I had a short stint as a zookeeper at the Houston Zoo Kipp aquarium from late 2001 to early 2004. The senior aquarist recruited me from a local aquarium store I worked at. Having worked in the aquarium industry since 1994, I had been around and been involved in some high-level stuff for those times so the senior aquarist thought I was a good fit. After an interview with the curator of fishes, where we stood in front of one of the reef systems and I rattled off Latin names of fish and corals, as well as talked about chemistry and equipment, I was told the job was mine. I was pretty competent with saltwater reef systems and that is what they needed me for, the 4,000 gallon reef zones exhibit. It had been badly neglected by the former zookeeper in charge of it. The sad thing is the zoo was still owned by the city at the time and the former reef zookeeper just neglected it out of boredom and city employees are notoriously hard to fire. I was stoked and ready to take on such a big tank.

It was actually 3 aquarium staggered next to each other and they all tied into a 1,200 gallon fiberglass sump. If I remember correctly, each of the tanks was a 5.5′ cube. The skimmer was a 12′ tall RK2 that seemed so cool at the time because it was the first time I was around a skimmer that had a manual wash-down feature that would clean the skimmer head. It was just a ball valve you could turn and it would spray all the crud away. I thought it was a little strange because they had it tied to the city water line and I felt weird about even a tiny amount of tap water going into the reefs. I admit it probably wouldn’t have any effect but I never used that feature much. I would just run the internal level up a bit for a day or two and let the bubble action remove the crud itself and do a little water change in the process…basically wet skimming just like THIS blog post I wrote.

Each tank had two 1,000 watt screw-in metal halide bulbs up front and two 400 watt screw-in metal halide bulbs in the back. I hated the front 1,000 watt bulbs because they were those old Venture bulbs and were terribly yellow and ran off of tar ballasts. I had them convinced to change to electronic ballasts and better bulbs by the time I left but I don’t know if or when they ever did. The bulbs in back were 20,000 kelvin Radium bulbs which were cool for the time.

Let me pause here to say it is funny that I have gotten a taste of two worlds in the industry. Zoos and public aquariums don’t go for the overly blue lighting that hobbyists do. It’s honestly not natural, but I get it. I think it can look cool either way. So you see, that was it for the lighting. No actinic supplementation of any kind. The tanks were deep enough that I am not even sure if anything was available at the time with actinic spectrum that would even punch down that far like LEDs would today. I don’t think any actinic source such as VHO or power compact back then would even be perceptible in the mix with the 1,000 watt Ventures. So, yes, the tanks were more yellow than I was used to.

The main pump was impressive. The brand was called Fybroc and has HUGE…to me. I know many of you public aquarium people will have been around larger but this pump was huge compared to what I had ever been around. Fybroc used all non-corrosive materials in the volute, where all saltwater would come into contact, so it was reef safe. These pumps are generally made for the oil and gas industry I believe. If I remember correctly, it pumped about 20,000 GPH and each tank had two 6″ lines, one on each side, as returns. I remember the water pressure coming through those 6″ lines was impressive. The sad thing was, internal aquarium circulation pumps didn’t really exist at the time, meaning purpose built pumps specifically made for circulating water via a propeller and not an impeller. I remember each tank had two Rio submersible water pumps hidden in the front corners blowing at the reef structure…not the greatest solution but it’s what we had.

Another part I wasn’t fond of was that all three tanks utilized the Jaubert method were there was a false bottom covered in lots of aragonite gravel and some window screen halfway and then more gravel. I’m not going to go all into why I didn’t like it but it just didn’t seem very effective and it was annoying that it couldn’t be removed without a major overhaul.

I fought hard to add some sort of refugium to the system, which is funny because they were somewhat novel at the time. Maybe you could say a little en vogue because Leng Sy’s Ecosystem refugiums were all the rage with that Miracle Mud. We didn’t really have Chaetomorpha back then and we used Caulerpa racemosa or Caulerpa prolifera. I prefered C. prolifera because C. racemosa would grow really well, go into some reproductive phase and crash, releasing all the toxins it had collected. By the way, I found an old book in the zoo aquarium written by a name that many people have forgotten, Stephen Spotte. I believe it was Marine Aquarium Keeping written in 1973, two years before I was born, and had a chapter about using marine algae as a filter on aquariums…Don’t forget we all stand on the shoulders of giants. I kind of felt Like Xenophon staring at the ruins of the Assyrian empire at Nineveh during the Ten Thousand Retreat in 401 B.C. …If you get that reference you get extra points. The refugium experiment I was allowed to put together was truly pathetic, especially by today’s standards. I put two I-beams made out of fiberglass across the 1,200 gallon sump and placed a dimly lit 30 gallon filled with Caulerpa prolifera on it…a 30 gallon refugium for a 4,000 gallon system. Siiiiigh. It was tough to get the necessary budget for things at a municipally held zoo.

