Step-by-step account of my first reef (with lots of pics)

[Dudester]

Thanks, Alex, great link! Now I can cross that research off of my To Do list. I figured that when an emerald crab eats valonia, the bubbles pop anyway, so what's the difference, right?

Good luck with the rock selection and be sure to get some flat pieces to create nice shelves upon which to place all of your future corals. (You'll be getting a 5th MJ before you know it )

Bruce - Care to share the link to the cure of your algae? I wonder if those Mexican turbos would eat the maroon hair algae that's in my tank? If so, maybe I could take 2 of them off of your hands (in trade, of course) at the meeting this Saturday, unless you truly want to find food for them? If not, then I'm sure you could take them back to AA and receive some store credit.

 

[alexk3954]

Good luck with the rock selection and be sure to get some flat pieces to create nice shelves upon which to place all of your future corals.

Any special shapes that I should look for? Any special amounts of rock to get. Maybe 40 lbs of larger pieces and the other 20 lbs. smaller, flatter pieces.

 

[bcoons]

Mike - Here's the link to the thread on the red algae:

http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=745530&perpage=25&pagenumber=1

Not sure if your maroon hair algae is the same stuff, but it might be.

I think I will bring a couple of the big turbos down to the meeting on Saturday. We'll see what ya' got ta' trade!

The big snails are kinda neat to watch. They are like big old bulldozers. Go where they wanna go, when they wanna go.

On a sad note, the Royal Gramma that I bought Saturday has died already. No apparrent reason (NAR). What IS IT with Royal Grammas and my tank?

Bruce

 

[Dudester]

Alex - 60 lb of rock might be too much for your 37g tank. Afterall, you do want some space for corals to grow, right? Maybe 35-40lb total, IMO. That would provide plenty of biological filtration and hopefully not crowd out the available space. I'd get mostly irregular shapes that will stack securely together while still providing plenty of spaces between them for circulation and tunnels. Combining this with a few flat pieces to create some shelves/overhangs would be nice. Make sure you get some rock rubble as well, since this becomes quite handy for mounting frags in the future, or for starting a refugium.

Bruce - Thanks for the link. I think my algae is a little different. According to the thread (and links therein) your candycane algae peels off rather easily. My maroon algae is impossible to prune, but nevertheless, I hope it would be pleasing to the turbo's palates. I may have to just buy them from you, since after careful consideration, I'd be hesitant to give you anything from my tank right now as I still do have some flatworms and other nuissance algae that I'd hate to trouble you with.

Sorry about your Royal Gramma. My Rainford's goby isn't looking all that great either. It's noticably thinner than when I got it just 4 days ago, and I've never seen it eat my food mixture. I have seen it fill its mouth with sand then spit it out, and I presume it's eating material on the sand surface during those times, but I don't think it's getting adequate nutrition.

This morning I took a flashlight tour of the tank after dosing B-Ionic, primarily to locate the goby and ensure it was still alive, but also to check out the Favites coral in full bloom. It was gorgeous and completely polyped out. I saw the goby immediately in its usual hiding place, so at least it's still alive. I also noticed a large pile of nassarius snails, which could mean only 1 thing --- they were eating something. After careful inspection, I saw 2 long red tentacles emerging from the pile of snails. A careful head count of my peppermint shrimp came up with only 2, so I guess one of them died and was being consumed by the snails. The peppermint shrimp were some of the first live creatures placed into my tank, right after the rock and sand. They've been with me for 7 months. Is this a decent life span for a pep? I'm not too upset about the loss, since I don't have any aiptasia, and I'm kind of sick of watching those shrimp steal food out of the mouths of my blastos and frogspawns. I'm not going to replace it right away, and instead I'll just monitor the tank closely to ensure that no aiptasia begin to bloom.

Last night I also saw something pretty cool. My acans were eating a dead blue-legged hermit crab. I saw 2 blue legs emerging from the mouths of 2 adjacent acan lord polyps, and the legs were being sucked in. I guess the body had already been consumed. Toward the end of the meal, 2 of the mouths were sharing a single crab leg/claw, and unfortunately the lights went out before I saw which one won the meal. At least I know that this LPS coral is eating!

