Hey Folks,

Ive a 16 gallon nano with a 5-6 inch deep sand bed, some live rock, 7 mangroves. This tank is just recovering from 3 days lights out to fight dinos. 5th day lights back on looks ok- a tiny bit of dinos I'm trimmin off my macro algea but not too much. Dinos pretty much went away but hair algea still on the live rocks. So I initally planned to get rid of all the old live rock and get some 'new' hair algea free live rocks My snails aren't doing a great job on the rocks.

Here is the dilemma, just found out I can get a 2" frag of true Palau Nepthea for $35 - basically all the money I was gonna spend on the live rock. Money being tight these days. I don't know what to do. What would you do?:

a.) Buy the Palau Nepthea, toss all your live rock anyways.

b.) Buy the Palau Nepthea keep your current live rocks

c.) Buy the live rocks, toss the old live rock and forget the Palau Nepthea

d.) toss a coin and hope for the best.

$35 isn't going to get you nearly a tank worth of live rocks... so I'm not sure how going with all new ones would be an option. Regardless it sounds to me like the tank is still having some problems and isn't ready for serious livestock yet. I certainly understand that the coral is appealing, but if you've got enough GHA to consider swapping your rocks - or you've still got dinos.... maybe you should try another 3 days of blackout and include a CUC in the mix. I've never had the dinos problem, but I had a pretty bad GHA problem with my rocks and my CUC really did most of the work in polishing it off. If the frag can wait, I would try to address the problems you're having now. If it can't - that still may be the best option, you don't want to be introducing a coral you care about to a system that you're thinking of restarting anyways.

How much live rock do you have in there now? Also, I was under the impression that the palau green nephthea was like $10-20 a frag these days?

How old is this tank? What are your parameters? With the info. you have shared, I think you should do nothing. Be patient, let bacteria establish in your live rock.

Thanks for the input guys. This tank's been running over 6 months now. It's kind of experimental in the sense that I'm trying to see if it can recover from a really bad dinos outbreak. I was tempted to totally tear it down and but I figured I might as well learn something from this so I'm doin the usual experiments. Current live rock - theres about maybe 8 lbs. 5-6 inch deep sand bed, with 7 red mangroves. Yeah, I've decided not to buy the coral. Pricing wise, I guess it really depends where you're at. Up here, its still abit expensive (Palau Nepthea) - But maybe I can snatch one when I come for a visit to the States for cheaper!

8lbs of rock with that sandbed is more than sufficient filtration, I'd save the money unless you want more rock just for aesthetic reasons