'big' up here, that's 75 and over in the gallon department. There's a trend to keep 40 gallons up here now, instead. But people mostly jump in, life hits them, and they jump right back out.

 

[Pat Clark]

I'm a oddball j got into this well because I always wanted a salt tank but I was diagnosed with fybro with makes you tired and always in pain. Having a tank makes me get up and take care of it. And watching the fish and crabs and every thing else in the tank helps take my mind off the pain. One day when it gets to bad I might have to take it down. Hope not and I will be fighting to keep it going for as long as I can. My wife wasn't to sure about it but now really loves it.

 

[jeffreyg]

algae.... most likely due to nitrate and phosphate... no real specific as to refugium, biopellets, denitrator's... hobby is really vague as to what works long term.

 

[Urbanknight]

There is validity to all the aforementioned comments. However, It's just like any other hobby. Some of us get bored and move on to the next quest. This subject was recently raised on our club forum. It made me realize that my statement 3 is largely correct. I had owned two pleasure boats in the past and in 1995 sprung for a new 20 foot Ranger Bass boat w a 225 Merc outboard. I fished several national tournaments for the first year, fished local tournaments the next year. Lost interest and the boat became a gathering place for birds and squirrels and a number of insects! I'm willing to bet the motor has less than 100 hours on it! I haven't had it in the water for the past two years! If my reef allows me, I think I'll go fishing this spring!!

 

[fab]

Expense is an issue, but n0t necessarily a showstopper. Expenses are somewhat scalable to ones means, not totally, as I always spend more than I should but not disastrously so. Now,after a multi-year eclectic collection of various used tanks, lots of second hand equipment, some tank crashes, a marriage crash and a near financial crash as a result of the latter crash, and a move to my current digs followed by a few years of "no tanks" in my daily life... I am putting on my big build... at last, a 1000 gal marine reef and fish system.

So some of us get in, stay in, get trashed, get out, stay out ... and then sneak back in. For me this has spanned multiple decades with several do-overs, starting with freshwater aquaria then morphing to saltwater.

Finally this time around it has been totally planned, designed and coordinated before the build started. This final build is fully featured with multiple sumps, reservoirs, quarantine, hospital, refugia, and remote deep sand bed tanks, Apex monitored and controlled all the way, radion lights, deltec water processing equipment, using all new top quality equipment. I spent over two years designing it. I am yet another half a year into the build and haven't yet filled my display tank for cycling. Hopefully that comes within the next couple of weeks. Most of my equipment is in hand.

Patience is, as someone above pointed out, a key ingredient. So, why do people leave the hobby? I believe it results from a lack of deeply rooted interest, real commitment and enduring patience primarily, money to some extent. For some of us maybe it is just a way to setup ourselves up for getting back in with the final, real system. Wish me luck! I know it will be a long, slow journey to success fraught with many pitfalls, but blessed with delights, rewarding accomplishments, and interesting problems to solve. I am back!

fab sends

 

[Dawnte]

I had a tank when I was 10. A 10 gal in my bedroom with a rainbow shark and some swordtails. My parents had a tank for a couple of years before that. After my crazy teens I got another tank in my early 20s and have had one since. The 55 gal I have now I've had for over 26 years. I bought it for Oscars back in the 80s. After them, cichlids. My kribensis bred. then with my divorce back to something simple, basic tropical fish. My angels bred. Started taking cool photos with the cell phones camera. Then, 2012 I was down to 1 lonely bleeding heart tetra after losing my house and moving to the home I have now. May 2012 I decided that with the help of the Internet I would be able to successfully keep a salt tank. I had never had the courage to keep saltwater before that after an ex boyfriend failed at it in the early 80s. I read everything I could and switched my 55 gal tank over to salt with a DSB and started cycling it. I actually used my cannister filters for the first 1 1/2 years. I had the usual cyano and algae outbreaks then... Flat worms... ugh the bad kind, planeria. Flatworm exit treatment twice with no losses of livestock. Aptasia,,,, tried peppermint shrimp.. it wouldn't touch them. Got berghia, bye bye aiptasia, Designed and built my own sump with a 20 gal and plumbed it using an overflow box, then plumbed it again with bigger pipes and pump. Another year a protein skimmer was added. GHA was becoming a bad problem. Tried various critters to eat it. Lettuce nudibranchs did the best. The stand started to give, a 20+ year old press board stand got very wet somehow and started to lean dangerously. Had to tear down, transfer all livestock to 30 gal buckets for weeks. Lost shrimp, 1/2 of my corals (LPS, softies) and snails. Set back up. Anemones, one which had split prior to the tear down never recovered and died. Joined forums. Learned lots. Won some zoas on a forum, GHA rapidly becoming bad again. Ditched rocks for established clean rock from reefer who was getting out of the hobby. I set up again. This time with lots of sps remnants on rocks. My 1st sps, Added doser, lots of test kits, lost some sps, some slowly coming back now. With the help of people I've met through my local forum I'm learning that it is a balancing act. I'd say people get out of the hobby when they stop learning. That's when you become bored or in the face of tragedy you lose hope or just quit in disgust. My hat is off to those who did this before Internet, before forums. My 26 year old low budget tank is doing well, for now. .... till I have something else to learn.

