things not to use or buy during your first 6 months in the hobby: FYI

[Sk8r]

1. no anemone
2. nothing guaranteed to make your tank do something faster: no miracle tonics, doses, reef-in-a-bottles, or instant-cycles, instant coralline, ****no red slime algae cures. ****[And very probably after 6 months experience with a tank you will have read enough on this site to make you doubt you ever want to, but after then you're on your own.]
3. no get-out-of-jail-free cards: no easy-fix dump-in-your-tank ich cures. Garlic honestly can help, and of all the folk remedies, it actually does not hurt your tank, but don't bet your other fish on it.
4. no sea cucumbers or sea hares, sea apples or medusa worms. Get a refugium for your algae problem. One of these creatures dying in your tank is a real mess.
5. no rare fish. There's a reason they're rare. Don't add to it.
6. no mandarin or scooter that is not demonstrated in the store to eat prepared food.
7. no butterflyfish.
8. no starfish except the black and white brittle star.
9. no crabs except the green mithrax
10. read up on the coral banded shrimp before you decide on that one. Pretty, but predatory.
11. no elegance coral
12. no goniopora coral.
12. no fish, device, nor critter to mess with your sandbed except [above 20 gallons, a yellow watchman] Under 20, one to two true nassarius snails. [Somebody on Ebay has been selling non-true ones.] Above, snails and micro-hermits are ok.

I list these as probably the source of more anguished posts [my fish died/is missing; my chemistry is off] than most others. This is advice calculated to give you the smoothest possible first 6 months, and to give you time enough to read up and decide if you really want to buy whatever-it-is.

Particularly in the miracle cure department---it is so tempting to believe there is a secret formula to let you have one of those beautiful tanks. Actually---there fairly well is. It's testing, and three basic additives: calcium, alkalinity buffer, and magnesium. For a sick fish, there is no substitute for quarantine...

Remember that the fish you buy has just been through a real crisis, and if they have been exposed to anything in collection, shipping, and warehousing---...let's put it this way: when will you catch the flu? First day of your vacation. When's a fish going to come down sick? Early on as the adrenaline runs out and he relaxes in your nice warm paradise...just my own opinion; but it sure seems to happen that way.

You'll notice there are only two corals on the list: the first is notorious for brown slime disease and the second is just very delicate.

[HABS#1]

I like your list SK8R mind you I have allready broken a few of the rules so to speak LOL.

Our tank is approaching 4 mnths old and we have

1.) BTA
2.) Hermit crabs
3.) Sand Sifting Star
4.) We used tap water and have no skimmer (I know not on the list but added anyhow)
5.) No Fuge or sump (won't be on our 75 either)
6.) Canister Filter being used with bio filtration RowaPhos and carbon 24/7

Mind you our levels other than during the cycle have never been above zero and out phosphates are really not detectable. Not saying this is a good idea for others to do or try but I am saying we have had no problems to date (knock on wood)

[tongareefer]

Well said!

[kathainbowen]

13.) No super rare, limited edition, blah blah blah corals off of eBay, AquaBid, or private vendors.

I'd wager 9 times out of 10, the corals with the long, huge, fancy and overblown names on those sites are just common corals, or worse- aiptasia! Until you're up to speed on coral id and recognition, you may wish to try to avoid these corals as you could be getting taken for a ride and way overcharged for a rather common specimen. That's more of a buyer caveat, but I figured it was something that should possibly be considered.




Sorry if I'm stepping on any toes with that one. It's just a pet peeve that many newbies seem to get stuck with. That, and buying things like horseshoe crabs or sand sifting stars to turn over their sand bed.

[Sk8r]

Habs#1, I broke a few of them myself---which is how I know how much trouble you can get into. Clearly you're doing many things right. This is a hobby where you get very few breaks from Murphy's Law purely on luck alone. Keeping spot-on water is one of the best ways to stay out of trouble---test, test, test, and read trends as well as results, and it really helps.

Oh, the 'rare' trap is a big one. You will NOT make money in this hobby. Not until you have spent a lot. Forgeddaboutit. Do it well, get to where your stuff actually DOES grow and reproduce, and you can keep yourself in fishfood by regular trading. If they say 'rare' in the ad, and you are a newbie with a raw new tank, run the other way very fast. You know what the biological definition of 'rare' is? It means 'rarely survives, rarely multiplies'.

[HABS#1]

Originally posted by Sk8r
Habs#1, I broke a few of them myself---which is how I know how much trouble you can get into. Clearly you're doing many things right. This is a hobby where you get very few breaks from Murphy's Law purely on luck alone. Keeping spot-on water is one of the best ways to stay out of trouble---test, test, test, and read trends as well as results, and it really helps.

Oh, the 'rare' trap is a big one. You will NOT make money in this hobby. Not until you have spent a lot. Forgeddaboutit. Do it well, get to where your stuff actually DOES grow and reproduce, and you can keep yourself in fishfood by regular trading. If they say 'rare' in the ad, and you are a newbie with a raw new tank, run the other way very fast. You know what the biological definition of 'rare' is? It means 'rarely survives, rarely multiplies'.

I agree there is no way to make money at this unless you are the LFS LOL. I am sure we will have our bad times also as is the case with most peple that do this I am looking at those times as a LEARNING EXPERIANCE and move foreward. This is expensive but a nice thing to get involved in. If you have kids they will love it and this can be something done as a family like choosing your fish and corals etc. Plus it isn't nearly as expensive as racing motorcycles and buying hockey equipment LOL. I know I just spent 300 bucks today on 2 hockey sticks for my 6 year old daughter and another 300 on a pair of skates for my 5 year old son. This goes along with the 15 grand in goalie equipment I have sitting in the basement that I wear.

[Sk8r]

sk8r---knows all about the price of skates and blades---lol. And tanks. This round [restarted, after 6 year hiatus] I am firmly resolved to have just one tank.

[HABS#1]

Originally posted by Sk8r
sk8r---knows all about the price of skates and blades---lol. And tanks. This round [restarted, after 6 year hiatus] I am firmly resolved to have just one tank.

Ya so was I but starting in May I will have 3 tanks the 31 is moving to the basement and the 75 will take it's place in the living room and the 10 is in teh kids room on thier dresser LOL.

[Zoophile]

Thanks for this list and all your FYI posts, Sk8r. You've singlehandedly kept me from buying several things already that would've messed up my DSB. I managed to walk through my LFS today without buying any livestock. The tank is done cycling and a mere 3 snails and 3 tiny hermits are doing a great job on the algae. LOVE the nassarius!! I'd much rather have a scant but well-fed janitor crew than the gazillion beasties sold in those starter reef packs.

And I'm luckily still using my goalie equipment, Habs However, I could probably equip 5 goalies with my old pad "upgrades"!

[Sk8r]

"managed to walk through my LFS today without buying..."

Now THERE is noble resolve.
Nassarius are a hoot. Seen them try to climb glass? Sllliiiiddde to the bottom...

[Mini Me6]

Sk8r: You are dead on with what not to in the beginning.

I unfortunately had a slight bump in the road setting up my AP12.

Four months into my setup I purchased a small CUC $59

I noticed at nite the hermits were tearing at my ZOO's. Toilet $15 loss.
Then a Porcelin crab was tearing at my CORAL. Toilet $10 loss.
Then my Pseudo ate my Peppermint Shrimp. A $12 loss.
Then my Pseudo harrassed my skunk clown so much it stop eating and getting sick. Toilet $19 loss.
I purchased a rock with 4 green mushrooms. Two fell off and Pseudo nipped them to death. A $15 loss.

Now my Purple Pseudo jumped into my overflow chambers.

[SIZE=3]PRICELESS.

[Zoophile]

I haven't seen him try to climb the glass yet, but he's the darned fastest snail I've ever seen. I couldn't spot his siphon sticking up out of the sand for a few days and began to worry that he'd died and was going to foul the water. I put a single sinking shrimp pellet in the tank and he blasted up out of the substrate like a rabid U-boat and engulfed the thing!

[HABS#1]

Originally posted by Zoophile
Thanks for this list and all your FYI posts, Sk8r. You've singlehandedly kept me from buying several things already that would've messed up my DSB. I managed to walk through my LFS today without buying any livestock. The tank is done cycling and a mere 3 snails and 3 tiny hermits are doing a great job on the algae. LOVE the nassarius!! I'd much rather have a scant but well-fed janitor crew than the gazillion beasties sold in those starter reef packs.

And I'm luckily still using my goalie equipment, Habs However, I could probably equip 5 goalies with my old pad "upgrades"!

I have not been able to use my stuff in almost 3 years due to 3 knee operations in just over 4 years. I had all teh cartalidge removed from both knees now the last one was in Oct. I plan on getting back between the pipes this summer though. When I was playing travel hockey as a kid my parents had to get me new gear every hockey season I don't even want to start on that cost LOL.

[Sk8r]

Ow.

I should, BTW, explain why I'm against all those things in bottles...
First, you have a large living creature under all your rocks: your sandbed. But it's just baby yet. Can't take much abuse. Some of those things in bottles are really antibiotics that kill off bacteria---[red slime] and they don't discriminate. They attack your poor infant sandbed.
Others add actually useful chemicals---[the coralline growth stuff] but at a stage when you don't have corals and things aren't getting used up as they would be in an older tank---so your levels of various chemicals get out of balance, and pretty soon there's a post saying Why is my [fill in blank] testing through the roof? Welllll, remember that miracle stuff you were dumping in early on?...