One of the most fascinating parts of the job for me is that we had a full blown lab that we ran attached to the aquarium. This is where we would test parameters and mix our own chemicals for dosing into the tanks. I would mix iodine solutions from dry chemicals, magnesium, carbonates/bicarbonates, calcium liquid, all the things I would test for and add to the tanks. This is so common place now, especially once Bulk Reef Supply came around, but it was pretty novel for me back then. I actually grew to hate the lab over time because I would spend so much time recording parameters for our AZA accreditation while trying to not fall asleep that I almost welcomed the ever-present smell of formaldehyde and other scary chemicals we kept in there. Basically we had to document all these parameters daily and show our logs on a monthly basis to the American Zoological Association to keep our accreditation current. Basically “See? We are doing our best to keep things alive.”. Most of our testing equipment was from Hach and we had the DR5000 spectrophotometer as well as a digital titrator to test calcium and magnesium along with a set-up to test pH with that I now think was horribly inaccurate. It was an armature (kind of like an old lamp with springs on it) that held a pH probe that you would stick into a glass beaker filled with aquarium sample. You’d put a Teflon coated metallic stir bar in the sample and throw it on a stir plate. The stir plate would make the stir bar inside the glass container spin and then you would record the pH after the reading stopped drifting. Sometimes this took way too long and I literally fell on the floor once because I passed out staring at it. I do have to admit that it was eye opening to me to use the DR5000 though. To be able to test Nitrate to the ten thousandths place was an insane concept to me…but I now realize is absolutely useless.

Every other week, I had to get into each of the three reef aquarium and scrub stuff away from the rocks and move things around under water. They intended to pay for me to get scuba certified but we never got around to it before I left. It would have been easier for me to put on scuba gear and stay under. Instead I would have to spend around 2 hours crouching down and standing up about 20 seconds later in order to gulp in air and go back down. Sounds unbelievably stupid, right? It’s what we did. I’m 6’3″ and the tanks were 5’6″ so I could just stand up in them. I had to put on a dry suit and lead belt in order to make it work. The lead belt to counter act my buoyancy and the dry suit because, honestly the tanks were kind of cold but mostly we had some hydroid issues in the tank and they would sting exposed skin areas so I just preferred the dry suit. I know I burned tons of calories doing this, two hours straight of squatting, standing, gulping air, going back down, ad naseum. They couldn’t allow me to just throw on the scuba gear for liability reasons. If I drowned and wasn’t certified, my next of kin could sue. Let me tell you something though; being 6’3″, if I died in 5’6″ of water, I deserved to be removed from the gene pool. Good news is I didn’t die and am still alive to tell the tale.

Now I will tell you a little bone-headed mistake I made that almost got me fired after working there only 2 months. The 1,200 gallon fiberglass sump that all the tanks fed into had a massive amount of scale in it. Minerals that had fallen out of solution and were like thin sheets of calcareous material. Hundreds of pounds of it. The boss said we could address it soon but it was annoying the Hell out of me just looking at it so one day I started pushing some of it into the intake for that big Fybroc main pump, not thinking much of it. I didn’t work the next day but I got a call from the senior, he was pissed. He asked me if I had pushed some of that scale into the main pump intake. Well, I’m honest to a fault because I suck at lying so I told the truth. Apparently that scale whips through the intake so fast, it turns into calcareous shuriken (Chinese stars for those non-ninjas out there) that royally screwed up the seal on the pump, causing it to leak. Not only was the pump leaking but that pump had to be serviced by Fybroc and that seal cost more than I made in a couple months. Thankfully my good looks, sharp wit and undeniable charm held me on so I could further prove I had what it took to be a zookeeper, which is basically trying not to break things and wearing a khaki outfit with boots like Steve Irwin, Neptune rest his soul.

So you might be wondering where are all my photos of this experience? This was before camera phones that were worth a darn. Before iPhones for sure. Besides, zookeepers don’t get paid enough to even live in a van down by the river so all I have are my vivid memories, and that’s just fine with me.

Thanks for following along and I hope it will be half as much fun reading as it was for me writing it.