A day as an Aquarist
Most of an aquarist's day happens where the public never looks. You're behind the glass, on catwalks above the tanks, in the quarantine room and the pump gallery, keeping water chemistry steady so the animals out front look effortless. The job is part animal care, part plumbing, part science, and it smells like salt and wet concrete.
Which aquarium this day describes
This is a public aquarium with a few big saltwater exhibits, a row of smaller freshwater displays, a quarantine area off limits to visitors and a basement full of pumps, sand filters and protein skimmers. You're on the fish and invertebrate team, not the marine mammal team. At a smaller facility you'd cover more of the building yourself. At a research lab or a hatchery the routine shifts toward breeding records and water trials, but the core of the job, reading water and reading animals, stays the same.
From the first water test to the last log entry
Walk the system before anyone else does
You start with a round of every tank on your section, flashlight in hand. You check that pumps are humming, chillers are holding temperature, the overflow isn't clogged and nothing is dead or hiding where it shouldn't be. A fish tucked in a corner with clamped fins gets a note on your clipboard. Then you pull water samples and run ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, salinity and alkalinity tests, logging every result in the husbandry database so the next shift can spot a trend.
Prep and feed
The food prep room is a kitchen that only serves animals. You thaw krill, mysis and squid, chop restaurant-grade fish to the right size, soak some of it in vitamins and weigh each portion against the diet sheet. Feeding is target work: a long pole with tongs for the moray, a squeeze bottle of plankton for the corals, a scatter across the surface for the schooling fish. You watch who eats and who doesn't, because a skipped meal is often the first sign something is wrong.
Into the big tank
A few days a week it's your turn on the dive rotation. You suit up, a dive safety officer or a tender runs through the checklist with you, and you drop into the main exhibit to scrub algae off the acrylic, vacuum the gravel and eyeball the sharks up close. Visitors wave at you through the glass. Sometimes a school group has a scheduled chat and you answer questions on a hand signal board, which is harder than it sounds with a regulator in your mouth.
The plan breaks
A skimmer in the basement stops foaming and the redox reading on the reef tank starts to slide. Your afternoon of cleaning quarantine tanks is gone. You trace it to a failed air intake, swap the part from the spares shelf, and then watch the readings for an hour to make sure they recover. Meanwhile the curator wants a partial water change on that tank tonight as insurance, so you're mixing saltwater in the big batch tanks and checking salinity before any of it goes in.
Quarantine, records and handoff
The new arrivals in quarantine get their own round: behavior notes, a look at their skin and gills, and a treatment dose if the vet has one prescribed. You clean nets and gear in the dip station so nothing crosses between systems. Before you leave you update the animal records, flag the skimmer failure for the life support team and write a short handoff note so the evening staff know which tank to keep an eye on.
How aquarists usually get their first job
Biology degree plus volunteer hours
The most common route. A degree in marine biology, zoology or a related science, paired with volunteer or intern time at an aquarium, zoo or university fish lab. Hiring managers care more about the hours you've spent doing water changes than about your grades.
The hobby and retail route
Some aquarists start at a specialty fish store or a coral farm, where they learn quarantine, plumbing and disease spotting on real systems. It's a slower path into a public aquarium, but you arrive knowing how to keep things alive, which some supervisors value above coursework.
Diving first, animals second
People who already dive often come in as dive volunteers, cleaning exhibits under supervision. That puts you in front of the husbandry team every week, and when a paid spot opens you're already a known quantity with the right certifications.
The part that wears people down
Nobody warns you how much of the job is cleaning. Glass, gravel, filter socks, buckets, nets, floors. The exciting animal moments are real, but they sit on top of a lot of routine that has to be done right every single day. Positions are also scarce, so you may move cities for your first paid role and wait a while before a senior spot opens. People who stay tend to love the problem-solving side: the day a tank crashes and you figure out why is the day you feel like an aquarist.
What Aquarist postings ask for
Hiring the most
- Basspro1
- Maritime Aquarium1
- Nc1
- Simon1
Remote
0% of openings are fully remote.
Questions people ask
Do you need to be a certified diver to be an aquarist?
Not everywhere, but a lot of public aquarium postings ask for it, and it widens the jobs you can take. Most facilities want an entry-level open water certification before you start and then train you further under their own dive safety program. Labs and hatcheries often don't need divers at all.
Is an aquarist the same as a marine biologist?
They overlap but aren't the same. A marine biologist usually studies animals in the wild or in research settings and spends a lot of time on data and writing. An aquarist keeps animals alive in managed systems day to day, so the work is far more hands-on: water quality, feeding, life support and husbandry records.
What does an aquarist get paid?
Check the pay figure on this page for your area. Pay tends to move with the size of the facility, whether you dive, whether you handle life support systems and whether you've moved up to senior aquarist or curator. Nonprofit aquariums and small zoos often pay less than big public aquariums or commercial aquaculture.
4 Aquarist jobs are open today
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