Here's some of the environments I often head to on weekends.
Not a bad place to live and visit?
A local place is often the best place to find inspiration, oddly, many folks have never really sat down and seen the complexity of the rocky intertidal, when I go through and point out things, it opens up a whle new world they have not seen before.

That is one of the goals of aquascaping, showing that world in an aquaria.
Amano has done this with Japanese terrestrial gardens and natural locations he has traveled to.

One of my personal scaping goals is replicating marine plant enviornments and bring that to the hobby.

The colors of the fish and macro algae are nothing short of stunning.
The diversity is astounding as are the colors.

A chiller is requires for all of these organisms, but that's a bit more $ than a CO2 system and still generally less involved than some reef tanks.

The high biomass of macro algae is able to purify the water column effectively.
This means nice looking coral like reef diversity with easy fast growing seaweeds.
This stays true to plants and algae as exporters of nutrients and provides a better balance without skimmers.

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here's more:

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Oh, of course there's more:
The star fish is about 18" across! It's the largest sun star I've ever seen, gnarly purple and orange coloration, they normally are a orange color when smaller.

There are many abalone, Chitons, crabs, other star fish species, bright orange volcano sponge and gobies in these locations.

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But there's always more!

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And yet still more:

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Star fishy, about 16" or more across, this is much bigger than a dinner plate

The younger ones are orange.

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I think you mean the state marine fish...Golden Trout is the state fish of CA...

Lovely environments, great pictures. Thanks.

Bill

Bill, one of my goals after doing some extensive work with MBA was to try any replicate some of the tide pool species for smaller hobby systems.

I have a 50 Cube I'll be soon working on for this at home here.

I did a similar thing when I saw the biotope in the Florida Keys(there are 5 or so there).

I think I can do this even easier, but of course need to add a chiller and keep things at about 58F.

Tide pool species can handle rough temps and salinities and low flows, but they still need the torrents.

That is the biggest challenge,the species and nutrients etc, the habitat is right near by so I can check and think about what needs to be done to get things to grow correctly and perhaps amplify the growth.

Regards,
Tom Barr