What salt water fish / invert keeping was like in 1971

[HarryLongo]

Here are some of the things a salt water hobbiest would find back in 1971.

There was no such thing as one day cycling a new salt water tank. The normal procedure was putting a few inexpensive fish in the tank and waiting the usual 6 weeks for the tank to establish a working bacteria culture. You could ask the very few salt water pet shop owners for a wad of their dirty filter fluff.

There was no such thing as invert food. You had to crush flake food or squeeze frozen clam food for some 'juice' and watch your creature slowly starve to death anyway.

There was no such thing a live rock available.

No such thing as a sump; protein skimmer; refugium; nor metal halide ligthing...
lighting was a flourescent plant light and mercury vapor lamp... the latter being you made your own unit.

Top of the line filtration in those days was a hang-on Supreme filter with and under gravel filter.

The typical salt water aquarium contained no live corals of any kind... just skeletons of hard coral. If you wanted coral rock you drove down to Florida and collected your own. No such thing as live sand available since none of the above as yet hit the market.

You were talked out of keeping salt water by your local pet shop because it was considered much too difficult to keep salt water fish. Younger men talked their father's into " going salt ."

The only inverts available were scarlet red clams; feather dusters;
anemonies; red banded coral shrimp; arrow crabs and hermit crabs... everything else was yet to be discovered. Oh, yes, you could get a sea turtle back then and dry pink coral sand from some beach in the Carribbean.

Clean-up crews were unheard of and not necessary since corals weren't available.

The hobby back then was brand new... at least in the North Eastern USA.

[joeychitwood]

I'd love to see some photos from the 1970s of early marine tanks. Does anyone have any?

[mrme]

I'm so glad they didn't stop improving the hobby !

[gary faulkner]

The hobby back then was brand new... at least in the North Eastern USA.

South East also. I had the only salt water tank around, except one LFS and he knew almost nothing about the salt hobby. One day after asking some questions of him, he just looked me straight in the eye and said " I'm sorry but you already know a lot more about this than I do." All the info I could get back then was from the FAMA Magazine. I don't remember having power heads or any submersible pumps back then either.

It is a whole nother world now!

[corals b 4 bills]

My first experience with salt water was in 1988 when I had a fresh water Oscar tank I could see the stores fish tank with the new invention...."The wet/dry filter"......oooooh! but the price of those things were like the price of a Tunze set-up totay.

[chrissreef]

We need someone to make a timeline! have inventions (skimmer, reactors, lighting etc.).

I'm not sure about 1971 but I remember 1985-2007 =)

[HPD Turbo]

Originally posted by chrissreef
We need someone to make a timeline! have inventions (skimmer, reactors, lighting etc.).

I'm not sure about 1971 but I remember 1985-2007 =)

So go on and make the 1985-2007 time line, it is very interesting.

[Sheol]

Mid atlantic states as well. Actually, I picked up love of Saltwater from my father ( & mucho J. Y. Costeau films!) at the time. Almost always had one salt tank in the house...

Matthew

[seapug]

yeah, the first saltwater "creature" I ever saw was an arrow crab in a tank around, oh......1976. Every time I see those guys I hear Linda Ronstadt in my head.

Are we all dating ourselves? haha....

[George Grogan]

LOL at the memories...

1985: Equip: 55 gal flat back hex, 2 x 48" shop light (daylight bulbs), undergravel filter w/powerheads, HOB power filter, air pump w/2 airstones. (Wet/dry was the Holy Grail back then, and far out of my budget.)

Livestock & deco: ocellaris clown, yellow tail blue damsel, fiji blue devil, coral beauty angel, coral banded shrimp; deco: dead coral skeletons and 2 small pieces of liverock (small, and rarely available locally)... I was so excited when I discovered a 3/4" blennie hitch hiking in a small shell on the side of one of the live rock pieces.

Water:Tap + dechlorinator; Sand: dolomite gravel.

Its a miracle anything lived!!!

[carlso63]

My first job EVER was working in a LFS in a shopping mall on Long Island, NY that had a SW section, way back in 1978 - I was 15 yrs old at the time.
Probably 15 SW tanks, all 30L tanks except a 175g display tank for the triggers, puffers, groupers, etc.

UGFs, Single Flo Bulb Strip lights, glass canopies, dolomite gravel, bleached coral skeletons for decor, damsels and clowns did OK longer term - but if you could keep a Yellow Tang alive for more than a few months you were considered a "pro"...

Big company for SW supplies was a place called Nektonics... they did the UGFs and we used to carry all their test kits and chemicals -

ph, Alk, ammonia, trite, trate that was it.

