Gamera
06/06/2002, 06:33 PM
I'm fairly curious about your thoughts on keeping a comet in a soft coral tank. Before I dig in, I suppose I should give a little background on the tank specs.
My 55 gallon tank has been quite stable, the corals are growing like crazy, and the rockwork has finally settled in. I've got a good deal of lengthwise flow (the sump has a Rio2100 pump that puts out at 450gph and an amiracle overflow that dumps 450gph into the sump). I've got two powerheads (201s) for cross-flow at two positions that mark off quadrants one third the length.
I've currently got a fairly large gramma, two moderately sized percula clowns, a medium sized bicolor blenny, and a coral beauty in the tank. Everything's going just peachy.
I have quite a few snails and a fairly decently sized sally lightfoot crab in the mix. There's a small mithrax I see every now and again, but it really likes to hide by the large brittle star I have. I think they share food. I also have two large skunk cleaner shrimp that do what they do best, though quite infrequently as the fish haven't been 'sick' since I first set up the tank.
From what I can tell there's still room for a large fish as all the fish and the shrimp like to hang out at the far right of the tank (where I typically feed the tank) and rarely stray beyond the halfway mark (lengthwise). It's led to a rather odd development.
The wife wants another fish.
She really wants another fish, and she's been bugging me quite a bit about it. I was perusing the April backissue of Reefkeeping and happened to be reading your article on comets. She was reading over my shoulder and saw the picture and the movie.
Now the wife wants a comet.
I couldn't think of any potentially troublesome issues other than size problems and the possibility of the comet consuming the blenny and the cleaner shrimp if it got that large. The blenny measures nearly two inches and the cleaners are about 1.5-2 inches each (just the body in it's natural position). I had hoped to find a fairly small one to start with and go from there.
Any words of wisdom?
My 55 gallon tank has been quite stable, the corals are growing like crazy, and the rockwork has finally settled in. I've got a good deal of lengthwise flow (the sump has a Rio2100 pump that puts out at 450gph and an amiracle overflow that dumps 450gph into the sump). I've got two powerheads (201s) for cross-flow at two positions that mark off quadrants one third the length.
I've currently got a fairly large gramma, two moderately sized percula clowns, a medium sized bicolor blenny, and a coral beauty in the tank. Everything's going just peachy.
I have quite a few snails and a fairly decently sized sally lightfoot crab in the mix. There's a small mithrax I see every now and again, but it really likes to hide by the large brittle star I have. I think they share food. I also have two large skunk cleaner shrimp that do what they do best, though quite infrequently as the fish haven't been 'sick' since I first set up the tank.
From what I can tell there's still room for a large fish as all the fish and the shrimp like to hang out at the far right of the tank (where I typically feed the tank) and rarely stray beyond the halfway mark (lengthwise). It's led to a rather odd development.
The wife wants another fish.
She really wants another fish, and she's been bugging me quite a bit about it. I was perusing the April backissue of Reefkeeping and happened to be reading your article on comets. She was reading over my shoulder and saw the picture and the movie.
Now the wife wants a comet.
I couldn't think of any potentially troublesome issues other than size problems and the possibility of the comet consuming the blenny and the cleaner shrimp if it got that large. The blenny measures nearly two inches and the cleaners are about 1.5-2 inches each (just the body in it's natural position). I had hoped to find a fairly small one to start with and go from there.
Any words of wisdom?