I find it entertaining and I typically hate fake 'reality' TV shows.

Mostly it is just worth it to see some of the set-ups.

Anyone else annoyed by the fact that they produce high end beautiful aquariums and insist upon stuffing them full of garish decorations and fake coral/plants/etc.?

I understand that actual reef tanks are too difficult to take care of for professional maintainence situations usually but you would think atleast one of the high end tanks so far would have had real coral and other inverts.

That African Cichlid keg tank that they screwed up with the sports memorabilia motif was especially obnoxious.

 

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Anyone else annoyed by the fact that they produce high end beautiful aquariums and insist upon stuffing them full of garish decorations and fake coral/plants/etc.?

I understand that actual reef tanks are too difficult to take care of for professional maintainence situations usually but you would think atleast one of the high end tanks so far would have had real coral and other inverts.

That African Cichlid keg tank that they screwed up with the sports memorabilia motif was especially obnoxious.

In my opinion, if your going to decorate a tank with "garish decorations and fake coral/plants/etc" or use "sports memorabilia motif", the tank is almost always automatically disqualified from being beautiful. It also is generally disqualified from being "high end", since the plants in a planted tank, or the live rock in a reef tank are part of the filtration system.

If your going to go to the trouble of setting up an aquarium, they real show is in the livestock you keep in the tank, not the plastic decorations. If you want the plastic decorations to be the center point, you might as well go all the way and use plastic fish and such. That way you have no routine maintenance.

Personally, I would wonder about any professional maintenance company that couldn't setup and maintain a reef aquarium. It's true some things would need to be scaled back, and you have to choose hardy livestock, but the actual maintenance isn't that much worse than doing a planted tank, provided you plan it properly. What is different is the knowledge you need and how you apply it. I would expect any good aquarium maintenance company to have such knowledge. Case in point, how may people here, in addition to their planted tank, also have a SW reef tank? I say quite a few.

 

I was excited until I saw that they were doing the standard clown vomit style...

 

Not many like the tank designs at all. It only has to work for the customer though. The reef forum I am on is trying to send Animal Planet a bunch of complaints about how they depict the salt water hobby.

 

LOL. Why? It isn't as if they are making individual people look bad.....

yeah i noticed that there is no acclimating time in some episodes and the coral inserts are to vibrant also where they get there stock from looks worse than lfs even lfs have character in their fish tanks the place they get them from is just a white room with blank glass cubes full of fish

That is what most wholesalers look like. For cleanliness purposes, a tank with no substrate/plants etc is much easier to manage.

 

I am about to watch the keg episode next. i dont have a salt water tank (yet). i still like the show. the set ups are a little cheezy but if they were just regular tanks it wouldnt make a show. i love seeing all the fish. that little boys bed was very cool.

 

Well what’s the verdict on the ridiculously RICH doctor tank? I think it has went beter than the other tanks. I still HATE the way they show adding fish and THIS time LIVE corals to the tank the same day. GRRRRRR!!!!

 

The equipment costs go through the roof if you try to do a reef on that scale.

 

With a lifetime of fish keeping and 25 years of SW the show has nothing for me. You'll need to equip me like this to get me to sit through an episode.

lol

 

The do offer live corals if you read up on their site. They prefer to use fake corals to help preserve natural coral reefs and not contribute to the harvesting of them in nature.

I'm 37 years old, and until I setup my first planted tank a few months, I never saw real plants in anyones aquarium. Always fake plants. ugly gravel and easy to take care of fish that most still manage to kill. Us planted people probably make up a single digit of the percentage of aquariums out there and only a percentage of those even use things like CO2, etc, the rest use plastic plants or real plants and no CO2.

It does come down to maintenance I would imagine. Many corals need to be feed specifically and that's not something most people are either willing to do, or willing to pay to have done every single day. They get a fancy tank to look fancy, easy to feed and maintain fish and probably pay a company to come in and do filter maintenance and water changes, etc and thats probably a few times a month. Imagine having to pay someone to come into your office and feed your corals specific foods, etc, every single day.

I like the show, its interesting.

 

The do offer live corals if you read up on their site. They prefer to use fake corals to help preserve natural coral reefs and not contribute to the harvesting of them in nature.

I'm 37 years old, and until I setup my first planted tank a few months, I never saw real plants in anyones aquarium. Always fake plants. ugly gravel and easy to take care of fish that most still manage to kill. Us planted people probably make up a single digit of the percentage of aquariums out there and only a percentage of those even use things like CO2, etc, the rest use plastic plants or real plants and no CO2.

It does come down to maintenance I would imagine. Many corals need to be feed specifically and that's not something most people are either willing to do, or willing to pay to have done every single day. They get a fancy tank to look fancy, easy to feed and maintain fish and probably pay a company to come in and do filter maintenance and water changes, etc and thats probably a few times a month. Imagine having to pay someone to come into your office and feed your corals specific foods, etc, every single day.

I like the show, its interesting.

I totally understand why planted tanks and reef tanks are not common and it makes good sense but when you are dealing exclusively with high end and custom set-ups those are exactly the rare situations where real plants or reef tanks are an option to consider. They don't seem to have any serious limitations on fish that they purchase (there have been some super expensive and not exactly common fish chosen) and they appear to have the type of high end filtration designs that go hand in hand with more challenging tanks but so far the episodes that I have seen it has primarily boiled down to: super expensive tank and expensive saltwater fish.

