stocking methods?

[Adam Rasmussen]

ive heard all sorts of hows and whys on stocking a tank from LFS'S , friends , and other aquarium owners and even books and all of them have different answers . so i have a couple of questions for you here on RC - how long should you wait in between stocking fish and how many can you put in a 65 gal ( i have a ocellaris clown right now and i would like a yellow watchman , algae blenny , flasher wrasse , and maybe a coral beauty) i also want to know if inverts are a big bio load i have 5 nassarius snails , 3 turbo , and 9 red leg hermits 1 electric blue hermit. but i would like to add some skunk cleaner shrimp, serpent star , and down the line i would like to try a pistol shrimp for the goby. also ive heard conflicting reports on corals some say that they are not a bio load and some say they are , ive heard i could add as many as i want to at 1 time and ive heard that i should only put 1 per week or 2 . can you guys and girls please straighten out some of my confusion pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease ?

 

[bertoni]

That's a reasonable fish load for a 65g tank, IMO. You could probably add more if you were careful. I wouldn't add more than one fish per month, just to try to keep the tank reasonably stable. The coral beauty angelfish have been known to nip on corals, though. A quarantine tank is a good idea, IMO, to keep diseases under control.

Corals that have photosynthetic symbionts don't add much bioload to the system. A coral such as Tubastrea, that doesn't have such symbionts, will present a bioload proportional to the amount it's fed. You can in theory add all the photosynthetic corals you want to the tank at one shot, but I would space them out to help keep problems down, again. Here again, a quarantine tank can save lots of headaches and money.

The invertebrates you listed aren't much of an issue in terms of bio-load.