Nat's 125 Litre Juwel Rio Marine!

[AK77]

It looks like a zoa or a button polyp. Just out of interest, have you seen that shrimp again? Heard any clicking sounds at night? Woken up and felt as is something has just crawled across you face??

 

[ben1987]

Zoas dont need particually high lighting. Should be fine!

 

[natwood]

It looks like a zoa or a button polyp. Just out of interest, have you seen that shrimp again? Heard any clicking sounds at night? Woken up and felt as is something has just crawled across you face??

Ahaha. Nope, I found it dead in the tank when I took my rocks out to aquascape them. I think it mustn't have liked the overnight journey to my house from the live rock place.
Oh yeah it looks more like a button polyp. It's closed up again now. I've just read that they don't need very high light, so I guess they'll be ok with what they've got now.

 

[AK77]

It looks like a zoa or a button polyp. Just out of interest, have you seen that shrimp again? Heard any clicking sounds at night? Woken up and felt as is something has just crawled across you face??

Ahaha. Nope, I found it dead in the tank when I took my rocks out to aquascape them. I think it mustn't have liked the overnight journey to my house from the live rock place.
Oh yeah it looks more like a button polyp. It's closed up again now. I've just read that they don't need very high light, so I guess they'll be ok with what they've got now.

Oooh! Did you take a picture of it? Also, did you find out what SG your salt is? If its mixed at around 1.019-20 (LFS do this to avoid white spot outbreaks in their tanks) this might be a reason why you're finding so many dead creatures, as the SG might be on the low side.

 

[natwood]

Once my ebay stuff finally arrives and I know that all my levels are ok, I'm not sure what kind of CUC I should get.
All I know so far is that I want a cleaner shrimp and some hermit crabs. Is there any standard team that I should have to keep my tank in tip-top condition?

 

[AK77]

Once my ebay stuff finally arrives and I know that all my levels are ok, I'm not sure what kind of CUC I should get.
All I know so far is that I want a cleaner shrimp and some hermit crabs. Is there any standard team that I should have to keep my tank in tip-top condition?

Hi Nat,

Good call. Wait until you know what your water parameters are before adding anything. If its below 1.024, you will need to bring it up to at least that before adding your shrimp and hermits.

There are a variety of shrimp, crabs and snails you can keep to form your CUC. Cleaner shrimps are very friendly creatures. If you put your hand in the tank and go near to them, they will jump onto it and begin picking away at any dead skin. Its a weird sensation. The shrimp assumes your a fish in need of some parasite removal, so if it backs away initially, just undulate your hand slightly and it should swim across. I used to do it all the time. Its a neat trick to show your friends as well as gross people out lol.

As far as hermits go, I'd stick to the micro species. You often seen them on ebay listed as blue micro hermits/blue tri colour/scarlet reef hermit. These tend to remain pretty small and play nicely with everything else. Larger hermits tend to squabble more and will most likely prey on any micros. I personally like the scarlet reef hermits. Nicely coloured, reef safe and they don't bulldoze your rock work either.

For snails, I'd suggest a mix of astrea, trochus, nassarius and cerith snails. The astrea and trochus that I've had, always seem to favour cleaning the glass, whereas my bumblebee nassarius snails favour the rocks and sandbed and remain small so they can access all the little nooks and crannies. It might be where they are so small, that they instinctively avoid open areas to avoid becoming easy pickings. I'd highly recommend them. The ceriths will work the sandbed too and bury themselves inside it to search for food also. By far the best sandbed cleaner in my experience, has been the orange lipped conch. Although its not recommended to add one to a new tank, since there isn't an abundance of food sources for them, provided you target feed them with pellet food, you can introduce them with the rest of the CUC. Algae wafers, like those for plecos, make a tasty meal, as do the squid and bloodworm pellets that are easily found on eBay. Before too long, algae will begin to develop on the glass and sand, which will provide a natural food source, as well as the fish poop when you finally add them. The conch also bury's itself in the sand, although it does this when its sleeping or feels threatened as opposed to trawling for food.

For your size tank I'd go for:

2 Astrea
1 trochus
6 bumblebee nassarius
2 cerith
1 orange lipped conch
3 scarlet reef or blue tricolour microhermits.

 

[natwood]

Thanks for that list AK! I'll probably go for something just like that if not just that.

Right, my Ammonia kit and Refractometer FINALLY arrived today. Unfortunately the Refractometer came with Japanese instructions! I've just read about them online and saw that I need to calibrate it first if I want the most accurate results. I'm guessing that's what the little bottle of water that came with it is for? I'm going to google around a bit more.

Will post my Ammonia, PH, Nitrite and Nitrate levels later! Exciting stuff ^-^

 

[natwood]

Ah I calibrated it but it was already spot on. Just done my salinity and it's at 1.022. So I need to bring it up by 0.002. So I'm assuming I need to get my salt now. What salt should I buy?

Salinity: 1.022
Ammonia: <0.25

 

[AK77]

There's lots of different salts out there. You could contact the LFS and ask them what brand they use if you wanted to keep it the same.

I've used Kent Marine in the past and I currently use Seachem reef salt. Instant Ocean is another one people often use. Actually, I think there is a new formula Seachem one, which I'll be checking out next time. If you can stretch to £40, you can get it from eBay. It mixes up to 600L, the lid to the bucket seals and once you've used it all up it makes a really handy mixing bucket / housing fish in emergencies / handbag .

It looks like you've got a bit of an ammonia cycle going on there, so that's probably what killed the worm and the shrimp. If you see any more dead critters, remove them ASAP, otherwise they'll remain there and only prolong your cycling as they add to the ammonia themselves.

 

[natwood]

Ok thanks I'll pop into my LFS and see what they've got. Yay ammonia cycle. I'll make sure I get rid of dead things, everything seems to be doing ok at the moment though. I've got loads of mini mini wormy things wriggling around the water. lol.

Here's the rest of my readings:

ph: 8.2
Nitrite: 0
Nitrate: 2

 

[AK77]

Your PH looks good and the nitrates aren't bad either.

Just out of interest, do you have an pure RO water that you've been topping up the water with?

 

[ben1987]

D-D H2ocean salt is good nat. £49.99 with free delivery (23KG). Some bloke on ultimare reef tested it and found it to have params closest to natural sea water.
If you want corals you need to get a reef grade salt as some are meant for fish only tanks...could do with finding out what its mixed with at the shop so you know what you have already.

 

[natwood]

Your PH looks good and the nitrates aren't bad either.

Just out of interest, do you have an pure RO water that you've been topping up the water with?

Nope I've not topped it up yet as I've not needed to. Putting the rock and sand in made it go right up so had to remove loads. I'll get some RO water when I go to get the salt.

 

[ben1987]

you dont need to top up yet anyway. You dont really need to til you get above 1.025-1.026. Then you just have to keep it stable at a selected SG

 

[AK77]

Normally, the saltwater in LFS's is around the 1.019-20 mark, as it helps prevent against outbreaks of whitespot as I mentioned earlier. I would guess that yours was originally the same but due to evapouration its slowly crept up to 1.022. As Ben says, you won't need to top up until after your SG reaches around 1.026. At that point you could just mix up some salt water at 1.026and raise the physical level of water in your tank and it all be at 1.026. After that, any water top ups will have to be with RO water. I'm currently topping up about 2.5L of water a day on my nano, so you can expect to do roughly the same on yours, when the time comes.