anyone made a "table top tank"?

kellymarie

Hello everyone! I am new to this site, but after searching I wasn't able to find what I was looking for ,so here goes...

I was at a new local Aquarium store with my son checking out the tanks the other day. We came across an unusual tank near the front of the store. We'd like to try and recreate it at home. I'd like to get some advice if anyone on here has something similar.

We asked the store employee about it, but they said "it's just for display and not for sale"...we'd like to try and do our own for fun anyway. I'll try and describe it, and if anyone could help, great!!

(by the way-we are fish "novices" ,,we do have a small tank with a male Betta fish that we've had for about a year, and another 5 gallon tank with a few guppies in it.)

The tank at the store looked like it was a shallow heavy duty rubbermaid tank-it was dark grey in color. Kind of like a water trough, only shallow. It was maybe 8 or 12 inches deep, rounded ends.

They had alot of what looked like sand covering the bottom, and some coral looking things in there and some rocks. They had anenomes(sorry, about the spelling), some small fish that looked like clown fish ,some fish that looked like angel fish (very small), a few guppies, some snails, some ghost shrimp.

The tank reminded me of a "touch tank"...but you couldn't touch anything in it. It was raised up on a sturdy wooden rack to about chest level so you could look in. At the time I didn't notice the filter system..it did have an overhead light shining down on it.

Any advice would be great!! We'd love to do this as a family activity sometime this year.
Thanks,
Kelly

fish_4_all

Well I wish I had better advice but I have not been able to find much about table top tanks.

If I were to make a table top tank like you described I would be looking for a seemless tank in the size I want that is fitted and can be custom cut to accomodate the filters and other needed equipment. A salt tank will need a lot more equipment and special fit needs. I would also find out what the best way would be get the lighitng I needed. For a salt tank with corals, anenomy and other critters you need a lot of lighting and trying to get this for your setup could be difficult.

My honest suggestion is to make some more posts about exactly what you want to keep in the tank, about how big it could be and what you really want to. Setting up for fresh water is going to be an endeavor in itself where salt is going to take a lot of informaiton to make sure you get going in the right direction.

Ask lots of questions and eventually with the members here we will get you going in the right direction so you can have a fun and pleasant experience without too many of the pitfalls that so many can encounter jumping in head first.