Form or function: Do you consider your rock work to be art or the platform for your coral?

[vlangel]

Way back when I was an aquarium tech for a lfs, I would remove a portion of the dead coral skeletons and bleach them white again. That is just what we did in a lot of FOWLR tanks. Anyway, I had to rescape the tank probably 4Xs a year. Multiply that by 25+ tanks and it added up to a lot of aquascaping. I did that a number of years and got pretty good at it. So even now when I have coral, for me the aquascape is primary.

 

[Reef Puncher]

It’s my first tank and tried to keep fish in mind when building the aquascape but also wanted it to look good. It’s also has plenty of room for some corals.

i really like this. did you make it yourself?

 

[2Wheelsonly]

I went overboard with my first two tanks when making the rock scape. After about 5 years in I realized the end goal was to have a tank filled with corals and the rock now acts as real estate for my corals.

If things are going right you wont see them after a year or two. Even archways and canyons vanished as my corals grew to massive sizes. The best rock work now is a tiered platform towards the back of the tank almost like stadium seating so I can have rows and depth of SPS colonies.

 

[2Wheelsonly]

It’s my first tank and tried to keep fish in mind when building the aquascape but also wanted it to look good. It’s also has plenty of room for some corals.

This is good for a fish only tank but if you manage to have success with corals then you're going to wish you didn't have such drastic vertical formations. SPS on the top will overshadow everything underneath and you will have bare rock towers with corals above.

 

[Timfish]

Rock work is a foundation for corals. It should also be "relatively' easy to redo to accomodate corals as they grow