 

[ToTaLCHaoS13]

Funny you should mention that you lost a peppermint shrimp. I just went home for lunch and found one of mine also has died and been eaten! At least I think it was eaten. All that is left is the clear exoskeletion. Is that normal? Should I take it out of the tank or let it break down?

 

[KingfishJohn]

My dottyback ate 4 peppermint shrimp before I flushed it. When I had a REAL bad aptasia problem the aptasia ate 6 peppermints within minutes of adding them to the tank... talk about frustrating!

Sorry to hear about the gramma Bruce. You seem to be having some of the phantom fish deaths as Mike was experiencing.

Mike -

Try crushing our food mix very small and put it in with the closed loop still running, I'm surprised the goby hasn't eaten anything yet. And the peppermint could have just been molting and the nassarius converged on him and ate him. It sounds like yours are relatively hungry since they're chasing lettuce nudibranchs around the tank.

 

[Dudester]

ToTaLCHaoS13 - What you saw in your tank is probably not a dead peppermint shrimp but instead, the molted exoskeleton of a living peppermint shrimp. I see a molted "skin" in my tank about once every other week. If it's easy to get to, like sucked onto the CL drain pipe, I'll fish it out. Otherwise I just leave it. Certainly not worth knocking anything over to get to it.

thedude15810 - I'll never forget the day you told me that your aptasia was eating your peppermint shrimp. Hilarious and sad at the same time. Oh what bitter irony! I bet your theory about the shrimp molting and being eaten is correct. Darn snails, can't live with'em, can't live without'em.

As for the feeding of the goby, last night I agitated the food mix up pretty severely so there'd be lots of tiny particles for it to eat. I then squirted the food directly into the rock where the fish rests with a turkey baster, and I still didn't see it eat. If it's alive when I get home tonight, I'll do what you suggest. If you recall, it really didn't eat when you fed it at AA, and I'm wondering if this fish was caught with cyanide since it's behavior seems consistent with a cyanide-caught fish? Do you think our food mix has deteriorated in quality due to the fact that it's been frozen for more than 6 months now? I wonder if the garlic is still active - I don't seem to smell it as much as I used to?

 

[Dudester]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7340496#post7340496 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by thedude15810
My dottyback ate 4 peppermint shrimp before I flushed it.

This has all the ingredients of a perfect opening sentence to a fiction novel about a manic reefaholic intent upon settling all piscine disputes single-handedly.

 

[jfw60]

Wheres your compassion?

Wheres your compassion?

You dont flush a fish because you failed to do your homework with compatability. Some fish eat other fish as well as shrimps. What are you gonna do when you have kids and they fight?, " Honey Lil Earl kept punchin Earl Sr., so I flushed him". lol

 

[Dudester]

Wo there, jfw60, glad to have you aboard but please don't be so critical. John is one of the most conscientous aquarists that I've met. He works at a LFS and I've seen him on countless occasions talk people out of making expensive (profitable) purchases for the welfare of the fish/corals. He takes meticulous care of the tanks at the store and his tank at his home. In fact, he saved the lives of hundreds of fish and corals just last weekend when his LFS lost power, and he spent most of the evening well after regular store hours hooking up pumps to generators. The dottyback to which he was referring not only killed his peppermint shrimp, but it also tortured every moving creature, including some very nice fish, that he placed into his tank. I trust that he wouldn't have added fish to his tank that were known to be incompatable with the dottyback. His action was akin to "putting down" a rabid dog. It's not fun or pleasant, but it was probably to the benefit of other fish and inverts that would have been treated similarly had he returned it to the store for re-sale.

 

[KingfishJohn]

Mike -

Cyanide doesn't happen so much anymore but one thing that does happen continually is that as this hobby becomes more and more profitable, the fish are collected from deeper and deeper waters. This often results in swim bladder problems stemming from decompression issues. Other than that, some fish just don't want to eat in captivity. One thing that I've read recently and found very interesting is that bananas have some kind of fish attractant in them. Seachem's "Entice" product is banana oil... why do fish like bananas? I have absolutely no clue lol. Also feed the fish before he "holes up" for the night.

I think our food mix is still ok but it's definitely getting drier and drier. I think next time we make a batch we should add more coral foods and get another person or people interested. If we told people what we were mixing I'm sure we could get people interested and get the costs covered of a large batch.

