as a given you will need to make sure that you can keep the temperature consistantly below 76 degrees as others have suggested. if this cant be done than you might want to try another fish.
I bred this species for a while just for the heck of it. I made two diy sponge filters and it was more than enough filtration. i cleaned them twice a week on a cycle so that the tank never had two freshly squeezed filters. At first i did the power filter (kindof) like you. What happened to me is the filter would kill my bbs before the seahorses could eat them. the way i fed my horses turning the filters off for an hour wasn't an option. the air powered sponge filters were gentle enough to allow most of the bbs to pass.
for feeding. i kept 57 bottles of saltwater where i experimented on the best method for culturing benthic copepods. at maximum capacity i was pulling enough copepods to feed my seahorses for a day, this is assuming that they would eat them all, but benthic copepods are hard for the horses to find so i wound up closing it down for being more trouble than it was worth.
after this relative failure i started growing what i believe to be A tonsa. i collected it myself by the methods described by luis A on mofib. while culturing this i introduced some hydroids from some brine shrimp hatchery water. this then got introduced into the seahorse tank! my culture crashed and i saw a whole bunch of little translucent madusae.
(now seems like a great time to mentin that hydroids can be transfered from your bbs cultures to your main tank. i belive decapsulation removes this threat entirely not sure though...rayajy?)
these are just some of the trials and tribulations i went through breeding these fish. I am in no way an expert, but maybe you can avoid my mistakes (or give me solutions to them)
as for tank mates, always love the nassarious snails. maybe if your close to the gulf you can save some from the oil spill. lol....too soon?
as for macroalgae vs. lighting.
you will have a pretty small tank, you should be able to find a cheap led that will support most macro algae. macro algae will only help water quality unless it starts dieing or you count the minor loss of oxygen at night.
hth ...tommy
