Gabor Horvath goes extra-curricular by returning to school, only this time around he’s sharing rather than learning.
SETTING UP A new tank is always a challenge. You must make sure that every parameter is spot on before introducing any livestock. You do frequent water tests and make adjustments if and when necessary. Having a tank at home means that you can check it at least once a day and you also know what goes into the tank, putting you in control over the whole process.
Setting up an aquarium in a communal space brings extra challenges. You can’t check the tank daily and there could be unexpected complications. In one of my recent outsourced projects an overly enthusiastic cleaner—an employee who was new to the job and was told to make sure that every light was switched off before she left the building—decided to turn off every socket in the room, including the ones powering the filtration and the heating.
For an entire winter weekend, the tank was without power and cooled down to the level that killed most of its tropical inhabitants. As the other employees didn’t know what to do, they left everything as it was, and so everything remained switched off, a lethal delay for the remaining fish by the time the help arrived. At the end of this tragedy the aquarium required a complete restart.
Into class
The school environment raises the difficulty level even more. Those of us with kids will know how worrying it is to have even our own children around the tank—you just never know when they’ll decide to feed something ‘special’ to your fish or pour bubble bath in for them to enjoy a perfect spa.
In a school you have hundreds of children to worry about, so you need to be both determined and brave to start a fish tank there. A few years ago, I set up a freshwater aquarium in the local primary school and it was highly successful, so when Elena Jackson from the Tropical Marine Centre (TMC) asked me I whether I was interested in setting up a marine tank in another school I said yes without hesitation. Based on my previous experiences I thought that I was prepared for every possibility and I could easily tackle them. Alas, I was wrong.
At the beginning everything was nice and rosy. Based on the brief I received from the TMC—namely that they wanted to see if older children could run a small marine tank—I decided to set the tank up in my children’s school, the Treorchy Comprehensive School in the Rhondda Valley.
The Headteacher and the Head of Science were both enthusiastic about the project so the idea of an aftersch
