This was actually a big issue for us, especially when we first moved two 180gal systems side-by-side in our garage. Your absolutely right, Richmond winters get COLD! Fortunately, our garage is also half underground and insulated. As of last winter we still had two 180gal tanks side-by-side in our garage (we traded one of our 180s to a member of our local club for corals this spring)... and to be perfectly honest, the winters weren't the hardest part, the summers with 1600w of lighting was a bit painful on the electrical bill due to the amount of additional electricity we were burning keeping it cool. Thankfully, we won't be running anywhere near that kind of light over a shark pond (which will be the only water down there long-term)
Scott Michael's literature on these sharks documents that they grow up to 2"/yearly... these little pups shouldn't quickly dwarf their current holding tank. The female won't be large enough to be sexually mature for another 6 years. If it takes us a 3 months to finish the pond, the sharks could end growing a sluggish 0.5". This seems VERY slow to me, but these are exceptionally lethargic as far as elasmobranches go, and despite consuming relatively large chunks of food, they don't eat nearly as frequently as hyperactive "big" fish like tangs do! Our last hippo tang (which reached about a ft long) would swallow multiple cubes of frozen food before ripping through sheets of greens every day.. !
These definitely were an impulse buy in the sense that I was not planning on buying a shark (or two!) that night. I've been looking forward to keeping epaulettes for a very long time, but did not expect them yet.
For a bit of background with this - I've been talking with wife for months about purchasing an epaulette from one of the LFS that has had them in stock. We had not moved forward on purchasing it, because we had also custom ordered an acrylic aquarium and a new deltec APF800 over a half-year ago, and the store (which also exclusively handles all Deltec warranty and repair work) has not been able to address getting this skimmer to cut on when it's plugged in since day one, and the tank is already having some crazing and milky issues in the seams. I'll spare this thread all the details of these problems, but we wanted to make sure we weren't throwing good money after bad with this particular store.
As far as the kid situation is concerned, that is why we can't keep these in the house long-term... with a toddler and infant, we can't do a pond in the house...it has to be in the garage. I'm just not 100% comfortable that we can keep kids out of a pond if it's in the house... but the garage is below the house and locked off, they have never been down there. Not sure where a moon-bounce reference came from... but don't give my wife that idea, we'll run out of room for tanks