 

[Klcan]

My kids simply won't let me get out. I told them once I was thinking about relocating one of my fish, and I was met with clinch fists and sobbing. It would have been like getting rid of the family's beloved dog.

One of my sons is really interested in the hobby and helps me out with the tanks, so I am hoping in time he will start to do more with them and let me sit back and guide him along. My other children love the tanks but aren't as intrigued as my youngest son or willing to help with the maintenance of the tanks.

 

[moulton1853]

Like many others I started with freshwater fish. I tried saltwater once for about 6 months in 2009. I lived in a very rural area that didn't have a lot of places dealing with saltwater and I didn't have access to a lot of information. The internet I had at the time was dial up so it took a half hour just to load a page. I relied on lfs to give me info but it was usually bad info. During that time I found out I was going to have my first child so doing tank maintenance was exhausting after working 45 hrs a week. My husband also started getting very sick. The tank went bad fast as an anemone got stuck in a power head. I drained the tank and never was able to get back to it. I kept the tank and dried the rock. Life got crazy. With the next 4 years I had my second child and my husband died. Since that time I have moved, met a wonderful man and started what I consider my second life.
This summer I got the bug again to get into saltwater so for my birthday he got me a new tank. This time with resources like this forum and more lfs selling good and livestock I am having more success at it. Although I currently have a fish in QT due to velvet that killed 4 out of 6 fish. The tank and corals seems to be doing well though, even have sponges, feather dusters, and beneficial worms. I also have a partner that likes to go to the stores and shop for livestock. The kids named the fish and inverts and even help with feeding them now. I think having support and more readily information makes the challenges that come up easier to deal with.

I don't think its boredom that makes people leave, just frustration and life makes them make that choice.

 

[reefwiser]

As I said early in the thread life get's in the way for many in the hobby. Those that do not have life events that set you back you are lucky. Most people have rough patches in their lives that makes them have to pause on Hobbies and deal with real life.

 

[Paul B]

I am glad this topic stirred up some interest as the number of responses show. I too will leave this hobby in the future but I am not sure exactly when. I Have been in it for about 60 years and am almost 120 years old. As we get older, much older, although we still want to do things we sometimes have to downgrade, move to a smaller house and get around a little slower. That has not happened to me yet but I saw my Mother and my wife's Mother fall into the fog of Alzheimer's and that can happen to anyone. I will stay in this wonderful hobby as long as I can because for me, it is not a hobby but a way of life. I am a very busy person but even busy people have some time when they don't have anything to do, those are the times where the tank comes in handy. There is always something I can do to it even if it is detrimental. I don't care as long as it is interesting. I am long past looking at ways to be TOTM or anything else, now I am just looking for interesting things I can do no matter how odd or unusual. I just built a water cooled LED fixture for the main light and a water cooled LED light for the algae scrubber. If the tank crashes now, it has had one heck of a run and I am very proud of what I have accomplished. My tank rarely, if ever has problems so I have to get creative to find things to do to it.

 

[Reef addict...]

