aussiemantis
New member
i dont really have photo's yet however i am knew to this forum and just wanted to know the status of other people's nano reef's, how they are doing and what you currently house in them. I currently live in Sydney australia so bear with me when i give measurements. I have a 100L/25g Aqua One UFO 550 corner display tank. it's really spacy inside and really high, about 60 cm high and 60cm across. Im relatively new to the hobby and im about 6 months into owning this tank. I bought it second hand for cheap online one our australian version of Craigslist, Gumtree.com.au and it was a bargain. $500 for the tank with about 30lbs live rock which was premium quality, perfect grass and polyp growth on the rocks and there were lots of corals plus 2 paired clownfish and a wrasse. 1 turbo and a hermit.
Since then i have made some rookie errors. First mistake i made was adding sand to the tank without rinsing it. it was a disaster. bits of plastic and rubbish everywhere.
second mistake i made was listening to people on online forums saying that small tanks do not need skimmers. NO PEOPLe!!!! skimmers are awesome and don't be like me and take them off. when i removed my skimmer i noticed that the water smelt a lot more worse during the time i would change the water. also i noticed that the clownfish and snail were struggling for oxygen and would come up to breathe most of the time, (at the time however i did not catch onto this and continued to go on without the use of the skimmer). due to this, oxygen became depleted in the water and most of the corals and livestock died. it was a complete disaster. I ended up throwing all but 1 peice of live rock and all but 2 coral polyps which survived, (i'm guessing they are a tougher species). Even my wrasse died.
I then made a 50% water change and reattached the skimmer and salvaged what little livestock i had left in the tank which did not perish. i kept at it while the live rock dried in the backyard.
I rarely check my water. there is no need to unless u find something dead in your tank or smell something unusual. keep that info in mind, its just something i do however i do not recommend you to do this. about 1 month later everything was back to normal however my tank was really depleted. i had lost the beautiful tank i bought and was left with was looked more like a trigger tank. it was a wasteland lol. :headwallblue:
about 4 months ago i slowly started doing lots of research and making my decisions based on what i have read and what makes sense to me. i now have my skimmer on 24/7 and my pump on 24/7. pump is a aqua one canister 1120L/h and the skimmer is a Aqua One 1000 model. its 1000L/h.
I have also added moderate flow to the tank and added the now dry dead live rock from my backyard back into my tank rearranging it to create the perfect lair for something interesting. at this point i only have a snail, hermit, 2 clown and some zoas and a little torch. that was all and some dead white rock stacked up with the one piece of liverock sitting on it all. i figured that if i can create an ammonia spike in the tank for a day or two it could trigger the growth of the rock again with the assistance of getting "seeded" by the live rock that is sitting ontop of it all. i didn't know what i was doing...it just made sense.
3 months ago i noticed that all of the rock is starting to turn green and i can see pink coralline growth, this is only after 1 month of the rock being in the tank. so it was great. :spin1:
During that same month i added a lot of live stock. a lot of elegance corals and fish. i bought a nice wrasse (i dont know what its called but i will upload pics later), 1 fijian damsel, 1 yellow tail damsel, 1 angelfish (blue and yellow) and a white ribbon eel which was so beautiful i had to buy it. it was only the size of my forearm and so thin. looks just like a moray but nowhere near as dangerous to your fish. he does get bullied by the damsels occasionally however i have laid some pvc under the sand of the tank which gives it some privacy. i feed it prawns in long thin slices. i have once fed it a whole prawn to see if it could swallow it even though its bigger than its head. it did
two months ago, one month on from adding all that livestock the tank was doing fine, i began gluing some of the coral frags onto the live rock and its really coming together. I've been fascinated by mantis shrimps for a while and all i wanted to do was find one and put it into my tank. then to my luck, boom! found one on gumtree. I don't believe any of the stories i hear about them. these include stories about them killing fish, breaking glass, being a nuisance. i believe that it is your responsibility to keep it fed so that it has no reason to attack anything else in your tank. a mantis is smart and opportunistic. it will not engage a ribbon eel in your tank for no reason unless is was a situation of life and death and it was facing certain starvation. it weighs up the risk of losing a limb and that it too great. so keep a mantis fed and it shouldn't harm anything other than the crabs you feed it. i have bad my eel and mantis and fish and hermits and snails in the same tank now for 2 months. not a single thing has died since then nor has their been any problems in the community of the tank other than the big damsel fish bullying everyone else. personally i wish my mantis would grow some balls and take out my damsel but that is all. only because i cant catch him myself :lmao:
so yea thats my tank, i wanna hear about your experiences :wavehand:
Since then i have made some rookie errors. First mistake i made was adding sand to the tank without rinsing it. it was a disaster. bits of plastic and rubbish everywhere.
