Zoos, mushrooms, leathers and.....

[ken123]

My tank is about 4 months old. I have snails, hermits, 2 skunk cleaners and 2 false percs. I never had any large outbreaks of algae although now I have a slight browning on the rock and sand for the last 1.5 weeks. All water parms are great. I only have a sump and will being planning a small fuge soon.

At some point I would like LPS. My questions...
Can I add zoos, mushrooms or leathers now? Will they co-exist together ok? Do they need to be kept apart from each other? And what about placement with LPS? I have read that some corals have extenders that reach out and cause problems with other corals. Do zoos, mushrooms & leathers need feeding?

As far as future fish, 5 green chromis (next), yellow tang, not sure what after the tang. Would a CBB be not compatible?

 

[Fast Fred]

Ken,

New tanks seem to go through an algae cycle as well. Seems to take about a year to go through all the different kinds of algae. That's another reason they say that a SW tank isn't really stable until it's 12 months old. No worries on the algae, just battle it as it comes. Water changes help tremendously.

As far as corals go, if your nitrate cycle is complete, and your nitrates are less than 10ppm, go ahead and start slowly adding the softies that you mentioned. See how they do, and adjust from there. Generally, dissimilar corals don't like to touch each other. Shrooms and toadstools don't like to touch, for example. Some LPS have stinger strands that they can reach out and sting other corals with. You'll see this hapenning usually, and you can change the placement of them accordingly.

 

[maloga3]

Good question!! I'm also getting ready to introduce new softies to my tank...additional question though...I've seen in the LFS a product that claims to naturally reduce nitrates...considering we are all human and sometimes procrastinate when it comes to water changes, does this product actually work? has anyone used it succesfully? Don't recall the exact name, but it was a big jar of white little pieces of 'nitrate reducer'...

 

[ken123]

So I can add a few slowly at this point then. Do they need to be fed at all?

 

[kau_cinta_ku]

you will be fine to add a few to start with. i have alot of shrooms, kenya leathers and zoo's and i never fed them. but i do feed the tank cyclopedez(sp) and i guess if they are hungry they will eat some of that otherwise i don't have any corals that need to be target fed.