The Impact of the Coronavirus on the Aquarium Hobby: The Good, The Bad, and The Unknown

For the first time, everyone everywhere is pretty much going through the same thing.

At least for part of the last 3-4 months, most of us have had to be isolated indoors with only our immediate families and hobbies to enjoy. As a result, most of us have been able to spend more time on our tanks than is usually the case and also given me time to try to figure out what both the long-term and short-term impact may be on not only me but the hobby overall.

When contemplating this I realized there is both macro-component—which affects the entire hobby and everyone in it—and a micro-component, which is how it affects me. While I am hopeful that things will get back to being closer to normal soon, I have accepted that this will probably not be the case until at least early 2021.

When looking at the big picture, the first thing that stands out is the widespread unemployment that has occurred as a result of the pandemic. During the last decade the world’s economy had been humming along, so people in the hobby had money to spend on expensive lights, frags, or whatever people had the disposable income to buy them. With money being less available, I expect that the hobby will also contract to some degree—and possibly a lot.

This contraction may have a significant impact because hobby has exploded in popularity in the past 10 years. Many companies have not experienced or prepared for when people no longer have the money to spend as freely as they once had. This may especially be the case considering how expensive the hobby has become. This could result in one of two things: prices come down due to lowered demand or, if prices remain high,  fewer new individuals, especially younger ones will come into the hobby.

I spoke to several manufacturers about this. They all said that sales are down significantly during the last quarter due to both lower demand and supply chain issues. While they are hopeful that as things return to normal, sales will return, none of them felt they would get near their previous sales levels in the near future.

One major negative of the pandemic has been the almost complete shut down in travel, especially air travel and international travel the most. Because of this reduced air travel, coral and fish shipments from Indonesia, which only recently opened, Australia and everywhere else have for the most part ceased due to the lack of flights. Whenever freight has been allowed, the freight rates are 75-200% higher in many cases. Because of this there is a significant shortage of both available fish and corals. And when they are available the prices are significantly higher than they were before the pandemic. Some possible good news is that the corals that are being maricultured in Indonesia have now had time to grow into bigger sizes and since the facilities were shut down for 18 months before this, this may have allowed them time to get things going again. However, if this lack of flights continues for too long, and they to grow too big, they will soon become too large to ship. And with freight prices being so high it may not be cost effective to ship them anyway. So, this will have a significant negative impact on the hobby at least in the short term.

Sadly, all of these negative factors are contributing to the continued demise of the local fish shop. Like many other mom and pop stores, my expectation is that a significant number of fish shops will unfortunately be forced to close for good after this or have already shut their doors. Many of these shops were already having a difficult time of it due to increased competition from the internet on dry goods and more recently corals and fish. Now with not only decreased demand and higher prices, it will be very difficult for all but the best and most well-managed shops to stay in business, which is a shame. Like books on the hobby that no one reads, the local fish shop will become much a thing of the past. This is unfortunate in that not only are fish shops where most of us got our start, they are often owned and operated by former hobbyists who try to turn their passion into a business. As a result, they not only share this passion, but they also their experience, which is hard to replicate online. Sadly, I feel that in the long run this will add another force on the hobby as more than likely it may reduce the number of new hobbyists joining it.

Like the local fish shop, I don’t really think we understand how much we value something until it is gone. In this regard, the pandemic has made me realize how much I have missed having new corals and fish come in to either shops or online stores. Like many of us, I think I took for granted the wide availability and almost constant supply of fish and corals to fill my tanks that we had. Since both of these have become more difficult to obtain, at least to me they increased in value. As a result, anything new I have brought in during the pandemic has been treated with absolute TLC. While I always treat all new arrivals with extra care, knowing that everything I brought in would be difficult to replace made me extra vigilant about acclimation. I also had my belief that any fish should be quarantined, and any corals thoroughly dipped and quarantined if possible, reinforced. I learned this as the last fish who looked clean that I brought in before we were all locked down, brought ick to one of my tanks, and that has taken over two months to eradicate completely. Similarly, the first pack of frags that I brought in had Monti eating nudibranch eggs on one of the corals and getting rid of them took nearly three months of twice weekly dips. This pack came from a highly regarded source, who I had gotten frags from in the past. So, this showed me that just about anyone can have pests in their tank. And to be honest I think a lot of us have pests, but until our corals get stressed, we really don’t know they are there until they start to cause problems. Now regardless of who I get frags from, they are all dipped and isolated until it is confirmed they are clean.

