The main reason I don’t want to do anything live, is I’m about 99% sure I’ll be getting an Emperor angel.
You can find used lighting on reef2reef all the time. I'd highly recommend staying away from "live" rock that has creatures and shit already on it. Chances are there will be something dead on it that will cause a tank crash. If your local fish stores are anything like ours, I would just by base rock or real reef rock online from a place like marine depot.
If you arent in a rush to get livestock I'd honestly go with the dry rock or real reef rock like here https://www.marinedepot.com/rock-wood-and-plants/dry-rock?water_type=saltwater
I love mine from there. Got their base rock to form our foundation. Put the foundation on egg crate so our pistol shrimp can't topple over the stuff by his digging lol.
killrbee7 I'd highly recommend signing up for that forum as well. You can find a ton of good deals on used equipment and more information than you'll ever need.
My decision to never buy livestock from our LFS was reinforced this morning. Was just wondering around there this morning, there are always some sick/dead fish as is the case with most store I'm sure. But today there was a tang that literally looked like it had leprosy. Multiple scab like mounds on it. From talking to the guy that orders all our livestock now, it sounds like it was being basically eaten alive by multiple parasites. Poor fish. And since their display tanks are one big system, you can easily assume that those parasites are in all their tanks. Pics suck but you can kind of see what I'm talking about.
Need to get rid of our old set up now but it's going to have to be local (Nashville area) I'm sure. Used 75 gallon tanks and stands don't bring enough cash to try and ship.
So, I had ordered the waterbox 130.4 two weeks ago. Spoke to the shop today about it, and my tank is stuck on a freighter in China...they won’t let the ship leave due to coronavirus. Waterbox says they don’t expect it to arrive until “mid-Spring.” Looks like I may be getting a refund and getting a Red Sea.
got my tank set up a week ago. Just a 20 gallon freshwater starter kit. I've been noticing one of my tetras was nose up and just hanging by the heater. Not moving much at all. This morning I woke up and saw he was nose down in some drift wood and not moving. Moved the driftwood and he was just drifting with the current so I pulled him to flush him. He started moving a bit when he hit the toilet water. How big of an asshole am I for not waiting longer before pulling the plug? I feel like a jerk.
You did the right thing. Even with expensive saltwater ones, the guy that helps us doesn't wait many days before finishing them off. If they haven't improved after a day or so when they are doing things like you described, put them out of their misery. They are still living creatures, no need to make them suffer. Now he pulls them out and freezes them to kill them quickly but that's also so he can send samples to a lab. With things like tetras he just flushes them.
Just picked up some new guys that I traded work for. Powder blue tang, 2 bicolor blennys, 2 firefish and a pink headed goby. Will post pics when I get home.
Update on my situation. Ended up switching over to a RedSea XL 525 after the coronavirus Waterbox fiasco. Put it together a couple weeks ago and set it up with some live sand and CaribSea life rock. Dosed with a few doses of bacteria/microbes over the past two weeks and really want to get the tank cycling, so we got two clownfish. We got a DaVinci and a Black Snowflake.
Not great pics since they were in the buckets. I'll try and get better ones tomorrow once everyone is settled in.
We dosed ours with straight ammonia in addition to the microbes and bacteria. That jump started the cycle for us. Good looking clowns. Do you know if they are a mated pair?
Sump layout already came with the tank. As far as components, have two mechanical socks, a Vertex Omega 130 skimmer, and a Sicce Syncra ADV 5.5 return pump. Waiting on lighting to arrive (supposed to arrive by Thursday). Ended up sticking with RedSea and got three of the ReefLED50 with the mounting arms. Will get some pics up once I get them on.
We tried to pair a few different maroons together, but the one we really wanted was a complete bitch to every fish we tried. At that point, I started to look around the store more and found the DaVinci, and she was so pretty...had to get her.
Ditch the socks and get a couple filter cups. Redea makes them for their tanks. Best decision we made just about. No more washing socks and shit. Just throw in some media, throw it away when its used up, put new media in and repeat. I keep a couple socks on hand just for days when I like stir up the sand bed a lot or something.