Just to reiterate, we basically make a huge mix of everything I can get my hands on to. It follows the same principles of the mix posted by Eric Borneman and the mix posted by the great Melev.


JFW60 -

Thanks to Mike for all the kind words but I'd like to give you a little more infor on the dottyback. I'd agree with jfw60 in most respects but I'd also word it with a little tact in the future. I'm sure you save countless fish daily but I'd like to give you my side of the story.

The fish in question was a tank raised sunrise dottyback from ORA. When I received him, he was the smallest of the 15 or so dottybacks we received at just 1 inch and was being beaten to hell by its tankmates. I took him home after reading that they were one of the more docile dottybacks growing to a relatively small size.

This fish grew up fast and began killing anything in its path. Wrasses, frozen food eating mandarins, peppermint shrimp, hermit crabs, he even went after an emerald crab at least 3 times the size of him. I got very very tired of this fish and did not want to inflict him on anyone else's tank.

The final straw came when I introduced a fairy wrasse, much larger than the dottyback, into the tank this last Saturday. Everything was fine for about 20 minutes then the dottyback began his hit and run guerilla tactics. He'd come out of the rockwork, strike the wrasse, and dart back in. Enough is enough I said and I caught the little bastard and flushed him down the toilet.

One thing I will say is that if I felt compassion of any sort towards that particular fish I would have done what I normally do at my LFS. If a fish has some kind of disease or is other wise dying, I put them into a cup of water, and freeze them. This is the most painless way to go as your body simply shuts down. With bigger fish I put them into a bag and bonk them on the counter hard enough to kill them instantly. While harsh, the fish doesn't suffer.

That dottyback deserved the trip to hell I sent him on lol
:smokin:

 

[jfw60]

Uh what?

Uh what?

"Akin to putting down a rabbid dog", did you really just write that? The guy may be your friend and I respect your loyalty, but as always, logic prevails. Fish do not develop rabbies. I did not attack your buddy, I pointed out the obvious, you don't flush a fish because he does what fish do, the only situation in which killing a fish in an aquarium setting is justified, is when the fish is sick beyond help, not because it teed you off for eating your ornamental shrimp. The critter is just doing what god intended him to do, its really that simple. Ethics in this hobby is extremely important especially in light of the fact that many hobbiest still make use of wild caught specimens, and our coral reefs are steadilly becoming a dwindleling resource, we must be responsible, who knows the world may turn to marine hobbiest one day to to help replenish the worlds reef ecosystems. We can not flush an oppurtunity like that down the bowl. And again I was not attacking your friends character, just his actions.

 

[bcoons]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7341831#post7341831 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by thedude15810
I think our food mix is still ok but it's definitely getting drier and drier. I think next time we make a batch we should add more coral foods and get another person or people interested. If we told people what we were mixing I'm sure we could get people interested and get the costs covered of a large batch.

I'd be interested.

 

[alexk3954]

Whats in this food that you guys are talking about, I might be interested if you needed to buy in bulk

 

[KingfishJohn]

The food we've been talking about is a big nasty frozen mess. I basically take fresh seafood, every frozen food I can get my hands on, etc... and blend it up in a giant food processor. It wouldn't work shipping it cross country. You'd probably shoot me for sending you a package of this vile smelling stuff. While not bad frozen, the minute it thaws PHEW!

JFW60 -

First off read the post I posted right before yours and tell me what you think. But to add to what you've posted most recently...

Some people are inherently bad people. The same goes for dogs, hamsters, fish, etc. I'm of the point of view that some fish are quite simply MEAN fish. I wouldn't want this fish to go into anyones tank as it would cause only terror. If you read my post, you'll see that I didn't flush him when he only ate my shrimp, I flushed him after her killed other fish for no reason time and time again. The fish in question poised no threat to him and he should have left them alone. The other dottybacks I have taken care of WEREN'T this way, this was an especially deranged fish.

SECOND read up on this hobby's impact on coral reef biotopes and the islands that we import from. Coral reefs in the carribean (which we cannot collect from) are dying from a bleaching episode. That's nature, things die. It sure does suck but Mother Nature has a way of correcting herself time and time again.