Another macro impact of the pandemic is that it has given most everyone a lot of free time, much more than was normally the case. For those who did not work, this was obvious, but even for many that were still working, this also occurred because once they were done working there literally was no place and not much to do, as almost everything was closed. All of this free time allowed me and many of my reefing friends to do some of the things that we may not have had the time to do when the world was normal. Truth be told some of these tasks were also not the most fun things to do either, so we tended to put them off.. This free time also allowed me to have more frequent and in-depth conversations with my fellow hobbyists from which I learned a lot. With time and technology, I and many of my friends were able to touch base with our friends all over the world. Since we all shared not only having to be home but also our enjoyment of our tanks, was easy to talk about a variety of tank related subjects, which helped to get our minds off of what was going on around us. Having friends from all over due to this hobby, helped me not only find out what was going on in places not frequently talked about on the news, but it also helped me find out about some things in the hobby that I otherwise would not have known about. Due to the virus, the hobby was shut down for the most part big time. Not only were most shops closed, but also all talks and meetings were cancelled, fish and coral shipments were stopped and all of the big shows like MACNA and RAP were cancelled or postponed. However, like myself, most hobbyists if anything became more focused on the hobby and improving their tanks in one way or another. Breeders and coral propagators had the time to focus on raising more animals, even some rare and hard to breed ones. And since few corals have been coming in from the wild, propagators increased what they were doing by expanding their facilities and propagating their most desired corals. The bottom line is that while the pandemic has been bad for fish shops, both short and long term, it probably strengthened home and commercial propagators and breeders, and all the manufacturers that make it through will probably be fine on the other side due to all the pent-up demand.

Lastly, in terms of the macro affect, probably the biggest and most important one in my opinion, is that nature seemed to come back while everyone was locked indoors. As we all read, during the worldwide quarantine, nature retook areas where people usually dominated. Dolphins have come back to swim in the canals of Venice, rare dugongs and dolphins are all along the abandoned beaches of Thailand and wildlife of every type are coming out and being seen near towns and villages where most thought they no longer existed. Unfortunately, with this good news there was also bad news in that the Great Barrier Reef suffered its third major bleaching event in the past five years, with this one being the worst, of them as it extended down to the southernmost part of the reef. Hopefully the reduction in industry and travel that has occurred has produced a diminution in CO2 and other harmful gas production and this respite will allow things to come back into balance. If this is the case, it hopefully will help show that we can reverse things and slow global warming and some of the other things we do negatively on the environment. It may be doe eyed optimism to think that this may occur, but at times like these one needs to look on the bright side.

In terms of how the pandemic has affected me personally and probably a lot of hobbyists too on a micro level, there are many things that have resulted from this situation. First, among these is that with all of this newfound time on my hands I was able to sit down and read. As with most aspects of my life, this reading focused a lot on the hobby. Instead of just sitting and reading online posts, which I tend to do too much, I tried to be more discriminate in my reading choices. So in this regard, I looked at a lot of scientific papers on corals, marine life and water chemistry. Sadly, there are not a lot of scientific papers on reef tanks. From these I learned about the bacterial microbiome around corals, the role of CO2 on bacterial health and how ambient CO2 affects pH, what corals like to eat in closed environments and many other topics that I think will help me be a better aquarist. I also went back and looked at all of the magazines and books I’ve collected over the past 10 years, I’ve actually collected them for 30, but only thought the last ten would be relevant, and read the articles that I felt were still relevant today. Obviously, some of these past articles are now clearly out of date or wrong, but many still provided useful information that still works. I also trust this work more than a lot of what I read on the net, as in a book or magazine and author signs their name to their work, so I have more of a reason to believe what they have written.

As a result of this reading and this free time, I also decided to continue the experiments that I began last summer, but in a more detailed and expansive way. Every month since last July, I have tried to change one thing in my 600-gallon system, to see if they produced positive changes or improvements in the tanks or corals. I will talk about these experiments and what I learned in future articles. Knowing that I would be home every night for the past three months, and probably for the rest of the year has provided me the opportunity to try new things on a consistent basis and see the results. One month may not be long enough to see the full impact of a change, but at worst if something positive occurred it started to show in that time period.

Getting to talk to my friends and experiment while having all this free time also gave me the idea to consolidate what others were doing. So, in this regard I contacted 20 of my reefing friends, all of whom I considered to have very successful reef tanks full of beautifully colored sps corals and found out as much as I could about their tanks, the parameters and what the “secrets” to their success. Some of them are successful coral propagators from their tanks, so I thought getting all of this data and consolidating it would be useful to me and lot of other hobbyists. The data collected included everything from the nutrient and major element levels in their tanks to the foods and and how they feed their corals. I also got a lot of information on their lighting and the flow in their tanks and I consolidated all of this information. This pooled information will be in a future article as the results provide a good baseline from which to start a successful reef tank.

