"tide pool" tank designs

[damsels are not mean]

Anybody ever made a tide pool biotope with simulated tides rising and lowering and housing animals that tolerate being in air for portions of the day? Always seemed an interesting concept to me and many of our favorite corals can even be found in such pools.

 

[Chrisv.]

If I remember correctly there was a tank that had tide simulations and massive Carlson surge device at the Smithsonian back in the day. Pretty sure it's gone now.

 

[davidcalgary29]

I think you could certainly raise and lower water levels on a timed schedule, but that's really not replicating the hydrology of a tide pool, most of which experience a 100% water change twice a day, high levels of insolation, and extremely powerful water flow. I think that they're probably a lot like seasonal rivers, which recede to leave small remnant pools filled with hardy species, but on a much more rapid cycle. In other words, it looks like a simple system, but is something that would probably be very difficult to replicate in a home aquarium, although I've certainly thought about it.

There's also relatively little stock suitable for tide pools available in the aquarium trade, as they're frequently used by juvenile fish seeking refuge from predators. The tide pools I visit in the Bahamas are mainly inhabited by small, juvenile groups of royal grammas, sargeant majors, and schoolmasters; mermaid's glass macro; crabs, and a few brain corals. That's pretty sparse by aquarium standards.

Perhaps this could be done with a small tank with a huge sump, such as on a 1:5 basis.

 

[Chrisv.]

When I was a kid I used to live in southern California and I had a pretty epic (by early 90s kid standards) tide pool tank that consisted only of cold water species that I collected in the tide pools. I didn't have any mechanism to raise and lower the tides though.

One practical consideration is that exposed rocks in tide pools tend to smell. You might not want that in your house.

However, there are enough areas in tide pools that are never actually exposed to air that I think you could still pull off an impressive tide pool tank without that element. I would go for strong alternating current and heavy aeration to mimic an area where water was flowing into or out of a tide pool system. Maybe a vortech on one side that was pushing hard for hours, then relative calm, then a vortech on the other side that pushed hard for several hours. You could probably compress this to a cycle that's less than a natural tide cycle and do fancy things with %activity on the alternating flow pumps. Need some heavy aeration to simulate waves crashing on the ocean side of the tide pools.

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

Discussed something similar in a different thread recently (though that one was more about imitating tides on the beach), and the just of it was imitating the rising and lowering of the water with two pumps (one to pump water in from a different tank/sump/reservoir/etc. and one to pump it back out when the time comes) and setting the water level just below the "tide pool" area then having a wavemaker on a timer that sends a wave over the top of the tide pool area every so often. You could pretty easily set it all on a schedule to try and imitate the natural high tide/low tide.

How well this would work in practice for a tide pool tank I couldn't say (as one of the earlier comments points out, this tide pool setup would be much easier in word than in practice), but it would interesting to see if it would work.

 

[Reefer Reboot]

I made a "splash zone" tank by placing a baffle stretching from front to back but at a 45 degree angle. Then stacked small reef ruble rock up the top side of the baffle for the water to run over. Stocked it with shore crabs, mussels, hermit crabs, anemones, and an assortment of snails (all locally caught). It was pretty cool to watch the critters scramble around when the food would wash over. Didn't keep it for long because it was NOISY, not to mention the massive salt creep!

 

[TheDragonsReef]

I made a "splash zone" tank by placing a baffle stretching from front to back but at a 45 degree angle. Then stacked small reef ruble rock up the top side of the baffle for the water to run over. Stocked it with shore crabs, mussels, hermit crabs, anemones, and an assortment of snails (all locally caught). It was pretty cool to watch the critters scramble around when the food would wash over. Didn't keep it for long because it was NOISY, not to mention the massive salt creep!

Got any videos of it?

Ive been contemplating setting up something similar with waves and a high tide/low tide

 

[Max The New reefer]

Anybody ever made a tide pool biotope with simulated tides rising and lowering and housing animals that tolerate being in air for portions of the day? Always seemed an interesting concept to me and many of our favorite corals can even be found in such pools.

Me and my dad have had alot of ideas for this, especially as Santa Cruz natives

 

[Reefer Reboot]

Got any videos of it?

Ive been contemplating setting up something similar with waves and a high tide/low tide

Nope, sorry, this was years ago (decades actually).

 

[Reefer Reboot]

Just a quick generalized sketch of what it was like.

 

[davidcalgary29]

How about building a waterfall, with aquascape, that's mixed in with the returns? That could achieve some of the desired aeration, although visibility in the tank might become obscured if it wasn't deep enough and the substrate kept getting stirred up. I'd also think that salt creep from the spray would become a problem.

 

[Daniel@R2R]

Cool idea!