Stocking help

dahuur2

dahuur2

New member
I have a six foot long 150 gallon tank that has up and running since Thanksgiving 2016. Things have been going pretty well except the no3 is still high. I suspect this is from not cleaning the used dead live rock I bought with the tank very well. I hope this works it way out through ongoing water changes.

At this point, I have a small clean up crew, half a dozen corals, and I just added a pair of clowns. I plan on adding a max of one fish per month, but I am unsure of what I want to get next month.

I have a want list that is my starting point of researching my next purchase:

Royal gramma
Lawn mower Benny
Fire fish
Some kind of cool wrasse
Yellow tang
Blue tang (I'm not sure if I have enough tank for one)
Fox face
Mandarin (someday)
Peppermint shrimp
Cleaner shrimp
Bubble tip anemone
Some type of reef safe starfish

So I guess my question is what improvements can I make to my list and what should I add next month?

Jeff


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I'd focus on getting your nitrates down then add more. How high are we talking? A little bacteria and carbon dosing goes a long way. You need a skimmer to do that though. (you may have one but it wasn't mentioned in this post)

Kegogut can chime in to as how well it works.
 
The leopard wrasse looks cool. Thanks Jordan!

Pife, Nitrates are at 40. No skimmer yet, but I had thought of adding some carbon in a media bag to the sump.


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I'm not a fan of bacterial dosing, I've done it all and while it lowers nitrate and to some degree phosphate, I've never liked the way my tank inhabitants look. I've lost some cool invertebrates that I'd kept for years while dosing....I'm completely old school in that I think adequate amounts of live rock (not the dead stuff), sand beds and refugiums, along with limited, thoughtful stocking of fish/feeding, and regular water changes are all that's needed.
 
I am with Pife. Get your nitrates down first adding more live stock just adds to the nitrate load. It also depends on what you want to keep in your tank. if you are not to worried about corals then you don't need to reduce nitrates to much. If you want corals it will depend on what kinds of corals as to how much you are trying to reduce your nitrates. You may want to consider a biopellet reactor. I used one and it knocked out my nitrates in 3 weeks. I had to actually disconnect it before it crashed my tank it worked so well. I tried carbon dosing previous to that and saw little change in my system.
 
I can atest to the bacterial dosing. My nitrates were 25+ for years and I couldnt get them down . I tried sulphur reactors,turf scrubbers,etc. I finally started dosing an aquaforest treatment along with vodka/vinegar regiment. Finally my nutrients were stripped from the tank and I stopped dosing and increased my feeding to get my No3 back up to to where I wanted them (5-10) and Po4 to acceptable lvls (.03-.07) .

Theyre staying steady now and I havent dosed anything in a couple months and things are doing great.

With a small bioload I'm betting you could do just the AF treatment without the carbon dosing with good success
 
As far as your fish list goes . You could probably do the foxface OR the blue tang but not both as they both can get pretty big and you might not have room for both. All the other fish (except the mandarin) would be fins to add anytime. The firefish can be timid so you might wanna add them next if you're going to go with them.
 
Thanks for all of the input. Do you think I would be better off adding a skimmer or bio pellet reactor?


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Sounds good. That was my original plan. I was just thinking I could hold out longer.


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Once you get your tank parameters under control and you focus on fish:

I would skip the blue tang. Dory is a cool fish, but she gets pretty big.

There are different kinds of Foxface/Rabbitfish. Make sure you get the one that you want from the get go because they reportedly don't play well together. The typical ones are the one spot. I have one of them and he's a cool fish. But when he dies, I'm replacing him with either a Magnificent Foxface or one of the other more interesting looking rabbitfish.

I'd add a goby/pistol shrimp paired together. It's a cool symbiotic relationship that you'll hopefully see develop.

Oh, and before you add a wrasse, make sure you have a screen or some sort of cover on your tank.

Yellow tangs are cool too, but before you add one, take a look at some of the other Zebrasoma tangs to make sure the Yellow is the one you want.

Of course, these are all my personal preferences. You can add whatever you and your wallet want.
 
A wrasse may out compete a Mandarin for food and starve it to death if you don't get one that accepts prepared foods. Something you may want to think about.
 
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