I guess I got into the hobby when I was about seven or so, and my parents bought me my first ten-gallon tank. It had a metal frame and a slate bottom, and the filter was filled with the kind of "angel hair" glass fibres they won't even let you stuff into your walls these days. Filled that tank with a couple of neon tetras, some swordtails, a young angelfish and a Corydoras catfish. That would have been somewhen in the middle-sixties, I guess. A few years later, we discovered an aquarium shop in the next town that had the most intensely blue fish I'd ever seen, along with some black-and-white ones. (They also had a couple of cute little turtles with flippers where their feet should have been, pacing up and down the glass in a 20-high.) That LFS was run by the same fellow for something like 53 years, and during that time, he also started a local aquarium society, which I (naturally!) became a member of. Saltwater became a natural extension of what I was doing with freshwater, but on a kid's budget, it wasn't easy to afford. As a new-teen, I had a ten-gallon saltwater tank with a damsel or two, a couple of sea horses and a bluehead wrasse (the Caribbean Thalassoma kind). I trained the bluehead to take live brine shrimp from the tip of my finger (he'd spit for them), and leave the ones I put in for the sea horses alone. There were interesting creatures to be found at the beach; grass shrimp, hermits and other crabs came home to share the tank. (Sometimes, my mother would call me from the living room, as she didn't really like it when the fiddler crabs escaped and scooted under the sofa!) There were several tanks growing up, ranging from 20 gallons down to the size of an infant-bath. With an undergravel filter.
Some years later, I was gifted with an impossibly large (55 gallon!) tank with a revolutionary new plumbing system, which would allow me to maintain living reef creatures. The filter was a wet-dry, filled with something called bio-balls, the lighting was intense enough to melt the brace across the top of the tank (>__<), and I was indeed able to grow these cool little brown anemones . . . !! As my children showed up, though, the tank got set aside in the interest of family-building. I worked full-time in a print shop (still do), and to make the ends meet, took a second job at a brand new Public Aquarium in 1988. (I'm still doing that work too, "education lite", sharing the aquatic universe with kids who're just discovering the world beyond their back yards.) That kept my fishy attractions on a simmer while I had no tank at home, but the itch was still there . . . When I picked up the hobby again, I looked wistfully at the marines, and the cool corals ... and the hot prices ... and decided on a freshwater tank. Then, one day, I saw a tank that I really liked. 65 gallon display, and wouldn't a smallish coral reef look amazing in that . . .
That was a year ago. Today, I'm (ever so frustratingly slowly!) working on putting together a 22o gallon upgrade . . .
~Bruce
