It is important to provide your aquarium inhabitants with a happy and secure environment to live in, meaning you not only need to create lots of nooks and crannies where each individual animal can find a "house" to live in, but have places where they can go to avoid harassment that may occur from other tankmates as well. This can easily be accomplished by using rocks, corals, or or a combination of both to make arrangements in the tank that will serve these purposes.
Aquascaping with Rocks
Whether you decide to use rocks that are live, non-living, or a mix of both, creating rock formations is not only easy, but fun. When you take different sized and shaped rocks, stack and piece them together to form arches, tunnels, and cubby holes that fish in particular can swim through and go into, it's like constructing a jigsaw puzzle. There is a sense of accomplishment and pride of how it looks when you are all done, and your tank inhabitants will love it too!
By far live rock is the most popular type chosen, but there are natural as well as manufactured rocks available, and even though non-living rocks start out dead, as the aquarium matures, so do the rocks, and in time they become "live".
- Rock Buying Tips: The best kind of rocks to buy are those high in calicum as well as strontium content, and that are of ocean origin. Be careful with land-quarried rocks as well as products sold specifically for use with "reptiles", because these structures may contain elements that can be problematic in saltwater systems, such as iron, silicon/silicate, phosporous/phosphate, lead, copper, etc.
Aquascaping with Corals
A true reef naturalist would not even think about having anything but real live soft and stony corals in their system. However for those that do not desire to keep live corals, may not be able to afford them, or have fish that are harmful to corals, there are lots of non-living corals and beautiful lifelike synthetic decorative replicas available to buy that will give your aquarium the look of a reef.
Whether you decide to use live, non-living, or synthetic corals, or you do not want a full-blown coral reef system, by placing individual pieces or clusters of corals around the aquarium it helps to break-up open spaces into what might be called "sections". This then provides divided areas throughtout the tank where fish in particular can go to hide, sleep, and keep away from another tankmates if necessary, as well as are places of refuge for motile crustaceans and invertebrates.
- Non-Living Coral Buying Tips: Be sure whatever you buy has not been treated with chemicals, and does not have a protective coating applied. Even though there is little or no concern about buying synthetic replications specified for saltwater use made by brand name aquarium supply manufacturers, as they design these products to be aquarium safe, be watchful for knockoff products out there that may not be constructed of inappropriate materials.
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