Cleanup crews ideally should be hand-selected, being sure you get only MICRO hermits. If you don't know what you're looking for, ask for scarlets. They're safe and easy to recognize. Steer away from margarita snails: cold water only and they die soon. Nassarius are as much undersand cleanup as most tanks can handle early on. Don't worry about a little detritus blowing around. MUCH nicer than bringing in a cucumber to eat it---and the thing dies and toxin takes down every living thing in your tank. Not all are that poisonous, but they're 'large fleshy inverts' right along with large fleshy anemones, and they are SO nasty if they check out and leave a blob of protoplasm in a poor infant sandbed. The smell cannot be described.

Take care of that sandbed. Don't invade it, stir it, or otherwise mess with it. Let nassarius snails or [over 50g] a fighting conch do the work delicately.

[HABS#1]

Originally posted by Sk8r
Ow.

I should, BTW, explain why I'm against all those things in bottles...
First, you have a large living creature under all your rocks: your sandbed. But it's just baby yet. Can't take much abuse. Some of those things in bottles are really antibiotics that kill off bacteria---[red slime] and they don't discriminate. They attack your poor infant sandbed.
Others add actually useful chemicals---[the coralline growth stuff] but at a stage when you don't have corals and things aren't getting used up as they would be in an older tank---so your levels of various chemicals get out of balance, and pretty soon there's a post saying Why is my [fill in blank] testing through the roof? Welllll, remember that miracle stuff you were dumping in early on?...

Cleanup crews ideally should be hand-selected, being sure you get only MICRO hermits. If you don't know what you're looking for, ask for scarlets. They're safe and easy to recognize. Steer away from margarita snails: cold water only and they die soon. Nassarius are as much undersand cleanup as most tanks can handle early on. Don't worry about a little detritus blowing around. MUCH nicer than bringing in a cucumber to eat it---and the thing dies and toxin takes down every living thing in your tank. Not all are that poisonous, but they're 'large fleshy inverts' right along with large fleshy anemones, and they are SO nasty if they check out and leave a blob of protoplasm in a poor infant sandbed. The smell cannot be described.

Take care of that sandbed. Don't invade it, stir it, or otherwise mess with it. Let nassarius snails or [over 50g] a fighting conch do the work delicately.

You reccomend nassarius I am using ceriths as they tend to burrow in teh substrate and climb on the rocks. I am looking at a mix of the 2 for the 75 when it starts how good or bad is it to mix the types of snails? I am looking at using Trochus and ceriths mainly along with blue legs again mind you I have a couple blue legs in my 31 that have grown beyond beliefe and have actually eaten 2 appendages off my starfish.

[Apercula]

I have nassarius, cerinth, and astrea snails, and scarlet hermits. The lfs wasnt too particular in sorting out the scarlets when I bought em and I got some I couldnt id so they went into the sump.

[Cope]

I Have a relatively new DSB in my 100 GAL. The tank is established for years, how long after I finish adding the rest of the sand should I wait to add a conch? I would like to have one and want to know how long I should wait for my DSB to be able to support one?

Any advice on the different types and how they perform?

I have about 10 naz snails that have been in the tank before the substrate change over.

Like I said I dont want to over load the DSB, or the existing snails.
Thanks
Cope

[Sk8r]

100g new tank should handle one fighting conch, good sand cleaner, will eat hair algae, either Caribbean or Tongan, fine. They'll disappear undersand, but don't worry about them. About one per 50 gallons of mature tank.
Nassarius snails burrow, rarely surface. Carnivores, not algae eaters, but will not harm anything alive and don't mind rotting gunk as dinner.
Ceriths, trochus, turbo, astraeas, all algae eaters, all good glass and rock cleaners.
I ended up with a real zoo of micro hermits this time as well as my scarlets, but I trust my lfs guy, who's a longtime reefer, who swore this was adult size. So far---he's right. I have crabs with white joints, blue joints and red feelers, a gray guy with a huge claw [for a micro] and can't persuade any of them to use a shell larger than a cerith's.
You DO have to provide alternative shells for hermits: if a crab thinks it is going to die because it has to molt to a larger body and is cramped in its shell, you bet that desperate little crab is going to have himself some snail sushi to get one. That's not the crab's fault...the owner is responsible for providing shells, and the crab just thinks---shoot darn, he gave me a live one, but [sigh] I'll chase it down.

[Sk8r]

PLEASE do not dose any fish cure into your tank. Please never, ever, ever, ever, ever dose any fish cure into your tank.

Please in no way, shape, form or under any kind of persuasion dose fish meds into your tank.

Remove all the water from your tank fast to a 32g Rubbermaid Brute trashcan, with a hole dug in a corner, and when all the fish go there for the last water, nab them to quarantine. Then re-water rapidly. That will not hurt your tank, not even if you have a fullblown reef with delicate corals.