The marine hobby also is the 2nd leading source of income for all of these small island communities, second only to tourism. This means that they're becoming more and more educated and more and more development is occuring in these backwood areas. Why would they want to destroy what brings them so much opportunity?

They don't, that's why we don't have cyanide use anymore and mariculture facilities have been set up. This hobby IMO is educating not only the general public of advantaged nations but has shown the small island nations what they really need... money.

I'd LOVE to hear what you have stocked in your tanks if you could get off your high horse for a minute.

 

[alexk3954]

The food we've been talking about is a big nasty frozen mess. I basically take fresh seafood, every frozen food I can get my hands on, etc... and blend it up in a giant food processor. It wouldn't work shipping it cross country. You'd probably shoot me for sending you a package of this vile smelling stuff. While not bad frozen, the minute it thaws PHEW!

oops, didn't remember that most of the people on this thread live far away from me.

 

[KingfishJohn]

I'll give you all a breakdown of our food mix in detail if I can remember all of it:

First of I go to the local speciality grocery store (Central Market) and get around 5 pounds of their fresh shellfish mix (clam, squid, octopus, crab, etc...). To this we add several packages of mysis, baby brine shrimp, formula one and formula two (which we may leave out as it has a nasty gelling agent) and various other frozen fish foods. Chaeto, zoecon, zoe, and other vitamin supplements are added as well and spirulina is recommended.

For this next batch we'll probably add a block of cyclopeeze, rotifers, H20 life coral food, DT's oyster eggs, phyto of some sort and maybe even some of the new product Reef Roids.

This mix is put into a food processor and blended into a gross paste that fish go nuts for. I also forgot to add that we add garlic to the whole mix so it ends up smelling like awful italian food.

 

[Dudester]

jfw60 -

"Akin to putting down a rabbid dog", did you really just write that?

Of course I did, I think it's a wonderful analogy.

Fish do not develop rabbies

No duh. Of course they don't. It was a comparison, get it?

The critter is just doing what god intended him to do, its really that simple.

OK, if you want to begin an ethical debate, is it then ethical for any of us to support the capture and confinement of marine animals, in an environment that is radically different from that in which God had naturally provided? I personally feel that it is appropriate, especially in the spirit of learning and discovery and, perhaps, as a source of replenishment in the future as you have pointed out. But look outside the box a little. Do you feel it would be better to return this fish, potentially so that a new hobbiest could purchase the fish? Imagine that unfortunate person taking the pretty new fish home, only to watch it wipe out an entire tank due to aggression. This could be enough to disinterest that hobbiest from marine aquaria altogether, and when the world's oceans become barren, that would be one less tank from which to harvest the new supply of corals.

If you sense a little light-hearted sarcasm in that response, then good. I don't want to steer this thread into an ugly direction. I do not agree with flushing a fish and would not do it myself, but he had his reasons and I respect that. Considering all he does for the hobby, I feel comfortable defending his actions. And I did so because I felt that your response was inappropriate and could have been handled differently, that's all. To assume that he didn't do his "compatability homework" was disrespectful IMO. The comment about Earl Jr. and Earl Sr., well, that was kinda funny.

Bruce - The food mixture included shrimp, scallops, mussels, squid, mysis shrimp, Cyclopeez, Selcon, Garlic, some chaeto, and a few other things that I can't remember off-hand. We'll definitely let you know when we make the next batch.

 

[jfw60]

Temper temper

Temper temper

I'd LOVE to hear what you have stocked in your tanks if you could get off your high horse for a minute.

Easy man, you can't argue with my statement because I'm saying the same thing you are, ethical reef hobbiest can have a positive effect on the publics consciousness on the problems of the coral reefs of the world. However you run the risk of anthropromorphising fish when you say your fish was evil. Its kinda funny, I feel like your Ahab discribing the white whale. He was just a fish, in a little box protecting his patch of reef.
I have narrowed down my reef keeping for school, and currently run a 12 JBJ, its ok for the time. I would like to start an SPS dominated tank with a few Anthias probably a 125 or so.
How bout you?

 

[Dudester]

OK John, I guess we posted at nearly the same time. Unfortunately our ingredient lists differ a little, but I think if you combine both of our lists, then the conglomerate would be accurate. I definitely remember including the Formula 1 and 2, and I'm also positive that we included Cyclopeeze.