daveNandi
05/30/2004, 08:12 PM
Ron,
My husband and I set up a 20 gallon (hexagonal) aquarium about 2 months ago in order to house 2 seahorses. The tank was cycled with just live rock and a substrate bed (crushed aragonite) for a month, and about 2 weeks after the ammonia/nitrite spike subsided, we introduced a variety of snails, a few mexican hermit crabs, a blood shrimp and a pair of peppermint shrimp to take care of algae problems and act as detritivores (seahorses are messy, inefficient eaters and need to be fed twice a day). So just over a month ago, we introduced the 2 'horses and they have done fine ever since (healthy, eating well, no signs of distress). But practically every d*mn invert in that tank has died, and then some (we added a pair of skunk shrimp, both of which died within days of each other, and within 10 days of being placed in the tank). At this point, we have a few nassarius snails still alive (they were added more recently than some of the original, dead turbo and astrea snails) and an algae cowry that was added ~2 weeks ago. The cowry is upside down tonight and not attached to anything, so it too is probably a goner. And I'm wondering: what the h*ll could be going on?
Seahorses are fairly persnickety fish; they don't tolerate high nitrate levels well so we do 2-3 gal water changes every week to keep it below 12.5 ppm (or even twice a week), they need very low-flow conditions in the tank or they can't catch their food, so an Aqua-c remora skimmer equipped with a Maxi-jet 1200 provides the ony water flow, and there is a fair amount of caulerpa for them to hitch onto. No corals. Water parameters are quite constant; temp stays at 78F day and night, pH is 8.2, dKH between 8-9 and salinity is 1.025, measured with a refractometer. 0 ammonia and <0.3 nitrite (the lowest measurement in our test kit). Light is provided by one measly 14W full-spectrum fluorescent bulb.
We bought the tank secondhand from another hobbyist, who states that he never kept anything in it other than a pufferfish and liverock. It was never used as a hospital tank and he never medicated the puffer with anything (ie copper). Plus, the tank stood empty in his basement for over a year before we bought it and cleaned it up (with tap water followed by R/O water. No chemicals or detergents touched that tank).
So I ask, after all this info: what could be selectively killing all the inverts, leaving the delicate seahorses untouched? What have we missed? We can't run this tank without any inverts- algae and nitrates would be too much to keep up with, so we're about to give up and move the seahorses to a Q-tank until we can buy, set up and cycle a new one, but if there's something we could possibly fix in the current set-up it would be WAY preferable.
Thanks for your advice in advance,
Andrea
My husband and I set up a 20 gallon (hexagonal) aquarium about 2 months ago in order to house 2 seahorses. The tank was cycled with just live rock and a substrate bed (crushed aragonite) for a month, and about 2 weeks after the ammonia/nitrite spike subsided, we introduced a variety of snails, a few mexican hermit crabs, a blood shrimp and a pair of peppermint shrimp to take care of algae problems and act as detritivores (seahorses are messy, inefficient eaters and need to be fed twice a day). So just over a month ago, we introduced the 2 'horses and they have done fine ever since (healthy, eating well, no signs of distress). But practically every d*mn invert in that tank has died, and then some (we added a pair of skunk shrimp, both of which died within days of each other, and within 10 days of being placed in the tank). At this point, we have a few nassarius snails still alive (they were added more recently than some of the original, dead turbo and astrea snails) and an algae cowry that was added ~2 weeks ago. The cowry is upside down tonight and not attached to anything, so it too is probably a goner. And I'm wondering: what the h*ll could be going on?
Seahorses are fairly persnickety fish; they don't tolerate high nitrate levels well so we do 2-3 gal water changes every week to keep it below 12.5 ppm (or even twice a week), they need very low-flow conditions in the tank or they can't catch their food, so an Aqua-c remora skimmer equipped with a Maxi-jet 1200 provides the ony water flow, and there is a fair amount of caulerpa for them to hitch onto. No corals. Water parameters are quite constant; temp stays at 78F day and night, pH is 8.2, dKH between 8-9 and salinity is 1.025, measured with a refractometer. 0 ammonia and <0.3 nitrite (the lowest measurement in our test kit). Light is provided by one measly 14W full-spectrum fluorescent bulb.
We bought the tank secondhand from another hobbyist, who states that he never kept anything in it other than a pufferfish and liverock. It was never used as a hospital tank and he never medicated the puffer with anything (ie copper). Plus, the tank stood empty in his basement for over a year before we bought it and cleaned it up (with tap water followed by R/O water. No chemicals or detergents touched that tank).
So I ask, after all this info: what could be selectively killing all the inverts, leaving the delicate seahorses untouched? What have we missed? We can't run this tank without any inverts- algae and nitrates would be too much to keep up with, so we're about to give up and move the seahorses to a Q-tank until we can buy, set up and cycle a new one, but if there's something we could possibly fix in the current set-up it would be WAY preferable.
Thanks for your advice in advance,
Andrea