10000L Coral reef at The Maritime Museum & Aquarium Sweden

[larangcon]

Love this thread, I have always wondered how big the equipment have to be to maintain such large aquariums. We also have a nice big aquarium here in San Francisco fairly new called the Steinhart Aquarium. I often visit and just relax for a long time staring and being amazed.

 

[Sallstrom]

Love this thread, I have always wondered how big the equipment have to be to maintain such large aquariums. We also have a nice big aquarium here in San Francisco fairly new called the Steinhart Aquarium. I often visit and just relax for a long time staring and being amazed.

Thanks! Then you also have Monterrey Bay Aquarium not far away I visited both Steinhart and Monterrey 9 years ago, great aquariums! But I didn't have time to talk myself in behind the scenes unfortunately. I think Steinhart's Phillipine Reef was quite new when I saw it, the corals had not really started to grow. But I have seen more recent pictures and now it's looking a lot better! Would really like to visit again.
The Phillipine Coral Reef aquarium is one of the aquariums described in the book - Advances in Coral Husbandry in Public Aquariums. We've been looking through that book so many times at work. Great to have now when we are planning for the new aquarium.

As for the equipment, our tanks are not that big. So for us it's still mostly hobby products size L or XL. But we also down size things like return pump and skimmer size. We don't have 10x tank turn around rate for example. And we like to reuse old skimmers so we often have 2 skimmers instead of one large one(hm, we actually have double skimmers in 5 different systems Is that our thing??).

/ David

 

[larangcon]

There was a news video when the Steinhart was opened it showed massive equipment and complex details of how they run their daily routines. It's really nice now that the corals are growing, what I like the most are the number of fishes in the tank. Really looks like you're snorkeling with the fishes as you look up and see the waves at the top and the lights shining down on you. The colors of the corals are not stunning as yours probably due to high intensity of the 6k metal halides up above to replicate the suns rays.

 

[Lasse]

For me - it looks like it have been a lazy weekend att the aquarium I´ll come in tomorrow and fix some for you to do (as usual)

Sincerely Lasse

 

[Sallstrom]

For me - it looks like it have been a lazy weekend att the aquarium I´ll come in tomorrow and fix some for you to do (as usual)

Sincerely Lasse

Sure, I have had a pretty nice weekend at work. Feeding cuttlefish and collecting new born Cassiopea jelly fish

Great! There might be some new toys at work tomorrow if Björn has picked up the package..

/ David

 

[Sallstrom]

@Lasse is "working"..

 

[Sallstrom]

And now almost live from our larger coral and bamboo shark tank!

My colleague Björn is placing some corals. This tank is about 26000L, but only half full with rock and light. Our budget didn't allow us to go all the way

 

[gregkn73]

And now almost live from our larger coral and bamboo shark tank!

My colleague Björn is placing some corals. This tank is about 26000L, but only half full with rock and light. Our budget didn't allow us to go all the way

Fts and more photos from this tank, dimensions, circulation, filtration, lighting and of course photos of the sharks , will definitely interested most of us

 

[Lasse]

@Lasse is "working"..

Someone has to admire others work too

Sincerely Lasse

 

[revhtree]

Love this!

 

[Sallstrom]

Fts and more photos from this tank, dimensions, circulation, filtration, lighting and of course photos of the sharks , will definitely interested most of us

This tank is in a part of the Aquarium that used to be our old nordic water part. But our old cooler broke down 2 years ago and since we are going to close down and rebuild the whole Aquarium we didn't want to spend 10000-20000$ on a cooler just for 2 year, so instead we emptied the tank and restarted it with new mixed water and new sand. We disconnected the plumming to the old system and installed 2 small(ca 400L each) sumps just behind the tank. For a while we did some coral experiments and light messurments in this tank, since its 2 meter deep. Then almost a year ago we decided to turn it in to a coral tank since we needed more space for large colonies. And to do this with a small budget
Here is some meassures of the tank from above:

We only could afford 800 kg dry marco live rock and we knew that we couldn't have great light in the whole tank(to expensive right now). So we decided to make one side of the tank into a reef and we covered the smaller window furthest to the right on the picture above(when we covered this window we could put a lot of stream pumps on the right back wall without them being visible from the outside(I really hate to see pumps in aquariums )).
But 800 kg rocks in a 2 meter deep tank doesn't look much so we had to do some kind of a rack to put the rock on to to get some height. So I did this nice looking thing!

Which looked like this when we put it together(yes, we couldn't get it into the tank in one piece..) in the tank.

We put back to nature slime line(background for aquariums) at the front of this PVC monster. And then we started to pile the rocks on it.

And this is what it looked like a couple of days later:

And that was the end of part 1

 

[Sallstrom]

Part 2 of the bamboo shark tank story

Volume: 26000L (an old guess from a colleague..)
LR: 800kg

The filtration/LSS is pretty simple. Two connected sumps, two skimmers( XL KZ skimmer and an old Deltec), sand pressure filter and live rock. And some Siporax in one of the sumps, but probably not enough to matter.

Return pumps: 2 new jet 2500 and 1 new jet 6000. We used what we had Turn over rate: 0,42X/h.

Sand pressure filter: 10000L/h I think. Old pump and old filter.

Cirkulation: 10 jebao RW20(I think 6-7 works today, crap pumps...). We tested large pool pumps but they made the tank to warm so we couldn't use them. Its a small room behind the tank..

Lights: 3 Pacific Sun Kryos 300w and 3 Heliospectra LX602 600W (and 1 Ecotech Radion as extra where we only have sand). All LEDs. All large lamps are over the reef part of the tank.

And here are some more pictures

Covering the rest of the plastic monster with rocks.

Installing the lights. Great work space

All lights up and running

Now I have to find some pictures of corals and sharks! End of part 2

 

[Sallstrom]

Didn't have that many pictures of the sharks, but found these.

They get their food through the pipe, a kind of target feeding. They are born at Aquaria Vattenmuseum in Stockholm Sweden.

And this is the reef from earlier this week.

 

[larangcon]

You love what you do my friend, come on, that's not work; when you can spend all day in a place where a lot of us want to do each day, each minute and not only get our hands wet, you can dive inside your tank. Now is that really work

 

[mattgsa]

Amazing set of tanks.

 

[najer]

Hope you are going to do "front of house" and "behind the scenes" videos before the shut down.

 

[Sallstrom]

You love what you do my friend, come on, that's not work; when you can spend all day in a place where a lot of us want to do each day, each minute and not only get our hands wet, you can dive inside your tank. Now is that really work

You know, I only post about the fun stuff at work Haven't written any about the alarms in the middle of the night and handling invoices
But you are right, and I can't think of another job I would rather have.

 

[Sallstrom]

Amazing set of tanks.

Thank you!

 

[Sallstrom]

Hope you are going to do "front of house" and "behind the scenes" videos before the shut down.

Yes, some kind of documentation has to be done. Probably by someone with better camera knowledge then me

Actually there have been aquariums and terrariums in these rooms/exhibitions since 1933. There have been crocodiles, Galapagos turtles and monkeys in this house Only aquariums since 2004.

 

[Dsnakes]

This is incredible. Great work!! I can't wait to see more