ROM tour Part 1: The Livestock

Last week Vlad and I got a backstage tour of the new aquarium at the Royal Ontario Museum.  It’s remarkable because it’s one of the first public reef tanks in the GTA.  The only other one I know of is at the Toronto Zoo and while I haven’t seen it yet, I’ve heard it’s more of a fish only tank.

The bad news first, I didn’t take enough photos.  I spent some of my time just looking at the setup trying to figure out what everything did.  I also now know why there are any full tank shots out there; it’s too big of a tank to take in one photo.  No worries, we shot some video that is furiously being edited by specially trained monkeys.

We were given a tour of the tank and its workings by Mary Burridge.  We are grateful she took time out of her busy day to give us the tour.

It’s gratifying to see large tank set ups and see how similar your home tank is to theirs.  It’s also nice that no expense was spared when building this tank.  Everything under the sun (including the Solaris) has been put into this tank.  The setup is modern, with simple and natural filtration being the choice here.  The refugiums are full of pods and macro algae.  The only questionable choice in terms of filtration are the bio balls.

This setup has resulted in big, fat, happy fish.  There was a Regal Blue Tang that followed me across the tank, begging for his picture to be taken.  A healthy Naso Tang was the clear boss of the aquarium, while smaller fish like Anthias, Gobies and Hawkfish darted in and out of the rocks.

The coral was a bit of a letdown.  It was common (Big Al’s) fare.  There were no show stoppers in the collection and some of the SPS looked like they were on their way out.  This could be because of the lighting choice:  Solaris LED fixtures.  I would have rather seen 4 400W metal halides with some high quality reflectors like a Lumenarc.  That would probably help the blue carpet anemone that was stubbornly parked at the bottom of the tank.

Enough talk, here’s some pictures.