New to the hobby and have a few questions regarding fish/tank.

[KMS.Kyle]

Hello,

First, a little info -

It's my first week owning a saltwater tank (after a month/half of having a fresh water tank) - I fell in love with the hobby and spent the month studying to have my own saltwater.

I lucked out and found an incredible deal on craigslist which got me a 9 month established tank - 150lbs ish of live rock some corals (Hammer/Frog, Zoanthid)

It is an odd shaped tank so it's been interesting - It's 55 gallons (32" L - 31" H - 14" width - do you can imagine what it looks like.

Upgraded the lights to have the Kessil 360N Tuna blues and added the Tunze Nano DOC 9004 Protein skimmer (as they weren't using a skimmer.. Ever - surprised at how healthy the fish were)

It came with 6 fish -
1 Golden Sleeper goby
1 Firefish Goby
2 Clown fish
1 Pajama Cardinal
1 Grey Head Wrasse (I believe - it looks identical)
(and a bunch of crabs, snails and a tiger snail)

That said - I had some questions.

After having it running for a week after doing the tank transfer across town - everything looks good, stable and healthy - the corals are thriving with the new light and the tests came out as follows -

PH - 8.2
Nitrite - 0.0
NiTRATE - 0.5-0.10
Ammonia - 0.25 (It started out looking like 0 but slowly transitioned towards this)
Salinity/Gravity - 0.024


Two questions - Does this look so far so good? (obviously still some balancing to go after setting it all up)

Everything seems to have transitioned nicely having used 50% of their live sand, their live rock and 50% of their water.

On that note - I only have 1 power head and it doesn't seem to be very strong - should I get another?

Also - the Wrasse profile seems that this tank is waay to small for it... Can anyone give me some feedback here? It seems really happy - but one thing I do notice is that it swims around my rock setup ALL DAY.. Like.. Literally.. From the lights going on until going off - it's swimming in a course like pattern in the tank... Is he happy? I worry.

I was also wondering about anemone.. I did a TON of research and saw how incredibly destructive the death of an anemone can do - especially in a tank with a weak skimmer like mine.. But I was more or less going for a little bit of opinion here - I have 2 clowns and obviously want to give them a home that isn't the top left corner of the tank - If one looks to be dying, is it easy to notice and remove?

Should I worry about my giant tiger snail eating my hammer/frogspawn? I noticed it was right beside one today.. But this couple has had it for many months and I don't think it's touched their corals.. I'm just a bit worried I guess.

Hmm.. I think that's all for now - thank you for your help

 

[ichthyogeek]

Nice looking setup you have there.
I'm kind of worried about your ammonia levels, but it seems like your tank is going through a mini-cycle, so it should even out eventually. If levels stay like that, I would definitely start to do more water changes and worry a bit more.

Absolutely get another pump! Or 3, or 4. There's a generic formula for how many gallons per hour you want in your tank, if you do a google search you can find it. But I think the general form was somewhere around 10-20x the number of gallons in your tank in an hour? So somewhere around 550 gph-1100 gph? You also want to research a bit about turbulence and how that effects the tank too (I can't explain it).

Wrasses will always move. They peck at crustaceans on the live rock like copepods, and are always on the hunt. H. leucurus, I have no experience on, so somebody else will probably help you there.

Anemones-Don't do it. I've been keeping saltwater for the past four years, and an anemone still scares the crap out of me, even with my super powered skimmer. The clowns might adopt a leather or another LPS tentacled coral (like a torch for example), possibly even Xenia. But I would caution highly against an anemone. Try a tentacled LPS coral or Xenia instead.

 

[KMS.Kyle]

Update: Ammonia is down to 0

 

[WaReefer458]

The sleeper goby will eventually starve to death if it isn't eating frozen food. They need a lot of sand to be healthy. I have a bigger footprint on my 40 but my diamond goby goes as far as eating algae off my rocks like a lawnmower blenny does. But I feed my tank heavy and he loves mysis shrimp. As far as the nem, you should be ok if you have decent lighting but as far as just getting one for your clowns, it's a crapshoot if they host it or not. Mine in my current tank don't even look twice at it. In my 12 years of doing this I'm only 1 for 4 with getting clowns to host or not. The only pair I had host one I had the nem in the tank almost a year and then boom... They were just in it one day.