MayEye's 15 Gallon Innovative Marine Reef Tank

[MayEye]

This is going to be my journal for my first-ever saltwater tank. I've been keeping freshwater tanks for several years. Though I enjoy my current 55 gallon planted low-tech cichlid tank, I found myself itching for a new challenge. My ultimate goal is that when my freshwater tank runs its course and most of the fish have passed from old age, I can decide to either upgrade my saltwater tank or just keep it to the 15 gallon depending on how passionate I am (and how much money I have.)

 

My goals for this 15 gallon tank:

1. Stick to a cohesive color theme, keep the aesthetic simple. It's really tempting to get the cheapest, most neon corals available, but I prefer the overall look of a tank with just a couple colors. My goal right now is to go for purples, and they should provide great contrast against the fish I'm planning.

2. Take it incredibly slow. I've ripped through a terrifying number of books, forum posts, and Youtube videos on reef keeping over the past 6 months. I've meticulously planned and re-planned and re-re-planned everything I'm going to do. That said, I don't think I'm ready. I'm positive there will be sudden financial costs that I didn't foresee, so I want to be sure I have a comfortable surplus of money set aside for the tank. The last thing I want to do is rush and cheap out on something important just to have to buy a better version again later.

3. Make it accessible. One of the things I dislike about my 55 gallon freshwater tank is that it's often out of sight, and it's in a tight spot that makes maintenance annoying. I've decided the reef tank will go in our living room where I can see it close-up right from the couch.

4. Nothing harmful. I was sorely tempted by different types of scorpionfish, zoanthids, fanged blennies... in the end, I decided I'm too anxious of a person to justify anything that was actually toxic. I obviously don't think a fanged blenny is going to kill me, but it's worth having peace of mind.

 

Equipment

Display: Innovative Marine Fusion 15 Gallon AIO

Lighting: NooPsyche K7 Mini Kit 60W

Rock: 12 lbs Reef Saver

Substrate: CaribSea Arag Alive Fiji Pink

Heater: EHEIM Jager 25W heater

Filtration: Built in system, likely will add more media once I see how it runs. Might have to add something for more flow as well.

Dosing: TBD

 

Fish Stocking Plan:

1 ocellaris clownfish

1 azure damselfish

1 tailspot blenny

1 Hector's goby, or (in my dreams) 1 yellow striped clingfish

 

I may not end up with all 4 of these fish if I feel I've reached the limits of my filtration or territory space with 3. Here is where I admit I have completely fallen in love with the yellow striped clingfish, Diademichthys lineatus. Do I think it's a good idea for my very first saltwater tank? No. Do I think it's a good candidate for being housed with 3 far more assertive species of fish? Also no. But I'll at least keep it in the back of my mind for the future.

 

Invertebrates Stocking Plan:

1 dwarf colored feather duster

1 cleaner shrimp

2 sexy shrimp

1 scarlet hermit

10 dwarf blue hermits

10 turbo snails

3 nassarius snails

2 cerith snails

 

 

Rockwork Plan:

 

[geekreef_05]

Nice! The rockwork is looking good. 

 

Looking forward to seeing the next steps.

[MayEye]

2 Month Update

 

Things are slowly improving! Tank is cycled, fish are settling in, and I'm experimenting with a few cheap coral frags. I abandoned the idea to go for purple corals only -- too many of the ones I was interested in don't actually look great in blue light, and those gorgeous gorgonians I was looking at are supposed to be difficult. Greens and pinks/reds are my goal now.

 

Note: Don't judge me for the acropora -- it was extremely on sale, and I know that it may or may not survive in a tank this new. 

 

I did things a little differently than a lot of people recommend, took some risks, and so far it seems to be going really well. I was SO nervous during the first few weeks, thinking I must be an idiot for basing my methods on newer info rather than the tried-and-true methods of old. A lot of the moves I've made have been based off of information I learned through scientific journals and the Bulk Reef Supply biome cycle test videos. I feel like I've learned more from this BRS series than from any of the reef tank books I read.

 

 

Timeline

 

Week one: Set up tank with rockwork, saltwater, and sand. (Used CaribSea live Fiji Pink sand that supposedly has bacteria.) Then I went to the LFS, bought one duncan coral and added it. Began feeding the duncan every few days with small amounts of different fish foods. Kept lights relatively low at first, ramped up slowly. Added one small piece of crab meat from our dinner. Slowly, brown diatoms began to appear on sand and surfaces. Mixed up some All-For-Reef and dosed to get the alkalinity around 10.

 

Week two: Bought two macroalgae pieces off of eBay. Added them with NO DIPPING. This was a risk, but it's one that paid off. In just two days, the diatoms disappeared. So did the crab meat. With the macroalgae, I had introduced both copepods and small bristleworms to my tank. And probably some additional bacteria that bolstered what I already had.

 

Week three: Tank is definitely cycled now. Nitrates are present, no ammonia and no nitrites. Observed for pests or issues with the duncan coral, saw none. It was now extending really well and making new heads.

