Adding a Sump/Refugium

In order to increase the load of fish and corals and in order to provide a more stable system in terms of water parameters, I have decided to add a sump with a refugium to my RSM 130D. This adds a separate tank below the aquarium that holds additional water volume. It will also hold some deep sand as a place for denitrifying bacteria. These bacteria convert Nitrate (NO3) back into nitrogen gas and water. The gas will then bubble out of the sump. I will also add some macroalgae (good info here: http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2007-01/sl/index.php). These sea plants consume nutrients that would otherwise contribute to nuisance algae and other instabilities in water chemistry.

Here is my my final design. I am having an expert cut the acrylic pieces for me and I will assemble the tank myself. Water flows into the right side through the middle part which is where I will put the sand and macroalgae and then out the left side. I will move the protein skimmer from the mini-sump in the back of my tank to the right side of the sump. An "overflow box" is used to get the water from the tank down to the sump and then a return pump will bring it back up again.

Thinking About My Future Fish

I have a smaller tank (34 gallons with about 30 gallons of saltwater -- live rock & live sand displace the remaining volume); I, therefore, can add only a few fish and they need to be small fish, so I need to plan my live stock judiciously.

My favorite (and the favorite of a lot of aquarists) is the Green Mandarin Dragonet (Synchiropus Splendidus):

These fish, however, are difficult to feed. They prefer live food and a lot of it, so it can be difficult to have a food supply for the fish. Currently, they are wild caught. They grow up eating certain things in the wild and frozen food just doesn't do it for them. Most wild fish are not as picky, so the vast majority of wild caught fish put into aquaiurms adapt to a variety of convenient foods.  Some aquarists are able to wean the Mandarin Dragonet off of live food to frozen food and are able to keep very healthy specimens for years, but from what I have read, a lot of these fish die of starvation. Also, although they are not endangered, some classify them as exploited and report the aquarium trade puts pressure on their populations. Here is an article that describes how they spear the fish in order to catch them: Mandarin Harvest Realities

The good news is that Oceans, Reefs, and Aquariums (ORA) has announced they will be selling captive bread Green Mandarins that will have been raised on frozen food. They plan to start selling them this summer. I hope to add a one (or maybe a male/female pair) down the road.

In the meantime, I used www.liveaquaria.com to research some potential candidates and I have narrowed it down to the following list. This is based on easy to care for fish that are safe with coral reefs and will do well in a tank that is a minimum of 40 gallons.

In order of interest:

Firefish

Royal Gramma Basslet

Hi Fin Red Banded Goby

Spotted Cardinal FIsh

Banggai Cardinal Fish

Tail Spot Blenny

Yellow Candy Hogfish

Six Line Wrasse

A Little Chemistry

I changed 10 gallons of water yesterday (about 33% of the water in the tank) and the chemistry is looking pretty good. It has taken me 3 weeks but I got my SG up from 1.024 to 1.026. I am still working on raising Alkalinity and Calcium using SeaChem Reef Builder and SeaChem Reef Advance Calcium. Once I get the numbers where I want them I bought a two part system: SeaChem Reef Fusion 1 and 2 to maintain these parameters.

• Temp: 78
• SG: 1.026
• Ph:8.2
• Ammonia: 0.0 ppm
• Nitrite: 0.0 ppm
• Nitrate: <5 ppm (close to 0)
• Phosphate: 0.0 ppm
• Calcium: 400 ppm
• Alkalinity: 9 dKH
• Magnesium: 1290ppm
• Iodine: 0.06 mg/L

I bought a SeaChem Iodine test and it's really a tough test to judge because the color is not that stable, so I have very little confidence in it. I order a $40 professional test kit to see how that compares to mine. Although I sent test out last week, so their numbers will be from last Monday and these numbers are from my test last night (Sunday) after my water change. I took a test last Sunday, so my plan is to compare it to that one.

Latest Full Tank Shot

A New Addition...

I added this very cool Long Tentacle Plate Coral. I am hoping the clown fish will call this home. It's actually a bit too big for my tank, but it should have some room to roam around. At least a few inches in any direction.