Oh, and 25% water changes once per month to keep trates down - that was the only way at the time.

Used to get in some Condy anenomes from time to time but almost no corals - they were considered "impossible to keep" at that time...

Our 175g was considered "cutting edge" because we had an imported German air driven protein skimmer that sat inside it...

Words like "sump", "wavemaker", "closed loop", "refugium" were all just a distant gleam in someone's eye back then...

[spleify]

I remember the first salt water tank I ever saw. I was about 9 years old in 1979.
I went with my older sister to one of her friends house's and they had a SW tank. Knowing what I know now it was probably a 125 gal, but back then being a little kid it seemed like it was a million gallons
He had like 3 fish and obviously no corals. I remember it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw, I stared at it for hours, and didn't want to leave. I always wanted to go back and look at the "ocean Tank".
I have no idea what kind of filtration or lighting he had, and wouldn't have even understood what he was talking about if he did tell me. All I know is that was the coolest thing I ever saw and new when I grew up I was gonna have one of those things. So he was the son of a ----- that got me in to this . Wish I had his number now I'd punch him in the head, for making me spend so much money
Actually if I wasn't exposed to that guy's tank then, who knows I may never had the desire to build my own little "ocean" now, so actually I would probably thank him.
I think what this hobby has become is something wonderful, I think we all need to try and use as much aquacultured animals as we can to try and save the oceans. I personally know that about 90% of the items in my tank are all aquacultured.
Just my thoughts and $.02
Great thread
Spleify

[ACBlinky]

My first tank was a gift from my grandmother for my 16th birthday, in 1991. I desperately wanted to have a SW tank, but at that time I was told it would be too expensive/difficult to maintain, and ended up with FW - even 20 years after 1971 I think this hobby was still in the dark ages compared to today.

I did buy two SW books that day, insisting to my family and the store owner that I would learn about SW so I could convert my tank. One is Hans A. Baensch's 'Marine Aquarist's Manual' from 1983; I still have it, and it's amazing to read about the hobby then compared to now.

Here are some examples from the book. I'm not trying to knock the author, I just think it's neat to read this and see how far we've advanced in 24 years since this was written.

Water
"Most hobbyists agree that it is easier to mix synthetic saltwater than to obtain natural seawater. The formula is easy: tap water + a sea salt mix = saltwater. When preparing the solution you may use water from the faucet (unless it is heavily chlorinated) and simply add a sea salt mix according to instructions. Most chemical differences in the tap water are reconciled once mixed with the salt."

Substrate
"The bottom material: You can choose from several materials: 1. Coarse quartz gravel, at least 2-3mm in size 2. Lava gravel 3. Crushed dolomite 4. Crushed shells 5.Crushed corals, coral sand 6. Combination of materials above"

Decoration
"The decor of the marine tank may be constructed with various materials, such as dead coral, gravel, sandstone without metal, limestone, marble, basalt, granite, lava bricks, slate, plastic corals etc. ... The corals in your tank will become covered with algae and it is impossible to bring back the white colour unless they are bleached. The aquarist should acquire two sets of coral; one set should be 'at the cleaner's' while the other one is in the tank. Periodically the clean corals should be interchanged with those from the tank."

And of course they discuss undergravel filters, lighting with 'Gro-Lux' plant bulbs to encourage the growth of algae (including hair algae, which can be scraped from the sides and frozen to use as food for herbivores), and give this formula for stocking levels:

Stocking levels
"Not more than 1in (2.5cm) of fish for every 5 US gal (20l) of tank volume

tank volume in gallons / 5 = fish capacity in inches

NB: deduct 10% of total volume to allow for gravel, rocks etc."

Inverts
"...there is a varied assortment at hand: crabs, shrimps, starfish, snails, mussels, living corals, worms, and last but not least, anemones. Unfortunately it is impossible to keep them all together in an aquarium. The aquarist should make it a principle to never keep fish and invertebrates together."

Am I ever glad I found RC when I finally decided to go salt. This hobby has come an incredibly long way. In 20 years will we all be laughing at the way we do things now? I wonder!

[Frick-n-Frags]

anyone remember when instant ocean came in 50gal bags with a bottle of liquid trace elements and you had to make the entire 50gal batch up at once.

I still have a trace bottle heh. undergravel filter, dolomite, sanders, whisper pumps, limewood airstones

[spleify]

As someone mentioned earlier in this thread, pics from the 70's would be awesome. Obviously there were no digital cameras either. But if someone has any, that they could scan and upload that would be AWESOME.
Spleify

[SDguy]

I had a Tetra Marine handbook from the 70's. It had you cycle the tank by throwing a little bit of potting soil in there

[mg426]

Around 1982 here. Undergravel filter, HOB filter, NO flourescant shop lights(no actinics) crushed coral substrate. Dead coral decorations. Actually keep some things alive for awhile.

