February 20, 2023, is World Aquarium Day, an initiative created by world-renowned aquascaper Oliver Knott to celebrate and honor “the best hobby in the World.” We’re biased but we’d be inclined to agree with Oliver, so today we encourage you to flood social media with images of your tanks, fish, and corals, and who knows, you might just inspire the next global sensation.
We are probably guilty of spending too much time staring into our tanks (and definitely too much money!) but as we often tell the people close to us who have to put up with our watery obsession, there are worse things we could be doing with our time and most of the time they’ll always know where we are; either in the LFS or staring at, maintaining, and generally fiddling with our own tanks.
We don’t know, but are others hobbies evolving at the rate that the reef aquarium hobby is? Over only a few decades we’ve gone from making the impossible possible to maintaining, propagating, and even spawning fish and coral species, our displays becoming better, more dynamic, and much more like reefs in the wild. A combination of physics, chemistry, and biology, our hobby teaches us so much about the marine environment and its many life forms to the point where now, we hobbyists with our propagation skills may actually be the key to protecting and replenishing the reefs in the future.
We will be visiting, celebrating, setting up, and testing even more aquariums in 2023, and if we can inspire just one person to take up reefing and fulfill their lives with fish as we have, it’ll all be worth it. Happy World Aquarium Day 2023.
