Under the sea

40-year-old Irfan Mirza loves the ocean so much that he put a mini version in his living room.

A striped Clownfish brushes across orange anemones swaying gently in the blue, while a school of bright yellow Tang fish swims past. Blue-hued Chromis fish move swiftly out of the way of the anemone tentacles swaying on the coral. Snails and hermit crabs scuttle behind live rocks resting on the smooth white sand.

Irfan Mirza’s living room houses a veritable miniature ocean.

“After a busy day at work, watching the aquarium is so soothing that it can put you to sleep,” says Mirza.

His huge saltwater aquarium takes 120 gallons of water and occupies half of his living-room. The 3-year-old aquarium — “one of the best in Pakistan” — according to Sajjad Mirza, Irfan’s bird-loving father — costs a total of Rs800, 000, including the marine creatures which have been imported from Malaysia.

Passionate about owning a saltwater aquarium since childhood, replicating the ocean’s natural environment is a feat Irfan achieved through “a lot of reading, and trial and error.” Grinning, he recalls how he once put the wrong species of fish together and they ended up killing each other. Another time, he put jumper fishes in an aquarium and by the next morning they had, surprise surprise, jumped out of the tiny holes in the tank. He also once added 10 fishes to a new tank, resulting in overcrowding so that all of them died at once.

Irfan’s aquarium is made special by the fact that it has living corals. “There are other enthusiasts in Pakistan but they mostly have only fish in their tanks.” Irfan, on the other hand, has even the highly poisonous button polyp corals. “Putting on gloves is recommended before dipping your hands in the aquarium, because their poison can kill,” explains Irfan nonchalantly. “Also, natural skin oils harm these corals.”

To sustain Irfan’s mini-ocean, each sea-creature plays it role. Fish eat food and their leftovers are broken down by shrimps and crabs, which also serve as cleaning stations. Cleaner shrimps stop the fish, enter their mouths and clean the bacteria residing within. The waste falls on live rocks where the ‘good bacteria’ break down food to ammonia, ammonia to nitrates and nitrates to nitrites, which are then released into water. Hermit crabs eat other leftovers while snails feed on algae and clean rocks. It’s a complete ecosystem.

They may play their roles harmoniously, but not all the aquarium residents are friends. They live in defined territories, and cross-border incursions can lead to attacks. Anemones serve as home for the clownfish, who in return feed them with their waste. This symbiotic relationship between the two is so strong that anemones sting every other fish that comes near them; the clownfish also get aggressive in order to protect their home.

This fragile ecosystem demands Irfan’s attention for an hour on weekdays and three hours on weekends when 10% of its water is replaced by home-made fresh saltwater. A test kit is vital to the system. A pH meter rests next to the aquarium with a probe in the water at all times. An alkalinity meter, a salinity meter and test solutions for calcium and magnesium are used frequently. “You don’t need to maintain water parameters in a tank with only fish,” explains Irfan. “However, with coral in an aquarium, you have to have salt, magnesium and calcium levels close to ocean water.”

Although corals mostly photosynthesise their food under halogen light, Irfan also feeds them food that he gets from abroad.

“Unfortunately, in Pakistan people don’t understand the water parameters and the strong light needed to sustain corals. Only two to three people import fish and no one imports corals. People don’t want to spend that kind of money. Australia, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia — all the best exporters of fish — have put a ban on selling corals as they are becoming extinct.”

“But this is only the pleasant-looking part,” he adds pointing to the bright fish swimming in the blue.

The ‘not-so-pleasant-looking’ part is the refugium sump kept in another room, one floor below the main tank and connected to it with a pipe. A cubical glass box covered with white thermopole is partitioned into a narrow sump and a broad refugium A refugium sump is an area of a saltwater tank that has been set aside from the main aquarium. A sump provides a convenient place for non-display accessories such as heaters, filtration media and skimming devices whereas a refugium is a sump that supports life, providing a suitable habitat for tiny organisms which filter a reef tank by feeding on waste materials.Dirty water falls into the sump and filters into the refugium where macro-algae consume waste nitrates. There’s more, but you kind of need a science degree to figure it out.

Next to the refugium sump lies a smaller tank connected to another refugium sump. This one has a lonesome fish swimming under blue-spectrum light amongst live rocks, waiting for macro-algae to grow. “This is cycling,” explains Irfan. The cycle starts when a dead shrimp is added to the tank with water and rocks. Bacteria grow cyclically for 6 to 8 months, till the tank is ready for fishes and corals.

Irfan is clearly passionate about this expensive, time-consuming hobby and takes an obvious pride in replicating the ocean’s ecosystem. “I am not really into banking,” says Irfan of his day job. “I work because I need a source of income to sustain this hobby.”

According to Nature’s World, the aquarium shop at Nisar Shaheed that Irfan patronises, the trend of owning saltwater aquariums is growing in Pakistan. Approximately 100 people in Karachi own saltwater fish-only aquariums and recently, there have been orders for corals as well.

“Sadly, the fish suppliers here do not encourage this hobby,” explains Irfan. “They sell for money and not for passion. Often, they sell dead, rotten fishes.”

While 7-year-old Manizeh often comments that her father only loves the fishes and not her, 9-year-old Minelle is fascinated by the vivid life in the aquarium. When asked if the aquarium gets more attention from her husband than she does, “No,” replies Irfan’s wife pleasantly. “Me and the fishes share his time equally.”

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, October 23^rd, 2011.