second mistake i made was listening to people on online forums saying that small tanks do not need skimmers. NO PEOPLe!!!! skimmers are awesome and don't be like me and take them off. when i removed my skimmer i noticed that the water smelt a lot more worse during the time i would change the water. also i noticed that the clownfish and snail were struggling for oxygen and would come up to breathe most of the time, (at the time however i did not catch onto this and continued to go on without the use of the skimmer). due to this, oxygen became depleted in the water and most of the corals and livestock died. it was a complete disaster. I ended up throwing all but 1 peice of live rock and all but 2 coral polyps which survived, (i'm guessing they are a tougher species). Even my wrasse died.
I then made a 50% water change and reattached the skimmer and salvaged what little livestock i had left in the tank which did not perish. i kept at it while the live rock dried in the backyard.
I rarely check my water. there is no need to unless u find something dead in your tank or smell something unusual. keep that info in mind, its just something i do however i do not recommend you to do this. about 1 month later everything was back to normal however my tank was really depleted. i had lost the beautiful tank i bought and was left with was looked more like a trigger tank. it was a wasteland lol. :headwallblue:
about 4 months ago i slowly started doing lots of research and making my decisions based on what i have read and what makes sense to me. i now have my skimmer on 24/7 and my pump on 24/7. pump is a aqua one canister 1120L/h and the skimmer is a Aqua One 1000 model. its 1000L/h.
I have also added moderate flow to the tank and added the now dry dead live rock from my backyard back into my tank rearranging it to create the perfect lair for something interesting. at this point i only have a snail, hermit, 2 clown and some zoas and a little torch. that was all and some dead white rock stacked up with the one piece of liverock sitting on it all. i figured that if i can create an ammonia spike in the tank for a day or two it could trigger the growth of the rock again with the assistance of getting "seeded" by the live rock that is sitting ontop of it all. i didn't know what i was doing...it just made sense.
3 months ago i noticed that all of the rock is starting to turn green and i can see pink coralline growth, this is only after 1 month of the rock being in the tank. so it was great. :spin1:
During that same month i added a lot of live stock. a lot of elegance corals and fish. i bought a nice wrasse (i dont know what its called but i will upload pics later), 1 fijian damsel, 1 yellow tail damsel, 1 angelfish (blue and yellow) and a white ribbon eel which was so beautiful i had to buy it. it was only the size of my forearm and so thin. looks just like a moray but nowhere near as dangerous to your fish. he does get bullied by the damsels occasionally however i have laid some pvc under the sand of the tank which gives it some privacy. i feed it prawns in long thin slices. i have once fed it a whole prawn to see if it could swallow it even though its bigger than its head. it did
two months ago, one month on from adding all that livestock the tank was doing fine, i began gluing some of the coral frags onto the live rock and its really coming together. I've been fascinated by mantis shrimps for a while and all i wanted to do was find one and put it into my tank. then to my luck, boom! found one on gumtree. I don't believe any of the stories i hear about them. these include stories about them killing fish, breaking glass, being a nuisance. i believe that it is your responsibility to keep it fed so that it has no reason to attack anything else in your tank. a mantis is smart and opportunistic. it will not engage a ribbon eel in your tank for no reason unless is was a situation of life and death and it was facing certain starvation. it weighs up the risk of losing a limb and that it too great. so keep a mantis fed and it shouldn't harm anything other than the crabs you feed it. i have bad my eel and mantis and fish and hermits and snails in the same tank now for 2 months. not a single thing has died since then nor has their been any problems in the community of the tank other than the big damsel fish bullying everyone else. personally i wish my mantis would grow some balls and take out my damsel but that is all. only because i cant catch him myself :lmao:
so yea thats my tank, i wanna hear about your experiences :wavehand:
