Aquarist Guru
04/23/2006, 01:09 AM
Hello everyone,
I'm new to NVR but a LFS gave me a card today and it's exactly what I've been looking for.
My name is Jarrod. 31 year old Father of two been married almost a decade now (god I'm getting old).
I bought an 80 gallon tank about 3 months ago with 2 mechanical 50 gallon filters, and a 100 gallon ventury protien skimmer. Along with a power head.
Now the story of my limited experience:
I cycled the tank with 9 damsels, and 60 lbs of LS and 35 lbs of CC substrate along with about 80 to 100 lbs of regular limestone.
After about 4 weeks my ammonia hit 0 finally however my nitrite and nitrate were through the roof.
Soon I found I had not allowed enough air in my skimmer to work properly, and I was advised to remove the CC which I did after a day of being armpit deep in my tank and using my pasta strainer.
I also added Cycle and with in a day or two my nitrite and nitrate went to 0 amazingly.
I waited another 3 weeks practicing my water tests and reading all I could on various fish I might want to purchase.
I decided to buy a percula clown at the constant request of my 3 year old daughter (she wanted a nemo).
All went well for a few more weeks so I decided to visit some LFS but they were almost all horrid (fish dead in tanks, shop keepers who had no clue if a fish was even salt water or fresh without reading the tank info).
I finally drove 90 minutes away to South San Jose found a pretty good LFS and they quickly had me buying a Emperor Angel in no time.
Saying they would be no issues with the fish what so ever and that later I could buy another 2 angels (fire and coral beauty was the plan).
A week went buy the fish were doing great, I couldn't help but visit the store a few more times too see all the new specimens that came in but didn't have a fire angel available so I waited another week.
The LFS told me though that my Bio system would not be enough with only 60 lbs of LS and no LR I decided he was right and did as he suggested and bought 40 lbs of sand, with plans to add some LR over time.
The sand made the tank a bit cloudy and moving all the rocks around for sure wasn't easy on the fish but everything seemed fine.
The next morning I found my beautiful emperor dead on the side of the tank with all its fins eaten down to the bone.
I took him back to the store that day but the shop manager said a water test wouldn't show anything and it was clear our damsels must of beat it up to death since its fins looked so bad.
I swore they never showed agression and they couldn't possibly have done harm to him until after he died but he didn't want to spend any time on it so I let it go.
And talked to a few other very helpful attendants of the store. What amazed me about this store is the owner is a biologist, and each staff member knew every fish, what they ate, if they needed high light needs or not, and so on. Where other stores from my LFS to petco and so on didn't know more than I and if so only about one or two things.
I will admit they told me I might want to wait to buy anything to see if other fish might die and find a more devious cause to the death of my Emperor.
But I was pretty sure the fact was I stressed the fish out by adding sand and moving the rocks as I did.
I spent the day on forums and found that some think angels are far more delicate than the store merchants led me to believe, angels I'm told shouldn't be in tanks under 6 months old, as any spikes could kill them quickly.
my moving rocks and adding substrate could easily have killed the angel and the damsels may have attacked from the confusion or simply pecked at him when he was dead.
Well this week I went back to the store, and was prepared to think of another fish but I couldn't find a way to decide what next with my suspessions that what they said I could handle would be much to eager with a sale in the end result.
So I of course got sold! I left with 5 more red hermits (to go with my 5 blue hermits), and 3 more turbos to go with the two I had.
But then the point came where I just had to try something new, so I bought a Sebae anemone after being told that my percula would make it his home, that it wasn't light hungry and my florecent hoods would be plenty.
Well then by the night after watching it float around and bump into everything, and even moving a rock it decided to get stuck under, it settled under my power head so I turned it off and let it goto sleep.
Little did I know that sebae sleep sometimes deflatted so an hour later I was nearly in tears when my wife said it was dead (or might be).
Sure enough it looked horrible, all flat and sunken in itself lying on its side on the sandy floor.
I almost yanked it out and was ready to call this hobby a bad mistake.
But I decided to goto bed incase there was something I didn't know.
The next morning I woke up and started reading up on Sebae's and had new hope as i learned it could live for a short time without some better lighting but over a years time or less it might die of starvation without some healthy light to feed the zooplankton.
My wife came up stairs and told me it looked much better again and even had attached itself to the rock.
She was right all was well, after 6 hours of being attached it decided to move again and tonight its doing well however is again sleeping on its side on the sand but only slightly deflatted this time.
So here I am, today at my LFS in town (I don't buy much from it as it rarely has much and well the store clerks dont know much at all).
But they handed me a NVR card and it was exactly what I was looking for.
So here I am, sorry for the long hello but I figured I'd get my short History out all in one spot than repeat it everytime I go into detail with a new face in the crowd.
I'm very eager to learn more about this hobby and have even spoken with a few friends about one day making this a career of some kind (I'll save that for another topic).
My plans in the future include a huge tank, and maybe getting into breeding and fragging myself.
I plan to keep a reef tank and a fish only but I'm not sure which tank will be which (either keep the 80 gallon I have a fish tank and make the future large tank a reef one or visa versa).
Please by all means if theres any thing anyone ever can come up with that they think I might need to know to learn all there is about this hobby, grab my ear I'm always eager for learning something knew.
