New with some questions. Please help!

f1shb0y

New member
alright well some of you may have seen my threads on starting a nano. i am wanting to hold off on that. i have a 75g reef tank so i figured i would start a differet kind of tank. I have a few questions.
1. First off I have a 10g rectangle tank. I was planning on getting 6 dwarf SH's from ccritters.com. Can I put that many in a 10g? Is ccritters a good website for them? i heard they are not tank raised from there, does that matter?

2. What kind of lighting and filtration? please leave website where i can find the items.

3. What about aquascape? I was planning on getting regular sand.. not live. What kind of rocks and grassy type items do i need to get? Live or just fake stuff? and how much of it?

i think i can figure out the brine shrimp, but do i feed the dwarfs that? or if they have babies, do i feed the babies that? is there any other food that dwarfs will eat?

thanks! feel free to reply on anything. :rollface:
 
Hey there!
I got my tank cycled a while ago and got my dwarfs a week ago. I got 8 of them, and in them one was a pair. You can buy pair or unpaired from ccritters. I got mine from the same place and they are are doing fine so far. I actually had some babies yesterday, 6 of them and they are all still alive.

I have a reg filter that comes with a 10g tank, live sand and some live rock. I gave my rock a freshwater rinse and added, not too sure if thats safe or not.
I am using the regular lights that come with a 10g, this was a horse only tank, no corals or plants that require lights. I have fake plants, have something for the horses to hitch on.

Here are my 2 threads, 1st one when i made a similar thread, and 2nd with pics of babies.

http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1724617
http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1748234

Plz let me know if any questions.
 
The dwarf seahorses are going to need live brine shrimp to eat -- both the adults and the babies eat the live brine. Some people hatch the brine eggs in rinsed 2 liter bottles, but you will need at least an air pump and some airline. New brine shrimp need to be hatched out each day from decapsulated cysts (you can decapsulate the cysts yourself with water, bleach, and declorinator or purchase the cysts already decapsulated.) For feeding adults, you have two choices. You can feed out the newly hatched bbs (baby brine shrimp) that have "hatched" from the decapsulated cysts, as these have some nutrition, or you can wait for 24 hours after the brine has hatched and enrich the brine by feeding it with nutritional supplements before feeding it to the seahorses. Whatever you chose, the "brine shrimp part" of dwarf husbandry is a rather large part of keeping these small seahorses.

That said, you can fill the horses' environment will fake plants if you want to; this will eliminate the chance of introducing hydroids to the tank, as will using dry/base rock in the tank. If you do that, you may want to use packaged "live" sand in the tank, as it may help with your cycling time and is unlikely to introduce any "nasties" to the tank.

You can put six dwarf horses in a ten gallon tank. It is up to you where you get your horses -- many people do not place the same importance on captive bred stock when it comes to dwarf horses -- I do not know if that is right/wrong / correct/incorrect/ wise/unwise. However, we are entering the "off" season for dwarves and you may have to wait until May to get some.

The lighting on the tank will mostly be a personal choice as far as what you perfer to view your horses under, as the horses do not have any sort of lighting requirement. There are few corals that can be housed with dwarves, so really you only have to decide if you want macro algae growing in the tank and what lighting it may need.

Filtration and flow will be important, as dwarf horses are lazy and extremely small. Any filtration will need to have intakes covered with sponges or mesh to help modify the flow and prevent baby horses from being filtered. I believe many owners like the Azoo palm filter, which is a HOB filter that I know can be found at Drs Foster & Smith.
 
Elysia, if you dont mind, could you send me a link to one of the sponge filters?
im trying to find one but cant. :s
 
I have gotten dwarfs from ccritters several times but recently I got CB from seahorsesource and they are doing well. I have a ten gallon with the glass stones at the bottom. I have had cyano breakouts so often in the past I hate sand-dont know yet if the stones will be different. The 10 gallon works out so much nicer for water quality. Good luck with your little guys they are great fun.
 
Filter links

Filter links

Here is the link for the Azoo Palm on the site of the good doctors'.

If you want a sponge filter instead, there are any number to chose from and you can get them most anywhere. Since I was at their site anyway, I selected this one as an example.

Hope these links work; I guess I haven't imbeded links since the RC upgrade. :frog:
 
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