Fish have been around a lot longer than us modern bipeds. Hundreds of millions of years compared to a couple of hundred thousand for modern humans. The fossil fish pictured here probably lived during the Eocene, between 56 and 34 million years ago. Its basic structure doesn’t look a whole lot different from many of the fish we find in our aquariums today.

Sharks were swimming about 400 million years ago and have changed little since. And even more remarkable was the discovery of a “living fossil” in the waters of the Indian Ocean. It was widely accepted that coelacanths had been extinct since the end of the Cretaceous, or about 65 million years ago, roughly the same time as the dinosaurs met their demise. So it was a worldwide news story in 1938 when a coelacanth turned up in a fisherman’s net off the coast of South Africa.

As long as fish and people have coexisted, humans have been fascinated with these finned creatures of the deep. Fish have been the subject of art and literature. Fish hold a special fascination for humans because — unlike pretty much every other kind of animal life — they live and move through an entirely different medium than we do: water.

Obviously, this strong attraction to these alien life forms ultimately lead people to attempt to keep fish in “glass boxes” and to replicate their worlds as best as possible under artificial conditions. And this ultimately gave birth to the modern aquarium hobby.

When you think about it, whether keeping freshwater fish or marine species, the glass (often acrylic these days) box is still mostly what we see in the hobby. What has changed markedly since the hobby’s debut during Victorian times has been what we do with these boxes.

Hopefully, this special issue of FAMA will inspire you to think “out of the box” about what goes on in the box. This unique-tank issue offers nine different takes on the “glass box,” including a sea grass biotope for seahorses; a custom-built 1,200-gallon backyard coral propagation system; a tide pool refugium; a unique tank that incorporates feeding tubes and special swimways to enable fish to move freely between compartments; several types of paludariums (a mix of land and water); an African garden aquascape; a betta breeding setup; a native fish aquarium and an aquarium set up specifically for bottom-dwelling fish.

While the “glass box” is still the mainstay, its interpretation is anybody’s game and an enjoyable aspect of today’s hobby. There are as many aquariums as aquarists. I hope this issue inspires you to do something different with your particular “box.”