We started off with big dreams, as colorful and lively as the animated movie Finding Nemo, a miniscule version of the Underwater World at Sentosa. We got ourselves a couple of clown fish, blue tangs, damsels, goby, gramma, firefish together with a handful of soft and hard corals, sponges and live rocks with great hope to one day become invincible aquarists. The thing with maintaining a mini reef, you gotta have a manic obsessive streak in you to have the will to constantly check the balance of an artificial ecosystem.
For three years, my house became a marine biology lab, with sticky floors and home-made raw seasalt crystallizing on various surfaces. We have a 4-foot bullet tank which is meant for tropical fish systems but because I thought it would look nice in my living room, lesser informed then about how messy marine systems can get. It was an expensive mistake, we had to correct all shortcomings with more expensive mistakes. We tried from the Smithsonian style to the Berlin-style minus the external sump to combining every equipment we could get our hands on. Just because the bullet tank was not designed to support a marine tank and we did not have the diligence to constantly keep the water quality pristine enough, corals and fish could not live happily ever after. We had a problem with high temperature, so we got a huge chiller that is so noisy, it's hard to think straight. Since the bullet tank has a covered top, it is so difficult to feed the fish manually. Some of them require thong-feeding of live food. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Everytime Che Anwar has to do something to the mini reef, he'd be so bingit I'd slip away into another room and blog, oblivious to doomsday waiting to happen.
Many a coral have died, so have sponges and most of all, our fish slowly disappeared as the hardier of the species became more territorial and predatorial. All the the non-confrontational and docile little fries were gobbled by the bigger ones. It became worse when we bought a lionfish, a grouper and a few triggerfish. It was very hard to catch up with their perakus pelahap carnivorous appetite. Even the doctor shrimps, snails, worms and hermit crabs weren't spared. When the bottom-grazing, and algae-eating critters have ceased to exist, came the most harrowing problem, high nitrates, resulting in hairy, slimy green stuff all over the place., not unlike the picture of that fish tank in "Finding Nemo" when the filter system went gazoink enabling Nemo to escape. Well, I did have clownfish and neon anemones.
The simple rule of keeping the mini reef as closely reminiscent with that of a natural ecosystem is not easy at all. The philosophy of duplicating the natural environments is a far fetched one as far as I am concerned. No series of tests based on tables after tables of parameters and obsessively monitoring the fish helped revive a decaying reef that was my fishtank. Sadly, the overzealous aquarists that Che Anwar and I aspired someday to become are throwing in the towel. Almost.
Yesterday, we gave up all of our fish for adoption save for Nemo, the surviving original fish we got when we first started. Twas indeed a sad and heartbreaking ordeal. It felt like we were bad parents, having to give up our kids to social service. Looking at the empty tank, without the graceful display of narcissism from the lion fish, nor the mafia godfather of a grouper, and piranha-like frenzy of the trigger fish, we feel so defeated yet a tad bit relieved that they are all now in the hands of professional fish people who will eventually sell them 5 times more expensive than the price we bought them for. We really fed them well but we failed at keeping house. Sigh.
With a huge eyesore in the hall, empty, lifeless and a small quarantine tank where Nemo currently resides, we are at a loss! To change to a tropical planted aquarium holds yet another future of heartbreaking meticulous watch over a similarly intricate ecosystem, minus the salt.
We have not decided on anything just yet. Che Anwar thinks the next time he wants to buy fish, it would be an Arowana, no need for rocks and plants. As if keeping those feng shui-friendly creatures is easy. Food for brilliant scales, special lightings, extra tank for live food. Aiyoh!What am I going to do with those marine equipments? I am already thinking about making a horticulture terrarium with landscapes of my kampung in the bullet tank, but I will hold that thought until Anwar is ready to give up fish-keeping altogether. He does not want the easy way out of this, which would be selling the bullet tank, buy a "double storey" system and start over a new mini reef. While lovingly supporting my husband's hobbies however half-cooked the ideas may be because Singaporean men have very little time for hobbies. I just need to make sure whatever it is, my house is kept in livable, do-able order. Asal tak macam tongkang pecah sudah.
My love affair with the mop is slowly blowing in the wind as Aishah now loves to spit on the floor and make green slimy patches of dodol or any sticky item for that matter, on the floor, and I am giving up my Monica-esque obsession. It's too tiring and so heartbreaking to find my lysol-ed and 3M-ed surfaces clean for just slightly over 5 minutes before my post-modernist expressionist artist gets to work.
Uja, let's arrange for a meeting before all that dodol end up on my floor. Please?!
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