[landlord]

My mother told me a story about how when her and my Dad were dating he gave her two seahorses for her tank. This was before 1971 when my older brother was born so I am guessing like 1968. They lived in the greater cincinnati area (Northern Kentucky) but she cannot remember the store where she got her fish from. She said she could never keep anything alive for more than a week or two... go figure.

--landlord

[Joe]

In the 60's my Dad found a very small advertisement in the back of "Life" magazine for mailorder seahorses. It stated that the male was guaranteed to be "pregnant". He ordered me some and I set up a 10 gallon salt tank. In about two weeks, the mailman brought my tiny carboard box. Boy, was I excited! I put them in the tank and fired up the corner filter floss filter and placed a couple small branches from a tree in our yard for them to perch on. The male did actually have babies and they lived for quite some time, as I recall. We hatched brine shrimp to feed them.

Joe

[scbadiver]

My first experience with a salt "tank" was the seahorses I ordered out of the back of a comic book or something. I got about a 1/2 gallon plastic tank with a small plastic plant, a little bag of sand and a little bag of salt. "no filtration neccessary" per the instructions. about 4 days after the tank arrived I got a cardboard pouch with 6 tiny seahorses in it. "float the bag for 20 minutes and gently dump them into their new home". Well, needless to say I watched them all die a horrible death over the next week. It still makes me mad to think of how many of them were needlessly killed like this. That was in the early 70's. In 86 when I started inot the real world of salt I got a 75 gallon tank, surely the biggest I would ever want or need (yeah right) and had crushed coral, UG filter and a fluval canister. Lighting was 2 shoplight fixtures with NO actinics and "triton" bulbs. I got all my dead coral from the Pier One store and it was a neat looking tank. I splurged and got a wet/dry filter from Cole Enterprises so I could keep more stuff but as it turned out, the foam they supplied with it was chemically expanded and killed pretty much everything I had in there overnight. Thanks goodness things have gotten better.

[Sk8r]

My lfs sold me a 20g tank, a hang-on filter, a monster sebae anemone and 2 clowns. The miracle is---I kept that thing going for most of a year before the water quality hit the wall, the nem suicided, and took the clowns with it.

Prior to that, back in 1965, I kept a 2 gallon fishbowl with a hydrometer [floating], in conditioned Baltimore tap water, a bubbler, 2 pretty good sized seahorses, and an air bubbler---assisted by a small tank in which I cultured brine shrimp. This arrangement succeeded for 3 months, until my downstairs neighbor threw a monster party in which the smoke [from something] rose up through the stairwell, under our door, hung like a pall over our ceiling at head height, and by morning, had done in our seahorses and even most of the brine shrimp. I was beyond irate.

[SDguy]

I'm just waiting for people from the seahorse forum to show up here....

[Sk8r]

Well, I ended up with the seahorses as a [sob] rescue. An ornament had fallen onto the male and pinned him overnight flat to the tank floor at the lfs, and they thought he was dead. I'd reported the situation, he was freed, swimming erratically, and because they were going to toss him, I bought him for 50 cents [plus they sold me the bowl and the hydrometer and the salt...well, you know how that goes.] By the next day, in my bowl, he was doing fine, so I went back and got the female...for full price. That was my first saltwater experience. They tootled about quite happily, snagging onto the air line, the hydrometer, or each other's necks, eating enthusiastically, and doing just fine. Because it was all live food, we didn't have the nitrate problem that could have resulted, and I did a total water change [as with goldfish] every couple of weeks. I was getting very fond of those little guys...when they were gassed by the downstairs neighbor. I'd thought maybe I could put some in my fuge, but the flow is much too fierce for them---and the cheato doesn't afford them enough room. So I'll just admire them at the lfs.

[DrBDC]

Originally posted by HarryLongo
.

There was no such thing as one day cycling a new salt water tank. The normal procedure was putting a few inexpensive fish in the tank and waiting the usual 6 weeks for the tank to establish a working bacteria culture. You could ask the very few salt water pet shop owners for a wad of their dirty filter fluff.

This hasn't changed! The only diffenence now is 25% of the people have figured out it's just as easy to feed a tank as to possibly sacrifice the fish. Half of those just don't want to chase down the damsels afterwards and don't care about the fish anyway.

[Agu]

A History of the Hobby