Loading ...Last year we bought an annual pass to the Disney parks in Orlando. It’s a reasonable drive from South Carolina and we’ve been able to make several trips. Between Christmas and New Years, we made our final visit.
With the tank move and various disasters and general bad timing over the past year, I’ve been unable to really add any livestock from the multiple aquarium stores in Florida on any other trips.
This time, the condo we rented contained a curious book made of yellow paper. It listed six aquarium stores with addresses and phone numbers. It was like an analog version of Google, I guess.
The digital Google on my phone listed dozens of aquarium stores in the greater Orlando area, so I guess it had better resolution.
Any visits to these stores would need to wait until the last day so that I could drop my purchases in the ice chest (I’d assured my family it was for colas on the way down) and shuttle them home.
A week at Disney is not to be missed, though I missed about 70% of it working through crisis after crisis at work from my laptop in the condo. In all, I spent part of a day at Animal Kingdom, a day at The Magic Kingdom and several hours staring open-mouthed at the tanks in what used to be “The Living Seas” at Epcot but is currently “The Seas with Nemo and Friends”.
5.7 million gallons of saltwater moves through that place. It provides a great educational opportunity for kids, but I learned a couple of things myself.
First, not even 5.7 million gallons of water volume and all the monetary resources backing the Disney corporation can necessarily completely remove the need to send in a team of divers to scrub cyanobacteria off the fiberglass coral sculptures from time to time.
More importantly to me, SPS corals can be a little boring to people not involved in this hobby.
I spent a lot of time staring into the tanks but I also spent some time watching the people staring alongside me, both strangers and my own family. Certain tanks were a bigger draw than others.
The circular tank which was a forest of montipora and porities with outcroppings of blue-tipped acropora was circled by polite people pointing before moving on the the tank with fiberglass coral and three large lionfish.
The tank filled with seahorses and pipefish and shrimpfish weaving among some seagrass was a curiosity on the way to the bare sand-bottomed cuttlefish tank.
The big draw in this particular room was the reef tank from the image above, crowned with a leather coral and multiple soft corals swaying in the current, it steadily held a crowd. I counted a meat coral and a larger frogspawn as the only stony corals in the tank which was otherwise loaded with plain-looking mushroom and, believe it or not, aiptasia.
My own family asked me endless questions about this tank.
Guys, the tank was oxygenated and partially circulated by large bubbles if regular old air from within the rockwork!
But stepping back from it, I was able to see the tank as a whole. It isn’t just the lighting (probably daylight metal halides in a pendant in the ceiling) or the filtration (my guess is wet/dry with no filter sock and possibly a spraybar over the bio-balls) and the tank itself (acrylic column, impossible to scrape without scratching around a giant mound of purple rocks).
One of the components is the people looking at it.
You and I may be delighted and amused to no end by delicate spires of stony corals gently fluorescing in an actinic glow (I know I am) but most of the people who look at our tanks are every bit as happy watching a tan finger leather coral sway when the powerhead kicks on.
Seeing how happy the frogspawn coral made my daughter made me revise my planned shopping list for my visit to the reef stores.
This list was later revised by rolling the rental car into a lady who is probably going to sue me, blowing out a tire on the turnpike and having to buy a new one on our last day in town while driving that thing all over on that ridiculous doughnut spare tire looking for someone who had that tire in stock on a Sunday and by my daughter getting a stomach virus which resulted in our fleeing the state at high-speed while she illustrated into a plastic bag how much digestive juice an 11-year-old girl generally holds, but the lesson stayed intact.
The total picture of a reef tank extends beyond equipment and stocking lists and chemical mixtures into the people who enjoy looking at it, and that may be the most important consideration of all.
With the tank move and various disasters and general bad timing over the past year, I’ve been unable to really add any livestock from the multiple aquarium stores in Florida on any other trips.
This time, the condo we rented contained a curious book made of yellow paper. It listed six aquarium stores with addresses and phone numbers. It was like an analog version of Google, I guess.
The digital Google on my phone listed dozens of aquarium stores in the greater Orlando area, so I guess it had better resolution.
Any visits to these stores would need to wait until the last day so that I could drop my purchases in the ice chest (I’d assured my family it was for colas on the way down) and shuttle them home.
A week at Disney is not to be missed, though I missed about 70% of it working through crisis after crisis at work from my laptop in the condo. In all, I spent part of a day at Animal Kingdom, a day at The Magic Kingdom and several hours staring open-mouthed at the tanks in what used to be “The Living Seas” at Epcot but is currently “The Seas with Nemo and Friends”.
5.7 million gallons of saltwater moves through that place. It provides a great educational opportunity for kids, but I learned a couple of things myself.
First, not even 5.7 million gallons of water volume and all the monetary resources backing the Disney corporation can necessarily completely remove the need to send in a team of divers to scrub cyanobacteria off the fiberglass coral sculptures from time to time.
More importantly to me, SPS corals can be a little boring to people not involved in this hobby.
I spent a lot of time staring into the tanks but I also spent some time watching the people staring alongside me, both strangers and my own family. Certain tanks were a bigger draw than others.
The circular tank which was a forest of montipora and porities with outcroppings of blue-tipped acropora was circled by polite people pointing before moving on the the tank with fiberglass coral and three large lionfish.
The tank filled with seahorses and pipefish and shrimpfish weaving among some seagrass was a curiosity on the way to the bare sand-bottomed cuttlefish tank.
The big draw in this particular room was the reef tank from the image above, crowned with a leather coral and multiple soft corals swaying in the current, it steadily held a crowd. I counted a meat coral and a larger frogspawn as the only stony corals in the tank which was otherwise loaded with plain-looking mushroom and, believe it or not, aiptasia.
My own family asked me endless questions about this tank.
Guys, the tank was oxygenated and partially circulated by large bubbles if regular old air from within the rockwork!
But stepping back from it, I was able to see the tank as a whole. It isn’t just the lighting (probably daylight metal halides in a pendant in the ceiling) or the filtration (my guess is wet/dry with no filter sock and possibly a spraybar over the bio-balls) and the tank itself (acrylic column, impossible to scrape without scratching around a giant mound of purple rocks).
One of the components is the people looking at it.
You and I may be delighted and amused to no end by delicate spires of stony corals gently fluorescing in an actinic glow (I know I am) but most of the people who look at our tanks are every bit as happy watching a tan finger leather coral sway when the powerhead kicks on.
Seeing how happy the frogspawn coral made my daughter made me revise my planned shopping list for my visit to the reef stores.
This list was later revised by rolling the rental car into a lady who is probably going to sue me, blowing out a tire on the turnpike and having to buy a new one on our last day in town while driving that thing all over on that ridiculous doughnut spare tire looking for someone who had that tire in stock on a Sunday and by my daughter getting a stomach virus which resulted in our fleeing the state at high-speed while she illustrated into a plastic bag how much digestive juice an 11-year-old girl generally holds, but the lesson stayed intact.
The total picture of a reef tank extends beyond equipment and stocking lists and chemical mixtures into the people who enjoy looking at it, and that may be the most important consideration of all.
Garrick has no memory of his birth parents, having been abandoned at the South Plains Mall in Lubbock, Texas as an infant and raised in shifts by the kindly part-time staff at World of Pets and Orange Julius.
He currently lives in South Carolina with his wife and daughter and four cats and has had at least one saltwater aquarium constantly since 1991.
You tend to take the path less traveled, don’t you?