FOWLR vs Reef? Which is more work? [A discussion.]

[Sk8r]

Is it true that corals are hard?
Is it true that fish-only can get by on a filter?
Is it true that little tanks are much harder?

Complex questions.

What you've got to control to have healthy fish: the alkalinity, the ph, the salinity, temperature [and the nitrate/ammonia levels---keeping them as close to 0 as possible.]

What you've got to control to have healthy corals: all of the above plus the levels of calcium and magnesium, and light...and your nitrate/ammonia needs to be really 0 or close to it.

What's different? You can use a filter AND a skimmer on a fish-only tank: in the interests of low nitrate, you clean that thing once a week at least, because it collects things that add up to nitrate, and it adds higher as the week goes by.

You should not be using a filter in a reef tank: you rely only on your skimmer [a good one] and your live rock and sand. This means a total breakdown of waste: what remains, the corals suck up. Mushrooms and zoas and leathers feed on it quite readily, require less light and thrive even in a slightly dirty reef. Large polyp stonies are still fairly forgiving, but want more light, as a group. SPS [small polyp stony: the sticks] want a lot of light, because they are really largely supported by the algaes in their tissue, and they want 'clean' water with a lot of flow and really, really no nitrate or ammonia. This last group of corals tends to live jutted out in huge formations like nets that take advantage of sunlight: solar collectors, so to say, and with flow going right through them. These are corals that may thrive quite nicely also with a bare bottom, since they are much more of a 'suspended shelf' kind of coral. Pure,well-balanced, stable water and unobstructed light is their need.

I'd advise newbie reefers to hang back from the sps for a number of months: the softies OR [not both] the lps stony are good beginner stuff. Keep them happy and they'll reward you with growth.

Yes, you can have fish: fish help feed the reef. However---angels, rabbits, and some other fishes eat coral polyps. THis is a really expensive diet, and of course, putting the wrong fish into your reef means some really destructive behavior and a really destructive chase-down of said fish. Research and ask about fish in a reef!

A reef can be largely automated with a kalk reactor and/or a calcium reactor, or just dripping kalk from your topoff if you're a tank under 40 gallons. Otherwise you have to test and dose nearly daily. The more you lean to sps, the fussier and more consistent you do need to be: it's that clean-water and unobstructed light thing.

A fish-only tank requires great attention to cleanliness---not in spite of but because of the amount of biomass you're adding in to feed your fish. Setting up a schedule for testing and for filter-changing, and always have Amquel and adequate salt, plus of course your quarantine tank available in case of crisis. If you get into serious water-trouble, best get your fish out to the safety of clean water ASAP, even if it has to be raw salt water [not desirable...but better than choking to death with no oxygen.] Clouded water means less ability of fishy gills to extract oxygen and less oxygen there to breathe. Sparkling water with an exactly maintained temperature and a proper balance of alkalinity and ph, plus low nitrates and no ammonia will mean healthier fish that don't tend to come down with disease. Here's another trick: don't buy new fish. Stock your tank once for all, get a good population that will not stress your tank as the fish grow, and do not get more fish in. That way, if you have gotten established with no ich, and you are full-up with fish, you will not be continually exposing your population to new fish with stress problems. That's how the old hands do it, and why we have, as a group, less ich. Quarantine your fish. Acclimate properly. Test often. And understock by at least 10%---that's my own rule, but it's a good idea.

Personally, I find every tank a lot of work in the setup and first 6 month. Daily testing is not too often. Develop a log book: keep records of test results and what you did. Learn from it. Do weekly water-changes to keep your trace elements up.

After six months you can relax a little: but go on testing and cleaning those filters on schedule if you're a fish-only.

And if you've automated your reef, at least test once a week, and don't neglect to test for nitrate. Here's where I find the reef ultimately easier, particularly in the softie or stony lps variety. I don't think sps ever is 'easy', but with the low fish count and high coral absorbtion of waste, my personal vote is that a fish/softy or fish/lps tank is probably the least fuss once 'mature'---no filter to clean, no need to really get your hands in the muck, just empty the skimmer and fill the kalk supply.

Discussion? Questions? Observations of your own experience?

And of course it's always a question of what kind of tank you're in love with. Me, I *want* to keep sps, but I haven't the patience to keep them well, so I'll tend to have the easier ones [montiporas, etc] and a number of stony lps...that's just my preference. That kind of tank, once I automated kalk, doesn't make me work too hard. But I've had the fish-and-filter, specialty tank, then a FOWLR, then a clown-anemone FOWLR, then a FOWLR with softies [that's a reef, by definition: when you get one coral, you're a reef] And then a stony reef, and a fairly decent lps with stony---and then I moved, yet again, so I'm back in the lps reef stage.

The object of this hobby, among other things, is to be happy, and learn. And wherever you are in it, there's no more nor less, it just is, and you're building experience.

What's your experience been like? What do you think you want to do, when you get your 'druthers?

 

[Caragol]

1) Corals are only hard if you want to keep the ones that are hard to keep. A simple softy tank can be as easy as keeping guppies.