Looking on the positive side, being in quarantine with free time has forced me and many others to find ways to spend our free time doing something useful, rather than just killing time watching sports or tv. One of the best ways that I found to use this time was to do the things on my tank, that I tried to avoid as they are not fun, or that would make life simpler if I fixed them or I simply did not realize I needed to do them but found them when I was looking for things to do. Sadly, despite our best intentions there are always things that we put off or don’t do on our tanks as they are not fun or sexy to do. But with this much free time I simply could not put them off and continue to feel good about it. To make it feel like I was accomplishing something useful on my tanks, First I made a bucket list of the things I needed to do or had been putting off and that got things started. This list included, cleaning out the make-up water chamber, cleaning the overflows on the tanks that were not easy to get to, breaking down and cleaning all of the lights, changing the hinges on the stands that had rusted, and taking apart all of the plumbing and cleaning it of calcium deposits and other things that had accumulated or grown in it and organizing all the extra equipment and other stuff that had been accumulating, including back up equipment. I also wanted to devise a better organization plan so that time would not be wasted looking for these things in the future when they were really needed. This was not an exhaustive list, as once I started doing things, I found many other things that needed done and as we all know there is always more to be done.

Figuring out these things that needed to be done and then doing them, was one major accomplishment that I achieved during this time, another was that I did significantly more testing on all of my tanks. Just like the above-mentioned tasks that (I) we don’t like to do, water testing is a necessary evil. But I learned that by doing some testing daily, it was possible to learn to do it relatively quickly while still being precise and accurate. And doing daily testing helped me keep the tank more stable than it had ever been. Some tests like Alkalinity and pH had been done regularly, but with the extra time that I now had, I started doing these tests daily or even more often. To these two, I added daily tests for calcium, and nitrate and nitrite, ammonia and phosphate. Most of these tests were relatively stable from day to day, but I did find that there could be a fair amount of variability if these tests were done at different times during the day, especially if these times were morning and evening. I also found that things like feeding, what was fed, and where the tank was in the light cycle could impact these numbers. While the values did not bounce so much as to be worrisome, they did show more variability throughout the day than I had expected. Because of these findings, while I am still doing a lot of daily testing, I am also now noting the time of day when the tests are being done and keeping track on a daily/weekly/monthly log so that values and their times can be compared. By doing tests this often I also learned to not chase numbers but rather gradually get the tanks to the numbers I desired. So instead of dumping a large bolus of buffer or calcium chloride in a tank when the numbers were low, I would take 3-4 days or even a week to get them to their desired level. By doing things more slowly than I had in the past I believe caused less stress on the corals and the tank on the whole, which to me is a positive thing.

The last thing that being home with all of this free time has allowed, and which is probably the most positive aspect of all of this, is that it provided me with an opportunity to simply sit and watch my tanks for longer than I had been able to before. Hopefully this time has afforded all of you this opportunity to spend more time enjoying your tanks as well. Considering how much time and effort we spend on our tanks, it is sad that when you think of it, we rarely have the chance to just sit and watch our tanks for really extended periods of time. Sadly, most of us only get to watch our tanks as we feed the fish or do maintenance and rarely much time otherwise. By sitting and watching and not doing anything else it took the fish some time to act normally and not be in feeding mode. As a result, I got to observe their more natural behaviors and not their behavior to get me to feed them. Once they started behaving normally it was easy to determine who were the dominant fish in the tank and within groups of fish like the cardinals and anthias. I observed which fish liked to pick at the rocks and which ones picked on corals or other inverts. I got to see where specific fish liked to hide, which could be useful later if I need to remove them and I also saw who harassed who and which fish might be in trouble both now and in the future. Daily regular observation also let me see which corals might be suffering and which were starting to wobble, so they could be reattached before they fell into their neighbors. Sitting and watching also allowed for the water flow to be adjusted and what affect it had throughout the tank in the short term rather than waiting until the next time the tank was fed. And lastly it gave me a better idea of how fast coral growth was occurring and what each affect a coral’s growth might have on its neighbors. Starting my tank with all frags has really let me see how different the growth rates are for different corals. While I knew all corals do not grow at the same pace, seeing them all start from small frags and now seeing some at colony size while others are still just frags has been interesting to observe.

The pandemic we are all suffering through now is a once in a lifetime occurrence hopefully, that has affected virtually everyone throughout the world at the same time and in the same ways. Sadly, things will not be back to being totally normal for the foreseeable future and hopefully there will not be a second wave. While impacting the hobby negatively in a lot of ways, on a positive note it has provided us with one of the things that we rarely have enough of: free time. So, we should take this opportunity to do the things we’ve wanted to do on our tanks that require time that we could not do before. As with most negative things in life we should also take this as an opportunity to learn from what happened, so we can avoid making the same mistakes in the future. Hopefully there will be some positives that coming from this. Stay safe everyone and remember we are all in this together.