hipocampus zoostera, good choice?

[ctenophors rule]

at my school we are hoping to star an aquaculture club, i have read alot of forums, including a few books at the local library, as well as checked out seahorse . org. i also have experiance breeding clowns, tetras, mollies, guppies, mickey mouse platies, kuhli loaches (though i dont know why they bred, my light had broken and had been out for two days so maybe lack of light?), and , believe it or not , peppermint shrimp.

my question is would a 15 gallon aquarium with a 2 inch sand bed , and chaetomorpha kept down with a live rock (done this before works fine) some macro algaes that can survive colder waters (probably red branching staghorns) with 45 watts worth of lighting. 25 watt blue actinic 20 watt 14,000 k. to solve flow, filtration, micro bubles, and temperature, we will have a tank below that will be 25-40 gallons we will do all filtration in their as well as house a heater, we will work out what pump we will need,(guessing a rio 50, that is what i used for a similar set up) to get the water warmed by the light mixed with the cooler water below.

would this be an ideal set up?

we are florida based we will de-worm all of our specimens then we will breed them to be sold responsible pet stores, or set free into the wild.

we would like to do the latter, but are worried about pathogens.


do we need worry sinse it is a native species?

we will make the rock (garf method), the sand will be bought

and all organisms (even curriolid worms, comonly mislabeled tiribelid worms, and scuds) will be inspected and quaranteened for health, and the tank will cycle for at least 6 months before we get our sea horses so it is good and ready with a large cope pod, scud, mysid shrimp, and worm growth.


thanks for the info

moaquaculture.

 

[TamiW]

A 15 gallon is too large for Hippocampus zosterae, unless you're planning on keeping a large number of them in there (two dozen or more). The reason for this is that food density needs to be kept high, and its impossible to do in a large tank without polluting the water. Its also going to be hard to keep track of them to watch for illness, etc . . .

I'd look into a 2.5 or 5 gallon aquarium. And if you're looking to raise the babies, I'd set up a separate nursery tank. They can be raised with the parents, but seem to do better when raised on their own.

Your filtration system also sounds likely to wash away all the food. I would stick to a sponge filter for them and frequent water changes.

You don't necessarily want a large population of scuds growing, I have heard stories of large ones attacking young seahorses. Mysis will be to big, but their offspring could feed the young. Copepods are a nice supplement, but you will need to hatch baby brine shrimp daily.

Do not release into the wild. You're wise to be worried about pathogens. Its impossible to say what might be brewing in a home aquarium vs. what is in the wild. Also, the conditions that allow for a seahorse to thrive in a home aquarium are likely to be entirely different than what would allow them to thrive in the wild. You're much better selling them to aquarists to take the pressure off wild populations. They ship well, so you might even want to consider selling online. A web site with paypal can be set up extremely cheaply in a lot of cases as long as you're not looking for anything fancy and are okay using some out of the box software.

 

[ctenophors rule]

thank you, we will use a smaller tank, but will probably keep the huge sump.

btw i forgot to mention the sump will mainly be a refugium, you see we will partition off the areas where the protien skimmer carbon filter and heater will be with acrilic, then we will have the rest of it full of chaetomorpha. we will exchange a clump of chaeto from bottom to top daily so that their are always lots and lots of pod.

is that a good idea?

i also frgot we are raising brineshrimp and we were thinking of enriching them with a high protien rotifer, will that be to small?

thanks.

would the filtration still be to small if it is in the sump refuge?

should we skip all that filtration? over kill?

thanks fish grrl