Jump to content
Cultivated Reef

Temptation of Bubble Tip Anemones?...


Mxx

Recommended Posts

Now I know that it is a hard-and-fast rule that you shouldn't introduce any anemones, not even bubble-tip, into a new tank. But.... are there any exceptions to this?

 

My 'new' 34 gallon cube was set up with a decent amount of mature live rock from a healthy tank that had been established for several years, so does that mean my tank is mature and stabilized already?. I've been fishless cycling it for a month after initially adding an entire bottle of Dr Tim's One-and-only Live Bacteria and then adding in ammonia drops on a regular basis.

 

So between the mature live rock and fishless cycling, would my tank have stabilized to a sufficient degree to consider adding a bubble-tip in another month's time? I have very good lighting, skimming, flow, and filtration otherwise.

 

I had also heard the contrarian view that it is actually good to get an anemone in the tank and let it decide where it wishes to settle before you add your other corals so that it isn't wandering around nuking everything. Is there any truth to this?

 

I'm still on the fence about anemones though. My kids are of course insisting that when we get a pair of clownfish that we must have an anemone for their home!... But I'm thinking maybe I could get them to host in a hammer coral instead. Apparently Euphyllia aren't crazy about hosting which they find irritating, but at least I wouldn't have to get rid of my powerhead or wrap it in unsightly gutter guard.

Link to comment

Hard to say if your tank is mature what are your

Current parameters

 

And there is no promises your clowns will host the anemone

or any other coral for that matter

 

I got a mature mated pair that dont even get close to my anemone :(

Link to comment

Stability shouldn't be measured by age of ones tank, more how comfortable you are with the maintnece and keeping up with it. If you see no swings in your parameters, Alk and calcium as well as waste products for a month, and if you KNOW what your doing, then go ahead with a healthy nem. I Set up a frag tank in one day with media and a small rock from my display, and then added a BTA to it within a week.

Oh, and yes, place he nem in a wel lit but sheltered area and let it decide where it wants to be. If its completely hidden in the dark for over a week then carefully rearrange the rock and bring it to the light but shaded, so that it has to open and reach for the light if it wants to.

Link to comment

Those are more supportive of answers than I had expected!

 

Being that I haven't added any fish or corals, the water parameters seem to have been remaining the same as they were originally in the freshly mixed saltwater.

 

And I'm quite confident in my knowledge, practices and maintenance, apart from the fact that I still want to add an auto top-off which I expect to be doing shortly and which will help with system stability.

 

What are the real chances of getting nem soup if I don't add extra screening around my powerhead? I do hear about it happening, but I wasn't sure if that is considered a freak occurrence or common enough that it's not worth it to consider risking?

 

I hear that particularly with tank-raised clowns, you may need to force the hosting issue if you'd like to achieve that. And therefore you can put the nem and the clown together in a floating spaghetti strainer for a little while until you can see that they've become friendly with one another, at which point the clowns will be sufficiently 'trained' to continue the hosting behavior once they're set free again.

Link to comment

I wouldn't have your anemone be the first livestock introduced to the tank. It could be perfectly stable, but if the introduction of a single creature could include a huge increase in microbial variety and the zooplankton that grows in the tank, it needs to be more like the enviroment the anemone comes from first.

 

Make sure you have a clean up crew in place and maybe a frag or two, a fish, or some hardier other inverts or something. Make sure those creatures have been alive and well for at least a few weeks. Then you'll have more diversity of the non-ornamental animals in your tank so it will be more like a reef environment in other tanks or the ocean, so that you can verify that everything is going well and your skimmer is dialed in to a small bioload and after your first algae bloom has settled back under the CUC. I would also stay away from introducing the nem and clowns at the same time unless you have already had fish in your bioload - the spike in required feedings and new creatures will be faster than the bacterial colonies in the live rock can compensate for it, and you will be seeing more waste as a result. If you have the colonies grown in a little bit with some bioload already in the tank, then the bacterial culture in your live rock will grow to suit the new bioload quicker and there will be less parameter fluctuations with their introduction.

