Moving soon

[DrMilhouse]

Thankfully, I have not set anything up yet so I'm not having to worry about moving a tank. As soon as I'm in to the new place (end of next month), I intend to set up a 55 that is collecting dust in the garage. My current place doesn't have AC so I opted not to ever get anything set up which would potentially reach 100 degrees.

For the local people here, I ordered two pallets of South down playsand, I have a few bags left over which would fill the tank nicely, is this a bad substrate for cephs? How much LR should I use in this tank if a bimac is it's primary intended inhabitant?

There's many articles out there and I've been lurking and occasionally posting here. I'm sure I'll have more questions as time passes, but for now I haven't seen a good answer to confirm or deny the south down or how much LR to use.

Thanks

 

[OctoMonkey]

Hi Doc

I dont get Souithdown in Scotland but let me field the Live rock part

As much as you can/want to put in!

It is not a necessity but looks really good, has interesting stuff growing on it, and in its own way... helps to keep down pollutants like nitrates.

Octopuses like to hide within the pores of the live rock when small and within caves made of larger bits when bigger. Also the amphipods and bristleworms which come from the rock really do help to eat all those little bits the octo misses.

I say the more the better. Leave an area with just sand in the tank, perhaps a third of the tank's surface area on the sand and the rest with LR built up into interesting STURDY caves. So if you can afford $100 worth buy that, or $75 or whatever???

I use a sand called honey sand in my tanks, which I scatter a very small amount of coral gravel onto to act as a buffer. My water here is so soft that it doesnt show up on a hardness test kit at all! The honey sand is very fine and i only put about 3/4" to 1 1/2" depth on the bottom. Easy to clean and looks nice!

Colin

 

[Kevomac]

I have a DSB of South Down sand in one of my three salt tanks. I don't know about beneficial properties but I do like the way it looks and it has never caused me trouble. Just be prepared to let it settle for a while after you put it in, because it will cloud the water for a while. As for LR, as much as you want. Its important to at least have some so that it will seed your DSB with critters.

 

[MickAv8r]

We currently have two bimacs here at the store, a baby male bimac named Kodos who is in a 10 gallon former nano-reef that has about 15 pounds of rock in it and a DSB of southdown/carib sea aragamax surgar sized oolite (about 4") and he's quite happy.

We also have Thor, cephalopoder's big male bimac, he's in our 55 gallon cold water reef (stocked with mostly animals from off the Mass, NH coast). This tank doesn't have traditional live rock per say, it's all granite rocks from the tidal pools and doesn't have caves, but is aquascaped into loose piles and Thor is quite happy, even foregoing his old PVC home.

However with such decorations it seems that you won't see your ceph much as they really are at home, Kodos the baby bimac is rarely seen (he is well fed with common periwinkles and thus has no need to come out of his lair much). Thor is well fed as well but even he doesn't hang out in the open as much, though he's in a tank that gets pretty high traffic and thus tends to just be visible unless I'm nearby and he may come out more.

So if your tank doesn't have any additional biological capacity i.e. a wet/dry I would put A LOT of rock in there to provide the surface area for bacteria (cannot believe the amount of ammonia these guys put out), but if you are running additional bio, then I may want to limit the amount of rock in there, i.e. provide a home, but some open space so you may see him more often.