My wife got ours when they were both "male" and tiny. Now we have a big, mean female and the male. Kind of wish we had an anomea for them to host and breed.
I have four slots, two with socks and two cups. Was gonna get some cheap foam media. I like the variety lol
Didn't realize a sump would come with that many. The sump for the 800 gallon tank l helped set up only has 2 openings. Granted they are 7" openings lol. Just my opinion..I would have the cups take on water first with just like some filter floss or the filter pad material in them, and then socks to do the final polishing of the water. My experience with socks has been either you have ones that filter out a lot of material well and you have to change/clean them constantly or you have ones with bigger holes that don't clog as quick but don't clean as well either.
Completely forgot about a nice camera we had sitting in the closet and turned the white up on the lights. Was able to actually get some good pics (minus the dirty glass and water from feeding them right before). Spoiler
Woke up to a dead powder blue today all the parameters except nitrates were fine and nitrates weren't that bad. May have just had something wrong internally.
Damn that sucks, picked up a Humuhumu on Friday. He found a crazy tight spot that he loves to trigger into at night.
Yea it sucks. From what I've read, powder blues can be notoriously delicate. We will probably get a couple other fish before we to with a PBT again. Everyone else is doing great
We thought we lost the horseshoe crab. Hadn't seen him in weeks, even found his shell against a power head. Turns out he had melted. We saw him this morning and he has probably doubled in size.
Yea, the fish store told me not to get one until my tank was very well established. Says that there is a reason why their picture is on just about every product for “ick” or other fish illnesses.
I had hopes that since this one went through 30 days of quarantine that it would be good to go. Guess not.
How's everyone's tanks doing during all this? Ours is doing pretty well. It's a struggle for me to not try and mess with it constantly since I'm home every day staring at it.
killrbee7 hasn't been on in like a week. Anyone talked to him? He's in healthcare right? How's everyone else's tanks doing? We had enough additives and stuff to keep going without me having to shop for more. I've been keeping my hands out of the tank and just using all the time at home to try and clean/organize underneath and automate as much as I can.
Yea, I’m a primary care physician. This has completely altered our practice for the past four weeks and there is no real end in sight. My tank is doing really well. Have added a few fish over the course of the quarantine, which has been very helpful in providing me a distraction through all of this. Currently have 7 fish total, all of which are getting along great and eating well. DaVinci clown, Black snowflake clown, Humuhumunukunukuapua’a, Emperor angel, Dwarf Flame angel, Clown trigger, and a Desjardini Sailfin tang
I love our desjardini. He's a straight up character. They can get huge though. How big is your tank again? We were sold one when we had a 75g tank and we couldn't feed him enough without crashing the tank. He wound up developing HLLE and we gave him to a guy the that has nursed him back to health. He stayed with that guy when we got our big tank and we got a new one.
Flame angel and coral beauty angel are two I really want. We've been offered one of these (regal angel) but not sure we are ready for it.
Nice. I've been told there's a chance that a sailfin could outgrow even our tank but that's only if they hit their max size which I don't think is very common. If that happens we will just trade him.
Some asshole took a bite out of our Marone Betta's tail. All evidence points to the pistol shrimp or an emerald crab as none of the fish have ever bothered her and the bite is a damn near perfect semi circle.
Fiancée’s birthday is coming up, and she wanted a fish as a present. Ended up getting a Blue Pavo Wrasse. Completely buried himself last night once our lights turned off, which was crazy...literally have no idea where he buried and he’s a pretty good size. But he’s out patrolling the tank well this morning.
He was the largest fish in our tank, by far, before the wrasse. Thankfully, he adapted pretty well with our other fish and wasn’t too much of a dick towards anyone. Our Humu is much smaller but is a bit more aggressive than the clown trigger, but they only really butted heads the first day together. Was pretty concerned having two triggers together, but it has gone great and love both of them.