Ben's 6th Birthday Present?!

Ben has been in love with a blue crayfish that he had seen in a local pet store for about a year now. He was constantly reminding Allie and trying to determine a way to make it his own. Allie and I had been fairly convinced that having fish/crayfish was going to be more work than we had bargained for, so we tried to avoid bringing one into the house.

As time went by, we began to see that his interest might be sustainable and maybe we really should look into some sort of tank for Ben. Allie spoke with some fish shops and quickly found that blue crayfish would need to be housed alone. They will constantly try to kill any fish that are put in a tank with it. That didn't seem like that would be an interesting tank for very long.

At this point, Allie and I began to seriously talk about getting some sort of tank for Ben. Our ideas bounced between getting a small 10 gallon freshwater aquarium with shrimp and frogs to getting a 55+ gallon reef aquarium. After conferring with Ben again, we found out that he really wanted to have an aquarium with shrimp, snails, crabs and a starfish (after hearing that his beloved blue "lobster" would try to kill its tankmates). After doing about 20-40 hours of research and speaking with many local fish stores, we determined that it was possible to create a tank that could house what Ben wanted!

Now, however, Ben's dad had gotten himself hooked on the idea of a saltwater aquarium. I was VERY into the idea of an invertebrate tank with some corals and maybe 1 fish. The corals and the invertebrates were very exciting to me! I decided that Ben's aquarium (probably more aptly named the Boys aquarium) could be housed in a Oceanic Biocube 29 gallon all-in-one aquarium.

The setup that Ben requested for a tank was actually a very sustainable aquarium. Shrimp, crabs and snails have very little bioload on the tank. The hardest part was going to be providing enough grazing ground for the starfish. After a bit more research, I found that members of the serpent or brittle starfish could be successfully housed in a 20-ish gallon tank with enough live rock. Even adding a fish or two would likely also be very doable for this system. The plan was formed!