The rich customers who had the custom quarantine system put in seem the exact types of hobbyists to request a reef set-up.

 

does any one else notice they don't cycle the tank before they add the fish, and they add to much stock at one time?

 

There is another thread on here about this show and everytime I see someone post a response like this it just shows that people have a hard time telling the difference between t.v. and reality. I have said this at least three to four times on the other thread about this show but I will say it again. This is a t.v. show and your only seeing what they choose to show you. Just because it looks like they put the tank all together and add the livestock in 1 day on t.v. doesn't mean that it's done that way in reality. These guys have a very successful business and that doesn't happen if you don't know what you're doing. I'm almost positive that these massive tanks are not put together and livestock added in the same day. Nobody would watch a t.v. show about a tank cycling or livestock being drip acclimated. It's meant to be entertaining like all other t.v. shows. Their business would have failed long ago if they did things the wrong way. Again remember people this is a t.v. show thats meant to entertain so quit trying to act like these guys don't know what they are doing and they should take the advice from people on the internet.

 

yeah i noticed that there is no acclimating time in some episodes and the coral inserts are to vibrant also where they get there stock from looks worse than lfs even lfs have character in their fish tanks the place they get them from is just a white room with blank glass cubes full of fish

 

The place they get their fish from is a wholesaler and I'm pretty sure they aren't open to the general public. That is exactly what these places look like. Bare tanks are the best for these fish so they can observe the fish and treat any illness. From what I have seen on these episodes that wholesaler looks like a top notch facility.

 

T.V. show people. You guys are doing exactly what the show's trying to do - fool you into believing that everything they show on T.V. is nearly everything that happened in its entirety in real life.

Also, reef tanks that large - even rich people wouldn't invest in that stuff. Its the kind of stuff you see in professional aquariums and billion dollar hotels -they have an entire staff managing tanks like those. It's not even about the money but the inconvenience of having to maintain that thing (even if you pay someone to do it, ya gotta let em in the house and have them be there!).

In any case, its highly unlikely that these guys are doing things the wrong way if they have a successful business. It's more likely that they're not showing us how they really do it....simply bc that wouldn't make for good tv folks.

Now people objecting to how they portray the fish business by not showing or disclosing the real way of doing things - that I can understand...

 

I agree, we're not seeing 99% of what really happens behind the scenes. Its just the cut down tv version. Its like watching any show. Do you want to watch them paint a car and watch 14 more episodes of the paint drying? No, its paint, and voila, here's the finished product 8seconds later. Thats the thing with a lot of these shows that takes a long time to do certain things, they have to start filming like a year in advance to get enough material to show.

As for the above comment, look at the mega-church tank. They said they have a full time marine biologist on staff to keep the tank in check.

As I said, 98% of aquarium people go with fake plants because of cost and time involved in maintaining, and I think the fake coral issue is the same.

 

Using fake coral with freshwater fish confused me.

 

Go to your local Petco or Petsmart and look at all the fake coral and other out of place decorations they sell. A huge chunk of the fish owning population don't care about natural accuracy or gaudiness in general. Bright pink gravel, some rubber sea anemones, and a plastic dragons head is exactly what they are looking for in a tank.

 

So I wasn't imagining it, and they used a bunch of fake coral in the keg tank? What was up with that?

 

Check out the "La Fish Guy" he does aquarium maintenance and builds. It's all salt but a whole lot more nuts and bolts than "Tanked". I learned quite a bit from him, cool guy IMO. He also was the opening speaker at MACNA.

 

When I watched the keg tank I was just like.. erm? Fake coral in a freshwater tank, and such a big insert that the cichlids barely have any swim room. Wow, good going guys.

 

In one episode these guys talked about how they drip acclimate fish so they do acclimate them properly.

They just did a soft coral tank and mabye a few lps which had a full fuge setup. The tank was huge like 12' long the fuge itself had to be around a couple hundered gallons. The tank was setup properly with cured lr and all aquacultured frags. They must have spent a fortune on frags for this tank.

These guys know what they are doing and they care about the enviornment. It takes years to get to the level where you can properly manage a living reef tank or a high tech planted tank. Nobody is going to spend 10's of thousands of dollars on a high end tank to have it look like crap because you dont have the time or experience to take care of it.

Instead of complaining about the show how about asking them to post a more informative version of the show online. Somthing that details the mechanics of their filtration, diferent versions of sw and fw tanks available to hobbiests, responsible purchase of fish, info about lighting and water params, etc etc. The bottom line is these guys have a real life business to run Im sure they would like to do a bunch of living reefs or planted tanks but they have to put their customers first.

 

Your watching days and weeks worth of work edited into 60 minutes. Each install has taken a full day, the fish are already onsite in barrels. Don't you think they may be using water mixed exactly the same as the water they put in the tank? Maybe there is a lot more going on than we see? You think?

For Pete's sake!

Besides, our hobby is not doing well in this country. Anything that gives it some attention and helps re-invigorate it is in all of our interests.

Gees!

 

The biggest thing I take from this show is how I could never do their job. I don't think I could bring myself to setup so many unrealistic/tasteless tanks b/c that's what the customer wants. At some point in time I would have to draw the line and just tell the customer no. I'm sure I wouldn't be in business long, but there's no way in hell you will get me to put fake coral in a freshwater tank. IMO, that's an opportunity to educate the ignorant rich client.

 

I watch that show and I wonder who are these people who can afford 1000 gallon tanks in their condos?