TikTok viral: Watch this backyard swimming pool transform into a full-blown aquarium

For beach lovers, snorkeling is a classic way to spend a summer day. Now, a group of content creators on TikTok have found a way to bring the snorkeling back home, and they’re going viral.

TikTok’s Aquarena took to the social media platform to post a video where the team transformed their backyard swimming pool into a full-blown aquarium. Filled with massive plots of coral, this temperature controlled pool has everything from Yellow Tang to sharks. With 19.3 million views at the time of this writing, the backyard attraction is picking up steam on social media. Not all of the attention is good, however.

“Nah I feel bad for the fish,” “yk how much chlorine has seeped into the sides of the pool, that’s gonna kill the fish rip,” “all the chlorine from the old pool is almost impossible to completely remove. Those fish will be lucky to live,” read some of the TikTok posts top comments. It’s a fair point. The chemicals used to clean swimming pools, such as chlorine, are fatal to fish. Beyond that, salt water pools are not appropriate environments for fish, according to easyclearpool.com.

“‘Saltwater pool’ is a misleading name for this specific type of pool,” the company said on its website. “Rather than being filled with salt water, a saltwater pool is equipped with a specialized salt-chlorine generator that converts salt into chlorine within the water, which is then used as the cleaning agent for the pool.”

Consequently, the pool would still be filled with chemicals deadly to fish. The company suggested utilizing a natural swimming pool, a man-made pond filled with water filtering plant life, if you want to populate it with fish.

While the Aquarena team does not provide any details on how they created their swimming pool aquarium, the TikTok video does feature the hashtags “#saltwateraquarium” and “#saltwatertank” with no mention of the pool being a standard saltwater pool. In the video, a truck can also be seen transporting some kind of water to the site to fill the pool.