2) Yes. Marine fish can be easy or incredibly difficult, it's based on what you want. False perculas and damsels can survive simply awful conditions, but I wouldn't want to try to throw a mandarin in a tank with only a simple filter.

3) Not at all. Depending on what you want to keep at least. Picos are easy because it's easy to change the water when you're only changing a couple of cups, but you're very limited in what you can put in there. I imagine it would be very difficult to maintain a good acro colony in two gallons because it is difficult to control the parameters, but mushrooms and zoas and other forgiving coral will do just fine with only water changes and simple PC lighting.

I feel softy/LPS reefs are easier to maintain than FOWLRs. Maybe I have bulletproof coral, but even letting the tank get neglected a bit never seemed to hurt anything, in fact some coral seemed to love the "dirty" water. I've never felt that perfect water is needed in these tanks to get them to thrive and have color. FOWLR tanks on the other hand tend to produce more waste and need to be fed much more which in turn equals more nitrates and phosphates which in turn can quickly lead to hair algae and other issues if you're not on top of your water quality.

SPS is a whole 'nother animal and is the most difficult unless you're willing to spend the cash to automate as much as possible. My SPS tank is on the smaller size (58g) so I do a lot of things manually, like two-parting by hand. It works well, but requires a lot more time and work.

But by far, by FARRRR my easiest tank, of all my reefs, FOWLRS, and freshwater tanks is my 2.5g softy/LPS pico. 6 cup water change weekly and change out the PC bulb once every six months and it's been running and thriving for over two years now. No fish or CUC other than hitchhikers from live rock (stomatellas, limpits, pods, small snails, bristle worms, etc). No feeding, no dosing, just six cup weekly water changes and light. No algae or cyano problems. No filtration other than a powerhead and the live rock and sand in the tank. It just is and does well.

 

[Sk8r]

I've observed some of these fishless nanos or picos, and the ones I've seen are quite beautiful.

Fish do add something to the balance---often a little instability, which would follow the curve of feeding, digesting, pooping, followed by the action of bristleworms, etc, a natural cycle, but one the corals are going to catch the other end of; and the smaller the tank, the more any change looms large.

Your little tank running solely off light has hit an admirable balance.

I have an ecoglobe I got back in 2000. It's water, algae, a wisp of sand and dead coral, and two brine shrimp---who used to be 4. Two died in 2002. Here it is pushing 2008 and the other two are going strong. The death of the 2 other shrimp contributed a tiny, tiny bit of biomass to the system, but here we are nearly 8 years later and still going strong. The algae grows, the shrimp eat the algae, and poop, and the bacteria in the wisp of sand and the water break it down, and the algae grows in the sunlight. It's a sealed system. It just sits near but not in a window.

 

[Caragol]

I have fish in all my other reefs, they add life and movement and beauty. But there's some magical balance in my pico. The feather duster hitchhikers are there, and they must be eating something. I've got a little bivalve that I love that grows and filters the water too, but I don't know what he's filtering since I don't feed that tank. I must have some natural plankton and microalgae growing on it's own in there. Wish all my tanks were so beautiful and easy.

When you say you should not use a filter on a reef, I think I get what you're saying but my sump is my filter. Bio, mechanical, and chemical. Bio is of course live rock rubble in the fuge, mechanical is the chaeto and that sponge I have on the intake of my sump's return pump to keep loose bits of macro algae from finding their way to the display, and I occasionally run carbon too for chemical filtration (once just to clear the yellowing water after a bryopsis dieoff, again after fighting flatworms).

 

[Sk8r]

Absolutely: by filter, I mean like wet-dry or cannister filter, a bought filter, which is pretty well a no-no.

What a sump or fuge does is much more like what nature does. My cheato acts like a filter sock. I don't use a sponge, however, because I don't want to stop the copepods from getting through.

Just to pursue a logical thread here---I'm very suspicious that there's a balance in reefkeeping that has nothing to do with the adult size of the fish or other stocking measures we use to figure how many fish we can 'get away with.'

In keeping a successful YOUNG reef, as opposed to the really established reef [those Tank of the Month guys] I'm wondering how much we shoot ourselves in the foot by stocking to the max, and how much better off the corals would be if we waaaay understocked.

I'm also questioning the wisdom of cooking or curing live rock, reducing the number of micro-organisms that come in. I say this because I've recently done it both ways: I used uncured rock in this tank's first incarnation, had an explosion of life, over 50 species of critter in the rocks and sand, and all corals grew well. I had aiptasia, I had grape caulerpa, volunteer mushrooms, I had every pest known to man, too...but they never hampered coral growth, except the odd aiptasia, that the peps would get.

During a move I was delayed in tank set up and my rock cooked in the containers. I was heartsick. I went ahead and set up, but I had lost all that life except the coralline and the bacteria, and I am now trying to recover it. Gone are my monster worms, the spiorbids, the stomatellas, many of the sponges, the little dusters [down in my fuge, they still exist] and the mysis colony, and all of that...it's gray, it's white, it's purple, but isn't live the way it was, and my corals struggle. Sure, it's easy to keep---it's clean. TOo clean. My fuge is developing complexity, but not enough diversity.