This is my first time posting anything,anywhere but I just had to comment on this subject. Especially since I'm only abut 18 months in on this marry go round and I've already had a few low moments of regret. Someone said patients is the key to life and they couldn't be more right. Patients should be plastered all over every tank and the store it's sold from. That's where I think the problem lies with this hobby. Saltwater tanks (especially reef tanks) can look so amazing online and in stores,that many people are drawn in. But do little if any research on they actually care and maintenance it takes to keep these systems going. I know I didn't and of course I love to learn things the hard way. If there were some way to beat the idea of patients into the heads of beginners I think there would be far more long term members of this amazing hobby. The all in one tank,the magic potions, the cheap online livestock(spend $150 FREE shipping!!) make this hobby seem turn key. But as anyone who has been in it longer than 6 months knows that is just not possible. The only things that happen fast in a saltwater aquarium are usually disastrous. I don't claim to be an expert and this is only my opinion from my experiences and Im sure others as well. BE PATIENT!

 

[ngvu1]

Like any other hobbies, new comers join and existing members leave .... there are a few stick around longer than other. And some are better or luckier.... nothing new right?
I can still enjoy doing it so I am in. Never know about next year, next month, or even tomorrow.

 

[Paul B]

Reef Addict, welcome and thank you for posting. I am honored you decided to make your first post on my thread.

 

[d2mini]

Why do so many people get out of the hobby?

Life changes, bro. Not that hard to comprehend.

 

[Paul B]

Would be interesting to find out if most of the long timers started out the traditional way. Fresh....FOWLR..... Reef.... Vs starting out with a full blown reef tank.

I started out keeping Trilobites as that was the only thing available then. From there I went to water turtles, land tortoises, lizzards, newts, and bugs. Of course all the time, since I was about 4, I had guppies, mollies, beta's etc. I usually had the turtles, newts, frogs and tadpoles in the tank with the fish. After you raise everything fresh water wise, you need to go to salt water. I started salt water the day they were imported to the US in 1971, I think it was on a Tuesday about 3 or 3:15.

 

[DawgDiggity]

I left 5 years ago... I think it was that I didn't have room for a sump and my canister filter just couldn't keep up. I don't remember. I just recently bought my buddy's daughter a gift certificate at the LFS and have had "reefer" on the brain ever since.
Looking back I really don't know why I didn't spend a few hundred dollars and take my system to the next step? I think I just felt like there was too much going on with the tank that I just could not control. Sumps with refugiums were still fairly new idea at the time and I was on the fence with installing a back of the tank overflow box. I will say that I want my next system to be as automated as possible. but, like I said I got reef on the brain and have been checking craiglist everyday waiting for that killer deal.

 

[Paul B]

I don't have a sump

 

[mcmc1717]

I had to learn patience the hard way, I lost my BTA because I couldn't wait to get an anemone with my clowns, but at least that didn't kill everything in the system, now I'm waiting 2-3 more months before I get another. I think the main reason people drop out because of their lack of willingness to rise from their failures.

 

[Paul B]

This thread has spurred 140 replies which is great. I love it when a thread can go on for this long without even the hint of an argument. If I wanted to argue, I would go out into the street and yell who I voted for.
Our hobby is indeed habit forming and even the people who have the most problems seem to keep interested for the most part anyway.
Of course sickness and finances drive many of us away.
It has been a lifetime passion for me but it is not my only hobby, it is one of many.
Yesterday I just had to buy this purple gorgonian. I already have to many of them and really have no place to put it so I had to move things around to fit it, and when I do that, I break things. The fish bite me and I jerk back (because some of my fish have fangs). I glued this very tall gorgonian on a rock and being my arm is in a sling from a shoulder operation, I dropped it in the tank and figured I would position it when I had more mobility. Of course I dropped it on another coral and broke it in half. Of course it fell up side down so I had to go in and get it and glue it back. While I was in there the clownfish bit me causing me to break a montipora. Now I had to glue that. I am running out of glue.
But I don't think of these things as a problem or work. It's like if I came upon a Supermodel with sore ankle and she asked me to carry her home, would that be considered work? I don't think so.
I am also getting old and have completed almost all of my bucket list. As a matter of fact, I can't think of hardly anything that I wanted to do that I have not done except skydiving. I don't know why I never did that but I didn't. I guess I still can but with my arm in a sling, they may have a problem letting me do that now.
I have also gone to just about everywhere I wanted to go which is a shame.
So reefing keeps my mind going. That and reading, I love to read.