FISH CURES HURT YOUR TANK. Never, ever, ever use them, not even if the manufacturer assures you a certain med is 100% safe in a reef tank. They aren't. In a new tank they're even worse.

[Cope]

Thanks for the great info SK8R, I'll wait a few weeks then have the
LFS order me one!

Cope

[rickofco]

Thanks for the info SK8r I try to read every thing that you put in a thread (that I find) and learn more every day.

Rick

[~SIRENA~]

Sk8r: I have a 1.5" to 2" sandbed that is 2.5 months old. I can see throught the glass in the sandbed all kinds of stuff including some purple algae. I made the mistake of curing my live rock in the tank on the sand. I have so much stuff from the rocks that I can't get out. Would it be sensible to add more sand to cover up some of the debris. I tried siphoning, but doesn't work too well. Do you have any other suggestions?
Thanks, Adriana

All water parameters are good.
Ammonia, Nitrates,Nitrite - 0
PH 8.3
Alk 3 meg/L
I have a 29g sump with refugium, chaeto, Nautilus TE skimmer

[JC_UF_ITK]

Is a sand sifting star bad to have in a 29 gallon tank?

[Sk8r]

JC_UF, yes: it will overdo it, disable your deep sandbed and then die of starvation: bad for the star, too. But read below about types of sandbed.

Sirena, easy fix: just take some washed aragonite sand, a funnel, and a piece of wide hose, enough to reach from funnel to your sandbed. SPoon a little sand in and just let it make a mound. Add about a half a cup every five days or so---skip an addition if you get any real nasty hair algae, and let your cleaning crew take care of it. But the object is to gradually deepen that sandbed to 3-4", at which point it will layer itself with a proper complement of bacteria to be able to take care of its own cleaning for the most part. Right now you have a "shallow sandbed" which can actually be cleaned---if you have a one micron filter to catch the goo immediately, but myself, I think a "deep sandbed" is better for a tank. With a dsb, imho, you have better biofilteration, will have less nitrate, and little mistakes will matter less.

I'd also recommend a complement of nassarius snails, about 4 really big ones, and some bristleworms, to help your tank cope with the subsand goo. And some micro hermits and regular snails to take care of the hair algae, which you are likely to have some of, where the sand is new.

The relative merits of a shallow vs deep sandbed: if you really like cleaning sand, shallow can work, and we used to do this back in the days of crushed coral---we'd stir that sucker up, fire up a diatom [1-micron] filter and suck out all the gunk. Nasty job.

IMHO, a deep sandbed left undisturbed except by nassarius and other natural small-scale cleaners is a better bet, able to hold your tank stable in most reasonable conditions by breaking down waste into nitrogen gas.
Things that are too rough for a dsb: sandsifting stars, diamond goby.
Things ok in a dsb: yellow watchman goby, black and white brittle star---not green![they eat fish]; nassarius snails; fighting conch [50 gallons and up]

NOW: merits of a shallow sandbed: you can clean them. If you have a fish-only tank and want to rely on a cannister filter which you will faithfully clean weekly, you can have a shallow sandbed which you will also clean fairly often. Some of the more extreme sandcleaners will be ok here, but the problem is---if the tank is that clean, they'll starve to death. If you can get your sandsifter to eat spirulina or other food, fine, but otherwise, you're going to clean this bed so often, the poor thing will starve.

It's a complex answer: some of it is personal preference. But if I had a Very Live Sandbed with lots of gunk, I personally had rather deepen it and let it start functioning properly as a dsb. My bias: I keep corals and my fish are a light load. My corals feed off detritus and my fish don't generate much.

There is one other answer: the RSB, the remote sandbed, such as having a shallow bed or even bare-bottom in the main tank and establishing a really big refugium with sandbed somewhere else in the plumbing, as in , the sump, which will handle all waste.

I have both a DSB and an RSB---and in the crisis when I moved my tank and had a major problem with my DSB, the RSB in the fuge turns out to have been the reservoir of biological activity that let my tank cycle in a week and get back to business.

So you see your decisions about your sandbed are pretty major: you can maintain it shallow and clean it often, or have shallow main and RSB; or you can run barebottom totally, or run bare with RSB, or run with two major dsb's, one in the main tank, one remote. All have their merits. YOu just have to figure which best fits your tank maintenance habits, which is best for the creatures you're going to keep, and which works best with the space you have to work in. My whole sump rig, for instance, is in my basement, while my tank is in the living room. Previously I was in an apartment and my ro/di topoff lived on my washing machine---very different circumstances.

[leoslizards]

Originally posted by kathainbowen
... and buying things like horseshoe crabs or sand sifting stars to turn over their sand bed.

Heh, good thing I read this first. I was at my LFS a couple of days ago and they told me to get some horseshoe crabs and/or a sand sifting star. I was going to get the star but I didn't because my SG is off and I was going to fix it before I got it. Why are they bad btw?