Just some thoughts. If I were given some really crusty live rock I'd do anything but cook it: I'd put up with the aiptasia and all of it just to get that life back again.

 

[n2everythg]

Good thread. Interesting thoughts and experiences.
Don't have enough of my own yet to add any value though.
Thanks
N2

 

[Sk8r]

All input appreciated... THis is kind of a 'thinking out loud' thread: I'm at the other end of the spectrum, been doing tanks since I was kneehigh to a duck, and I have a lot of observations that are generally 'unproven'---the curing rock item, for instance, runs counter to general practice. You'd have to do it a dozen times one way and the other to have anything other than absolutely anecdotal experience [and even then it wouldn't meet scientific standards of proof] but that's part of the value of forums like this: that people can float a thought-balloon or two and see what others' experience has been. Ie, it's easy to say: nanos are all hard and big tanks are all easy---but that generality isn't actually accurate, as we've illustrated above. Why is that one nano so easy? Is it because there are no fish? Can you run a big reef that way?

Well, then, define "big," relative to, say, your average marine habitat...

There's no way to be too absolutist in this hobby, without running up against a thoughtfully posed exception. And we learn a lot from those exceptions...like the easy nano. Like the cooked-rock tank that's being hard to get started, compared to before, with every plague most new reefers cook their rock trying to avoid.

The more experience you have in this hobby, the bigger a basket of exceptions you collect---the more you see the complexity of what we try to simplify for easy learning.

 

[jakkalofv]

Re: FOWLR vs Reef? Which is more work? [A discussion.]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=11334299#post11334299 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Sk8r
the softies OR [not both] the lps stony are good beginner stuff.

why is this? the not both part I mean.

 

[Sk8r]

Ah. Softie coral 'spits' discouraging chemicals into the water to try to prevent other corals coming close: in a recirculating tank, goes-around-comes-around in a way these creatures never planned. If you get a really unhappy leather, you may need to run carbon to 'clear the air.'
lps stony coral puts out 'sweeper tentacles' when feeding [often at night] that can reach up to 6-8" down current. These tentacles sting like a jellyfish. Judging how to place these beauties is sometimes a headache. They also do this when annoyed.
So....if a softie spits, out come the sweepers, and if another softie is in reach of the sweepers, well, pretty soon every softie is spitting [they often do, when one is annoyed] and every lps is sending out stinging tentacles [they can even temporarily 'load' one with a lot of stingers and stretch way far]...and it's just WWIII in a glass box.

You'll notice our exemplary little nano has both, and you CAN do it, but it's not what I'd recommend for somebody just breaking into corals. You won't get the absolute best out of both unless you can assure good behavior by clever placement [a rock spire can stop sweepers, but only being farthest down the current can send softie-spit into the carbon bag [to be sweetened up]...

It's a matter of experience, and since newbies have so many things to learn at once, this seems like kind of a problem that could be avoided by limiting what kind of corals you keep. Now in my lps stony [and one sps] tank I do have gsp [greenstar polyp, a softie] and would like to get some xenia [a stinky sort of softie], but will put them in a safe nook.
Another thing softies do is multiply like crazy: mushrooms, zoas, gsp, xenia, all has the capacity to take over a tank---or crawl up on another rock and annoy the resident stony coral into losing a head or two. You have to kind of watch it and limit it. Of course---yumas and ricordias and most expensive zoas don't multiply near that fast! You could figure.

 

[Swanwillow]

edit-sorry for the OT. Great thread! NM about what I had typed, too OT.

 

[otrlynn]

I'm wondering about the "spit" you refer above. Are you referring to the mucus that some softies shed on a regular basis or something more toxic? Also, are zoas and mushrooms among those that are apt to release something toxic that "annoys" the LPS? Do SPS coral also have the "sweepers"? What do you think of the softie/SPS combination?

 

[jadeguppy]

I have to say that nanos seem to have a bad rep with certain people. I love my 5.5g. As mentioned above, a small water change each week= a large % water change and can keep things in check. A problem may go bad faster in a small tank, but a quick water change is much easier to do and will often correct the imbalance. I neglected my nano for a short while and it started to show it, 1g water change later and everything is happy again. I think the key with them is lots of rock. I have a 18watt pc over it, a powersweep powerhead that I love for directional flow change in the small area, and a hob filter that I use for more flow, to keep the surface of the water stired, and to fill with more rock. The tank has a large variety of pod and cleaner crew life as well as a firefish and peppermint shrimp. I agree with not cooking rock. Checking it over for mantis shrimp and other problem critters yes, but not cooking. I bought two pieces from the Keys and put them in the tank (after a saltwater dip to remove decay). Not only did they provide lots of biodiversity, they came with small patches of macro algaeseveral colors of coraline, and two corals! At one point I had over 15 different corals in the tank. Mostly zoa, mushrooms, and hammers. They are great tanks for a small budget or small space. With regular water changes, they tend to forgive not testing the water. For many people just staring the hobby, a water change is much easier to under stand than all the chemistry involved. my .02

 

[jadeguppy]

Oh, I think the spit he refers to is the chemical warfare. Corals excrete chemicals to deter predation and encroachment.