Do you ever get jealous of Freshwater Aquascaping?

[Zionas]

Yeah I agree there’s definitely upsides to both. If I ever did a freshwater tank again it would probably be a Cichlid tank or one with more exotic varieties of fish like Archer Fish, Ghost Knifes.

 

[Ardeus]

Reef aquascaping is in its infancy at best.

It's still commonly accepted that aquascaping is just the product of functionality and personal taste.

Concepts and techniques like how to create the illusion of depth, adequate proportion between the size of fish and corals and using natural reefs as a reference still elude 99.9999% of reefers, just to name a few very basic aquascaping techniques.

I have been thinking about the idea of organizing a reef aquascaping contest, but I'm still on the fence because it will likely be a flop due to little participation and low aquascaping quality of the participants. On the other hand it's got to start somewhere.

Regarding fish behavior, I miss my tanganyikans terribly, especially the shelldwellers.

 

[Zionas]

Why not give it a try? As you said gotta start somewhere.

I’m all for realism when it comes to reef aquascaping but I haven’t dived much.

 

[Carson789]

Yeah I agree there’s definitely upsides to both. If I ever did a freshwater tank again it would probably be a Cichlid tank or one with more exotic varieties of fish like Archer Fish, Ghost Knifes.

I love archer fish they are just a pain in the butt. Side note if you look up Penn jillete (I think that's how you spell it) the magician he has a crazy tank for archer fish

 

[Ardeus]

There's different aquascaping styles in freshwater planted tanks and although we can learn a lot from them, not all techniques can be transposed to reefs.

Diorama aquascaping would always look ridiculous in a reef.

Not all of us have dived in a natural reef, but we all have seen pictures and videos of natural reefs... and it's useless.

You often hear that the main reason people have reef tanks is because they want a piece of the ocean in their home.

But how many of those tanks look like someone has cut a piece of a reef, put glass around it and brought it home?

How much attention do we pay to the environment we are trying to recreate?

How much effort do we put into making our tanks similar to something we could find in the ocean?

We see but we don't observe. We don't analyse what's going on there and try to learn how to replicate.