His name was Rocky. A clownfish, living in a sea anemone, in my parents' saltwater tank. We had a freshwater tank too, but Rocky is the one I remember. I was a kid, and I could not work out why the anemone wasn't stinging him. Two animals with nothing in common, one of them covered in weapons, and they'd decided to look after each other. I was mesmerised. I've never really stopped being mesmerised.
Our tanks grew. In high school I worked at an aquarium shop in New Jersey called Ocean Aquarium, where I met one of my best friends and where the hobby properly got its hooks into me. In college I still had tanks; a 20 high was a favourite, and then the classic 55. I'm still in it today. Two reef tanks.
In all that time, what I keep seeing is people losing animals they could have kept. Copper dosed into a tank full of shrimp. Ich treated when it was velvet. A dose taken from a stranger on a forum who had never seen the tank. The fish didn't die because the hobby is hard. They died because the information was wrong.
Meanwhile the local fish stores, the ones with somebody behind the counter who actually knew things, keep closing. What's left is the open internet, and for fish health that is the wild west.
So TANKSENSE is my attempt to put the good counter back. Triggy runs on Claude, but the part that matters is what I built around it: he's held to vetted aquatic-veterinary sources for anything to do with fish health, he's given your actual tank to reason about, and he is hard-stopped from the things that kill fish. He will never give you a dose, and he will never tell you to do something drastic. When he doesn't know, he says so.
My goal is simple. Help people love and care for their aquariums, any size, any type, and give something back to a hobby that has given me most of my life. I'm here to save fish.
I've got a few other ideas up my sleeve, too.
— Scott MorvayFounder, TANKSENSE