s a small child growing up near Rotterdam
in South Holland, I became captivated with
fishes in aquariums, and I was thrilled when,
at the age of seven, I received my first tank
as a birthday present. A few years later I got
interested in saltwater fishes. This was some 25 years
ago, and there were relatively few fishes in the marine
section of my local pet shop, but they fascinated me even
more than the plethora of species in the freshwater aisle.
When I finally made the switch to saltwater, I started
at a very basic level. Today the tank I had would be called
a nano aquarium, and I kept some shrimp, a feather-
duster, and couple of damselfishes. I was also very fond
of the small Asterina starfish I got from the pet store for
free, not knowing it was actually considered a pest.
As my pocket money and my knowledge grew, I grad-
ually upgraded the tank. I switched to keeping “easy”
soft corals, then moved to large-polyp stony corals
(LPS). In the middle of the 1990s I started experiment-
ing with small-polyp stony (SPS) corals, which only a
few very experienced aquarists were keeping at the time.These corals were much less commonly
available than they are now. Keeping (and
even finding) a brown Acropora with blue
tips was considered a major achievement.
In the Netherlands, most people were still
keeping soft corals and macroalgae such
as Caulerpa.
As time went on, I transformed my
LPS reef into an aquarium that contained
mainly SPS corals. For the first few years I
did not even dare to keep a dwarf angelfish
in the tank—I had read and been told that
they would nip at my corals, slowly but
surely killing them. A few years later my lo-
cal aquarium shop had a Harlequin Filefish,
Oxymonacanthus longirostris, available.
This species has a reputation for starving in the aquarium
because it cannot find its natural food—SPS coral polyps.
This particular fish had been brought back to the store by
a customer and was already eating frozen foods. Because
my corals were growing very well, I took the corallivoreA
Keeping challenging and “unsafe” fishes in
a rule-bending 200-gallon reef systemStrange Tankmates
aquarium portrait | TANNE HOFF
ALL: TANNE HOFF
Tanne Hoff