I'm new to NVR but a LFS gave me a card today and it's exactly what I've been looking for.
My name is Jarrod. 31 year old Father of two been married almost a decade now (god I'm getting old).
I bought an 80 gallon tank about 3 months ago with 2 mechanical 50 gallon filters, and a 100 gallon ventury protien skimmer. Along with a power head.
Now the story of my limited experience:
I cycled the tank with 9 damsels, and 60 lbs of LS and 35 lbs of CC substrate along with about 80 to 100 lbs of regular limestone.
After about 4 weeks my ammonia hit 0 finally however my nitrite and nitrate were through the roof.
Soon I found I had not allowed enough air in my skimmer to work properly, and I was advised to remove the CC which I did after a day of being armpit deep in my tank and using my pasta strainer.
I also added Cycle and with in a day or two my nitrite and nitrate went to 0 amazingly.
I waited another 3 weeks practicing my water tests and reading all I could on various fish I might want to purchase.
I decided to buy a percula clown at the constant request of my 3 year old daughter (she wanted a nemo).
All went well for a few more weeks so I decided to visit some LFS but they were almost all horrid (fish dead in tanks, shop keepers who had no clue if a fish was even salt water or fresh without reading the tank info).
I finally drove 90 minutes away to South San Jose found a pretty good LFS and they quickly had me buying a Emperor Angel in no time.
Saying they would be no issues with the fish what so ever and that later I could buy another 2 angels (fire and coral beauty was the plan).
A week went buy the fish were doing great, I couldn't help but visit the store a few more times too see all the new specimens that came in but didn't have a fire angel available so I waited another week.
The LFS told me though that my Bio system would not be enough with only 60 lbs of LS and no LR I decided he was right and did as he suggested and bought 40 lbs of sand, with plans to add some LR over time.
The sand made the tank a bit cloudy and moving all the rocks around for sure wasn't easy on the fish but everything seemed fine.
The next morning I found my beautiful emperor dead on the side of the tank with all its fins eaten down to the bone.
I took him back to the store that day but the shop manager said a water test wouldn't show anything and it was clear our damsels must of beat it up to death since its fins looked so bad.
I swore they never showed agression and they couldn't possibly have done harm to him until after he died but he didn't want to spend any time on it so I let it go.
And talked to a few other very helpful attendants of the store. What amazed me about this store is the owner is a biologist, and each staff member knew every fish, what they ate, if they needed high light needs or not, and so on. Where other stores from my LFS to petco and so on didn't know more than I and if so only about one or two things.
I will admit they told me I might want to wait to buy anything to see if other fish might die and find a more devious cause to the death of my Emperor.
But I was pretty sure the fact was I stressed the fish out by adding sand and moving the rocks as I did.
I spent the day on forums and found that some think angels are far more delicate than the store merchants led me to believe, angels I'm told shouldn't be in tanks under 6 months old, as any spikes could kill them quickly.
my moving rocks and adding substrate could easily have killed the angel and the damsels may have attacked from the confusion or simply pecked at him when he was dead.
Well this week I went back to the store, and was prepared to think of another fish but I couldn't find a way to decide what next with my suspessions that what they said I could handle would be much to eager with a sale in the end result.
So I of course got sold! I left with 5 more red hermits (to go with my 5 blue hermits), and 3 more turbos to go with the two I had.
But then the point came where I just had to try something new, so I bought a Sebae anemone after being told that my percula would make it his home, that it wasn't light hungry and my florecent hoods would be plenty.
Well then by the night after watching it float around and bump into everything, and even moving a rock it decided to get stuck under, it settled under my power head so I turned it off and let it goto sleep.
Little did I know that sebae sleep sometimes deflatted so an hour later I was nearly in tears when my wife said it was dead (or might be).
Sure enough it looked horrible, all flat and sunken in itself lying on its side on the sandy floor.
I almost yanked it out and was ready to call this hobby a bad mistake.
But I decided to goto bed incase there was something I didn't know.
The next morning I woke up and started reading up on Sebae's and had new hope as i learned it could live for a short time without some better lighting but over a years time or less it might die of starvation without some healthy light to feed the zooplankton.
My wife came up stairs and told me it looked much better again and even had attached itself to the rock.
She was right all was well, after 6 hours of being attached it decided to move again and tonight its doing well however is again sleeping on its side on the sand but only slightly deflatted this time.
So here I am, today at my LFS in town (I don't buy much from it as it rarely has much and well the store clerks dont know much at all).
But they handed me a NVR card and it was exactly what I was looking for.
So here I am, sorry for the long hello but I figured I'd get my short History out all in one spot than repeat it everytime I go into detail with a new face in the crowd.
I'm very eager to learn more about this hobby and have even spoken with a few friends about one day making this a career of some kind (I'll save that for another topic).
My plans in the future include a huge tank, and maybe getting into breeding and fragging myself.
I plan to keep a reef tank and a fish only but I'm not sure which tank will be which (either keep the 80 gallon I have a fish tank and make the future large tank a reef one or visa versa).
Please by all means if theres any thing anyone ever can come up with that they think I might need to know to learn all there is about this hobby, grab my ear I'm always eager for learning something knew.