[RKDinOKC]

My direct boss left work early today to stop and get a couple of clownfish for his daughter's 7th birthday.

Did not find out if this is his first saltwater aquarium or not. Sounded like it.

When just out of college I setup and maintained a 60 gallon saltwater aquarium. It took three weeks to get the water livable for fish. It's got to get the whole plankton and bacteria eco system going before the fish will survive. Especially if you don't put in live sand and live rocks or coral. Even then I could only add one fish at a time or it would shock the ecosystem with the extra food and waste of another fish.

Because of the salinity my aquarium evaporated 3 gallons of water a day that I had to replace to maintain the correct specific gravity or salinity. They didn't have fancy affordable reverse osmosis water filters back then so I had to keep 3 days of water sitting out. First was for the chlorine to evaporate. Second and third was to treat to take out some of the bad chemicals which would precipitate to the bottom.

Kept my salt water aquarium going for 6 years.

Had...in the order I got them.

A Blue Tang like dory
Blue Girdled Anglefish (basically yellow)
4 Yellow Tail Damselfish (they schooled swimming around together all the time)
A Brittle Star (a starfish you can actually watch move)
A Clownfish (Like Nemo, but had all it's fins)

Considered getting a small octopus. But found they are very difficult to keep in the tank and didn't want to get up in the middle of the night and step on it.

The last thing I got was a cleaner shrimp, they are actually supposed to help keep the tank clean. Even though I watched it for over a month in the store it introduced some kind of sickness that ended up killing everything in the aquarium. It was sad watching them each deteriorate and die over a couple of weeks. Brought in a fish doctor and tried several things, but evidently they got something that wasn't curable.

Kinda lost my interest in keeping a saltwater tank.