 

I'd also caution you in that using a fishless cycle with ammonia drops and a bacterial culture does not necessarily improve on other methods in terms of getting a tank to maturity. If you wanted maturity right off the bat, you'd add the live rock from an established tank with minimal contact with the air, then have normal or slightly reduced lights along with full filtration from the start. You'd wait for the small ammonia spike then do a large water change. Once the ammonia and nitrates had died down, you'd add a CUC and gradually begin stocking in a week or two after that. That minimizes the initial dieoff associated with moving the rock and does the most to keep the stuff that's already there alive, though still uses caution when beginning to stock and gradually grows the bacterial base in the rock. A soft cycle with mature rock will get you to mature tank conditions faster than any other method, at least in my opinion, though it will still take time for the life on the rock to grow sufficiently to fit the size of the new tank - live rock from a 20G in a 40G new tank that has been successfully soft cycled and is running under normal tank light schedules is probably only good for 10-15G worth of livestock, and since the copepod and other organism's populations haven't grown in, it could not meet the feeding demands of many kinds of creatures until it has matured.

 

If I were you, from where you are, I'd do things in this order:

Verify that ammonia and nitrates are zero and that the rock is going under a full light cycle and the skimmer can pull some gunk

Get the ATO running

Add a clean up crew and feed them/the rock a bit - not much or often

Wait 1-2 weeks

Add a small coral, hardy invert, or smaller fish - maybe a few of them but not enough to be a significant portion of the tank's eventual bioload

Wait 1-2 weeks

Make sure your dosing schedule for any additives is worked out and your params are stable and in the right place (at least temp, pH, salinity, alkalinity, ammonia (0), nitrates)

Add the anemone and let it settle

Wait a week after it settles (at least)

Add other corals, livestock, or clowns in smaller bursts with at least a few weeks in between adding them to minimize increases in bioload

 

That's just from what I've read and my own experience starting and managing tanks, but though it doesn't adhere to some of the maturity guidelines and recommended schedules, if you really stay on top of monitoring stability and don't run into any hitches, I think you can safely raise an anemone with a schedule like this if you've got the right lights and other requirements met.

 

As for the powerhead, it depends on your placement and how quickly you can react to the nem moving around. If it's anywhere near your rock work and you often can't see it for 12 hours sometimes, it's probably worth covering. Otherwise there is certainly a risk, but it hasn't yet happened to me. And with hosting, there are lots of tricks but really no guarantees. To minimize stress on the nem, I wouldn't add them all together (unless the nem was already hosting the pair being added), and I would wait a month or more before trying drastic measures. It took my ocellaris clowns months to host in my haddoni anemone (which takes up a decent portion of the tank fully opened), but they did eventually take to it.

Link to comment

Thanks Dajmasta, that sounds like a good cycling plan. To a fair degree it actually sounds like much of what I'm doing already fortunately, but there are are some points there I can certain incorporate to further fine-tune how I've been doing it.

 

The nitrogen cycle seems surprisingly adjusted. I added ammonia to bring it up to 2ppm and tested the next day and had 0 for ammonia nitrites and nitrates, which I wasn't sure was possible even, I prepared a separate ammonia/water solution just to test that my testkits were even working.

 

However, I'd also been having a major Briopsis bloom, so I suspect that might have immediately been absorbing all the ammonia directly. I'm nuking the Briopsis now with Tech M dosing, so once that is eradicated I will retest the nitrogen cycling and resume my stocking preparation. So I have some time still.

 

My initial thoughts were that I could potentially dose a bit of ammonia daily right up until a few days before I add my first fish, to ensure there is a more-or-less consistent hand-off of ammonia being supplied to enable the bio-filtration to handle whatever the fish would be producing. (All to be confirmed via testing).

 

I've already recently added turbo snails, copepods, and amphipods, so there is some diversity going already. But I'm actually a little hesitant of adding my first fish and corals.

 

As of today I'm cycling a bundle of filter floss in the sump, and will be quarantining my first fish for a few weeks in a separate tank anyway, and will be using the floss in the quarantine tank's filter. At least if I get some clowns into a quarantine tank then that might ease the kid's exasperation over the long wait with all this!

 

By the way, would it be advisable or safe even to quarantine a nem for a few weeks before adding it to the display tank? I'm not necessarily planning on quarantining my first corals, just dipping them in Coral Rx and adding them.

 

I've been looking at how to mod the powerhead and overflow to protect a nem, but apparently using gutter guard is not sufficient. http://www.aquariacentral.com/forums/entry...r-Tank#comments And what you actually need is a large (and rather unsightly) block of foam around each one instead, and which will clog quickly...

 

Thus, I'm thinking of trying to see if clowns would host first in a Hammer or Duncan before I consider disfiguring my tank's appearance in order to protect my tank from becoming Nem Bouillabaisse...

Link to comment

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

  • Recommended Discussions

×
×
  • Create New...