Added Corals and Fish (Pics!)

On Saturday (3/13/2010), I added two corals. It turns out that each of these corals has other species on their rock, so I ended up with four different species. A week later, the chemistry looked very good, so I added two small clown fish.

Yellow Polyp Coral (Parazoanthus sp.)

Green Polyp Coral (Zoanthus sp.) and Toadstool Leather Coral (Sarcophyton sp.)

Dreaming of a Bigger Tank

While I am waiting for my tank to be ready to handle the load of some corals and fish, I was thinking about where I could put a larger tank. I used Google Sketchup to redesign my family room to support a 150+ gallon tank. I will likely never do this, but it was a good project to help me learn Google Sketchup:

Here is the back wall of my current family room:

Here is it with a built-in 150 gallon tank (63"x24"x24"):

My Leveling Mod

My house is not level. In fact, I have been told the house with move up and down between the dry and wet seasons as the clay soil beneath the house expands and contracts (although I have not lived in the house long enough to confirm this). In an effort to make it easier to level the 600+lb tank in the future, I added Rockler levelers to the bottom of the tank stand. A more detailed write is here. Here are some pics:

Faces of My Tank

I have tried several different reefscapes over the past month, so here are some links:

CURRENT, Version 4.5: Pile of Rock #2:


Version 4.0: (I did not take a picture, but similar to version 4.5. I bought a bigger magnetic glass scraper so I needed to move a rock a little away from the glass but this caused a partial collapse of the structure so I rejiggered it)

Version 3.0: Mounds:


Version 2.0: Cathedral:

Version 1.0, Pile of Rock #1:


I liked The Cathedral the most, but I was unable to reproduce this. I had to take it down because I found a mantis shrimp in on of the rocks so needed to collapse the structure to remove the rock from the tank to remove the mantis shrimp from the rock (more on this in another post). The bottom line is that mantis shrimp are predatory and will kill other animals in the tank, so they can be a problem.

Welcome to My Tank Blog (#2)

I am going to use this blog to document my journey into the art and science of marine reef keeping. Since I was a kid, I have told my self that when I settled down and bought a house that I wanted a salt water aquarium with lot's of cool looking saltwater fish. Well, after a few decades, I finally have settled down and bought a house, so three months after taking ownership, I went out an bought a tank.

The buying decision was complicated as there are a lot of options. The general rule of thumb is that a 40 gallon tank is on the low end of a good beginner tank. Smaller tanks are harder to maintain because they can get out of whack pretty quickly and everything in it can die (the tank "crashes"). It turns out that aquariums are dynamic systems and the key to reef keeping is balancing the various chemical parameters of the tank (e.g., the salt content, calcium, ammonia, etc). This means it is similar to balancing a broom stick on your finger, It requires lots of small constant changes to keep the system balanced; and any lack of attention can quickly escalate into the a complete loss of balance.

I decided on a 34 gallon tank by Red Sea called the Red Sea MAX 130D. While 34g is a little smaller than the recommended minimum, it is a very aesthetically appealing tank and it is more or less complete with everything you need to get started. The reality is that many owners complain about some of the stock equipment, so I did make a few upgrades. Here are my upgrades:

• I upgraded the protein skimmer to a Tunze 9002 because of reports that the stock skimmer was noisy and a bit fickle (the protein skimmer removes Dissolved Organic Carbon (DOC) from the tank water which will cause problems because its decay produces toxins and the decay process removes oxygen that the animals need to use to respirate).
• I also purchased the inTank Media Basket to hold the mechanical and chemical filter media. This makes access to the filtration items much easier.
• I purchased Purigen as a synthetic chemical filter to remove nitrogenous waste
• And Chemi-Pure Elite as an activated carbon filter to remove ionic organics and other ionic impurities

I also added levelers to the bottom of the stand, but more on this in another post. Here is the tank waiting to be setup with sand, rock, and water.

NOTE: I moved my blog from it's old location to here because of spam issues.