[Dolf]

This is much more than a dog or cat. Yes, fish are underappreciated, but it is more than that. I don’t think that I have ever heard of the SPCA charging somebody with causing a SPS colony to suffer and die because they kept it under a single T-5 in a tank that was still cycling.

This is the perfect hobby for the budding megalomaniac- you have complete control over the environment of everything in your tank from light to temperature, salinity, nutrients, feed, water flow and what everything will have to live with as a neighbour. You become the vet and you need to do your research to be successful. Perhaps that is the relaxing part of this “hobby”- research and the feeling of keeping a diverse complete ecosystem where it would be considered impossible if not for your efforts (ever dropped a tang into Slave lake?) It is much more involved that keeping any large animal where the parameters are not only known- but it becomes immediately apparent if you have breeched those parameters.

This appeals to the researcher, the scientist, the artist and, again, the megalomaniac as a hobby. The frustrations are the price that you pay to have a very unique experience. One of the things that I most love is that there are thousands of ways to keep a tank that work and billions that don’t. This means that there are hard and fast rules but many rules can be bent and changed by “tweaking” a seemingly unrelated process.

Bauder hit it on the head when he said that if it were not challenging the rewards would not be worth it. If any idiot could run out and set up a tank it would loose it’s appeal to many of us. (O.K, any idiot can set it up- just not keep a challenging species successfully.) I suspect that most of us on this board enjoy a challenge and being able to see the results of our work and that it is that feeling of accomplishment that allows it to be classified as a hobby.

One final thought- even if you are staying home from work cleaning up water from the floor it was still “spare time” as you had nothing better to do than clean it up. If work were more important you would be there- you are filling your spare time with tank maintenance instead of work. So I argue that everything that we do on our tanks (even if it breaks “date night”, causes job loss, financial insecurity, ends in divorce, garners eye rolling, tears, blood or death) is done in our spare time.