SaWEET!

S

Sting

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Dec 23, 2002
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www.picturetrail.com
Alright! I am psyched! It's been a little over a month and my tank is nearly cycled completely. This Saturday- I am heading over to TBS and buying around 30 lbs. of Live Rock for my first installment!!!

I am so flipping excited! You have no idea how hard this "patience" thing is for me- but I actually did it! The live rock will finish off the cycle with minimal die off since it's at the end (and since I don't want any sponges anyway) and then later that day I can buy my clean up crew!!!

Thanks for everyone's help. I have benefited so much from all your advice and I know I am off to a great start. It is so exciting to think about having actual living things in my tank!!!

The last question:

Do I add the clean up crew the day I put in the live rock- or wait until the next week? I leave town Sunday, and I will be gone a week, so my house will be empty. Do the inverts need to be fed or will they be fine on their own?

As of now I'm leaning on the "wait till next week" option, and letting the rock settle in while I'm gone. Then, when I get back I'll be able to buy the rest of my live rock, and then the detrivores!!

Here is my current stock plan, please notify me if there is any problems in this setup. Lists go in order of placement in tank.

Inverts:
25 Astrea Turbo Snails
15 Blue Leg Hermits
3 Peppermint Shrimp
3 Emerald Crabs
1 Brittle Starfish
1 Scarlet Skunk Cleaner Shrimp

Fish:
Ocellaris Pair
Royal Gramma
Firefish
Coral Beauty Angel

Later Additions:
Polyps, Zoos, Feather Dusters, Mushrooms, Xenia, possibly Sun Polyps and a host anenome down the line.
But those are my corals and I'm going to wait at least 4 monhts for any of those.

Thanks for all your time! The fish will be added on a monthly basis, around 2-3 weeks after the initial inverts.
 
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Wait a week--plus maybe a few days. You'll find all sorts of hitch hikers come out of the rock, and you'd really kick yourself if you came home to find a mantis ate all your clean up crew.

Also--not sure if yoyu were listing them in order or not, but I would add the firefish, then the royal gamma, then the angel, then the clowns. The clowns will be the buggers, so you'll want to other fish to be comfortable and established before putting them in.

Otherwise, looks good! Congrats on sticking tough with the cycling!
 
Everything sounds really good, but I just want to mention something to you: blue legged hermit crabs can be real jerks. Sometimes they will kill a snail just to check out whether or not its shell will make a nice new home. You might think about buying red legged hermits instead. The choice is yours, and blues can be very effective at ridding the tank of algae, but I have had much more success with reds than blues.
 
Hermits will eat anything they can. They will eat diatoms/brown algae, they will eat leftover bits of food that your fish don't get, and they will eat seaweed if they are able to reach it. I don't have any caulerpa or anything like that, so I don't know if they will eat beneficial algaes.
 
Could these guys be devistating to a reef aquarium? I was thinking about using pepermint shrimp, or hermits, or some sort of scavanger, in my reef aquarium. I would not think that I would want something that will eat anything though.
 
You will want some scavengers. Many people avoid hermits totally, others, like me, keep them around to eat things snails won't. The biggest worry people have is that hermits may reduce the worms and other good guys in your sandbed.

By the way, blue legs will eat caulerpa. I also had to move a shaving brush to the fuge because they kept uprooting and eating it.

Peppermint shrimp won't eat algae, but they can be a nuisance. Mine have eaten nerite and nassarius snails, and sandbed clams. They also steal food from slow, stupid creatures like anemones. The benefit is that I have never had a problem with Aiptasia and they make planktonic larvae for the ahermatypics to eat.
 
oh, this is gonna be so cool. To see what live is like under the water line. Every exotic or "abnormal" creature I have had, I have tried to create the perfect environment for them. I do not think that any of them is going to be near as fun and intresting as a saltwater/reaf/aquarium.

So much to learn though, but I got 3 months while this tanks cycles.........lol
 
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