 

Week four: There was a good sale going on, bought more corals and two astraea snails. Dipped corals before adding. Continued ghost feeding, trying to emulate what it would be like with fish making waste. Really impressive swarms of copepods all over everything.

 

Week five: More observation, testing, and ghost feeding. Bristleworms give me the heebie jeebies, but even just a couple small ones do an amazing job cleaning their area. So they can stay! Ordered livestock.

 

Week six: 2 fish, 3 hermit crabs, and 5 nassarius snails arrived. These fish are my clownfish (pictured below,) and my Hector's goby. I knew this would be a jump in bioload for the system, so I started testing my parameters religiously 1-2 times a day to make sure everything was going okay. Fish were chowing down on copepods in the water column for the first few days.

 

Week seven: Everything going well. Fish are no longer timid, don't seem alarmed when we watch them or walk past the tank. I can't really get the Hector's goby to go after anything frozen, so I'll be hatching some live baby brine shrimp to try those out. It just might not be hungry though. I was delighted to see it nibbling on a clump of hair algae one morning, and 24 hours later it had eliminated ALL hair algae from the tank. I often see it picking copepods off the rockwork, and it performs some sand sifting as well. I've noticed dirty areas of sand come and go based on where the Hector's goby has decided to hang out each day. Trying to feed a little extra to make sure the copepod population stays up, but I'm uncertain if this is helping or just making my tank dirtier.

 

Week eight and onward: Turned up light intensity. One of the astraea snails died, and I held onto optimism a little too long thinking it was just hiding. Phosphates rose, copepod population is lower, and problem algae is starting to creep in again. This is where I am now, and not gonna lie, it kind of sucks. The real annoyance is a fine, green algae that grows quickly on the glass but comes off easily. Nitrate kept bottoming out, so I'm actually dosing a tiny bit of potassium nitrate to try to keep my corals and macroalgae okay. I think I'm on the right track, it might just take a bit to get back to the balance I had before.

Pretty sure the cheap acropora isn't going to make it, as polyp extension is decreasing instead of increasing. Exactly like I expected, and a little saddening, but I'm still glad I experimented. It was a bit of a surprise to see how much of the acropora is shadowed due to the single-point light source. This is something I'll have to seriously think about and find a workaround for if I ever try acropora in the future. Makes me think that getting a wide strip light (AI blade, etc) would be more important than just having strong PAR output.

 

 

Takeaways

 

Things I did right: Starting with an easy coral first rather than a fish, then adding copepods and macro algae (I think these are key) as soon as diatoms were spreading. My tank cycled very quickly, to the point where I almost didn't believe it. It's also been extremely stable -- even when my phosphate started going crazy with a large dead snail rotting in the water, my ammonia never rose.

 

Things I did wrong: Two fish to start with instead of one, not acting quickly on possible nutrient bombs (the dead snail.) Though honestly, I will continue to order multiple livestock items at once. My LFS is far and not that great, and since the only thing that spiked was phosphate (and not anything very dangerous like ammonia,) I'm comfortable with the downsides that come with bulk ordering.

 

 

(Picture is from the start of the algae bloom, after I cleaned the walls and blew sand off of the corals so they're not super happy in this image. I've adjusted positions of the rocks since then to try to give all the SPS more light coverage.)

 

 

What's next?

 

No damselfish. My thoughts on stocking keep changing, but I think I should follow my brain on this one rather than my heart. Some people successfully keep 1-2 damselfish in tanks this size, but I suspect with the way my tank is laid out, it wouldn't be happy. Too many sites and books recommend 20 gallons or 30 gallons for azure damselfish, and the footprint of my tank already "feels" smaller than the water volume due to it being a cube. Add to that the potential for aggression, and it's a no go.

 

Go slow on CUC. Until the tank feels more mature, I'm not going to add much in terms of clean up crew. My husband wants "a starfish, lobster or a nice crab" in there, to which I said "good lord... okay." so I will eventually look into getting something like a cleaner shrimp or a pom pom crab to satisfy him.

 

Get an ATO set up. I've got a small trip coming up in April, so the tank will have to be okay for a couple days without me manually adding fresh water. I just ordered the Duetto 2, so I'll be able to make sure it's working properly before I'm away. I have a deep mistrust of anything that could potentially dump water all over our floors, and I kind of like the ritual of filling the tank up twice a day... so I'm unsure if I'll keep it running all the time.

 

More fish? I don't have the restraint to stop at two fish since my tank has the space and the filtration capacity for one more. Four would be too much, but three makes sense to me. Recently I've been thinking more about possum wrasses. They're one of the first nano fish that really caught my eye looking at pictures online, but I was put off by the price tag. I've been seeing them listed for less than $100 recently, so maybe I will take the plunge if they're still available by the time my tank has recovered and matured some. They're not as flashy as something my husband would prefer, but I just love wrasses.

 

Dosing. It's time to really figure out how much All-For-Reef I should be dosing regularly. At first I nearly dosed too much, but recently I've noticed my alkalinity creeping down, and I'll have to figure out how best to keep it stable alongside calcium and magnesium.

 

I'll update again once things are substantially different. Maybe a couple months down the road, I'll report back!