In agricultural Las Lomas, a hobbyist-turned-businessman works a farm of the seas.

Where most people might place a big-screen TV in their living room, Adam Jenson has a big-screen-like 180-gallon aquarium sitting inside his Las Lomas home, where brightly colored tropical fish dart about. Considering Jenson is founder and owner of Tiger Lily’s House of Fish, a successful retail ornamental fish and aquarium-keeping business, it’s not surprising. Yet while others might focus on the fish, for Jenson it’s what’s in the background that fascinates.

What dominates the tank is an array of what Jenson estimates are 60-80 different species of corals in a wide range of colors, shapes and sizes – animals that descend from those found in oceans around the globe. There are hard corals and soft corals and corals that look like trees. Joining them are a few swaying sea anemones, related to corals, in the same class called Anthozoa. Jenson has carefully propagated them in tanks in a basement space – a different sort of farm in North County’s agricultural region.

Jenson’s personal collection is just a sliver of the estimated 6,000 different species of coral in the world, a fact that captivates Jenson, a walking encyclopedia of coral knowledge he’s eager to share. The ocean and all its creatures hold sway with Jenson, who refers to an original quote from a personal hero, ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau: “The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.”

“I’m so passionate about the aquatic world,” Jenson says. “The corals are absolutely outstanding – the textures and the flow to them. The fish are brilliant, absolutely brilliant, but when you get into the different aspects of coral reefs… it’s just mind-boggling.”

Jenson began keeping aquariums of tropical fish as a child, and later began breeding the fish, eventually taking his stock to tropical fish stores to sell. At The Ultimate Aquarium in Monterey, owner Larry Procida became Jenson’s mentor. (The Ultimate Aquarium closed in 2022.) He showed Jenson how to propagate corals. Jenson bought an aquarium off of Craigslist to house his corals.

“One aquarium turned into 15,” Jenson says.

Along with an $850 electric bill, Tiger Lily’s House of Fish became an official business in 2017. He remembers his supportive wife, Jessica Sharkey, telling him, “fix it,” as she handed him the eye-popping bill. Fix it Jenson did, by turning his hobby into a business, selling fish and corals online, as well as installing and caring for the aquariums inside private homes and businesses.

At first Jenson was selling online to people around the country as well as locally, until things got chaotic. The pandemic coincided with the birth of the family’s second child. Jenson was so busy that his downstairs tanks got out of chemical balance, and he experienced an aquarist’s biggest enemy – a die-off, in which everything inside an aquarium perishes. As an essential business during the pandemic due to the fact that he was caring for the live animals of his clients, Tiger Lily’s was able to survive the shutdown, and the die-off. Since then, as he’s rebuilt his stock, he’s limited sales to customers within California.

One of his core aquarium clients is the memory care unit at Aegis Living in Aptos – aquariums improve the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and reducing patients’ stress, according to medical research. Jenson set up a donated tank for Aegis and from the existing corals inside that tank, he’s been able to seed other aquariums.

“That aspect of being able to be almost like a co-op has been fantastic,” he says, including the fact that it’s utilizing a captive-raised animal, as opposed to depleting ocean populations. Each aquarium is like a seed-bank for others, including organizations that are utilizing aquarists’ collections to replenish threatened coral reefs in other parts of the world.

Jenson’s business doesn’t afford him time to help repopulate reefs – yet – but he continues to populate other aquariums, even sharing corals with other aquarists for free, who in turn share their stock with him. Currently in his propagation tanks, a new population of corals is growing, ready to be shipped to a new home.