New FOWLR tank 370-500g

[theofilos]

Hi everyone. After I took some time off the hobby due to heavy burdens :mad: , I am ready to come back.

I want to build a new tank and my purpose is to build a tank that will look a lot like the sea. I may have some easy going corals and I am mostly interested in putting a lot of macroalgae on the rocks. I want to create a natural feeling on the tank. I havent had macroalgae before and I need some info. If the tank establishes and gets filled with it, adding a tank or an angel fish will result in losing all of macroalgae? Or it wont be harmed?

Some fish I will add is 1 or 2 groupers ( possibly cep. miniata and a saddle grouper), 1 moray eel ( love the tes. eel ) I would love some tangs and angelfish but I wanna make sure that I can have the macroalgae in the main tank. Feel free to propose a list. I am leaning towards understocking the tank.

So far what we know : the tank will be around 370-500 gallons, I am ordering the glass on Monday. It will have sump refugium with DSB. Lightning will be t5, any reccomendations for w/g on growing macroalgae and easy corals? I will get the best skimmer I can get. The tank will be filled with Live rock and I wanna make a structure so it can have some caves and a mountain valley effect :). Love to hear everyone's opinion! Thx!

[spamin76]

You might want to skip the tangs if you want to display some actual foilage. I am not sure where you would get it, but you can try for a "kelp forrest" kind of thing.

If you get tangs, make sure you keep species of algae that they won't eat.

If you want algae, you may actuallu need to dose CO2 into the tank depending on the species and whether they are more calciferous or more soft plant tissue-like, as water perturbations really elimnate a lot of CO2, and if you have a really large amount of the stuff they may deplete the CO2... CO2/carbonate chemistry in this situation can be pretty complicated, so you might want to do some reasearch. If you have too much CO2 taken up by the plants it might mess with your calcim carbonate equilibrium and might result in alkalinity problems of sorts.

Too much CO2 would favor the formation of carbonic acid which will drive your pH down, so you might have to walk a fine line.

[theofilos]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=12440877#post12440877 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by spamin76
You might want to skip the tangs if you want to display some actual foilage. I am not sure where you would get it, but you can try for a "kelp forrest" kind of thing.

If you get tangs, make sure you keep species of algae that they won't eat.

If you want algae, you may actuallu need to dose CO2 into the tank depending on the species and whether they are more calciferous or more soft plant tissue-like, as water perturbations really elimnate a lot of CO2, and if you have a really large amount of the stuff they may deplete the CO2... CO2/carbonate chemistry in this situation can be pretty complicated, so you might want to do some reasearch. If you have too much CO2 taken up by the plants it might mess with your calcim carbonate equilibrium and might result in alkalinity problems of sorts.

Too much CO2 would favor the formation of carbonic acid which will drive your pH down, so you might have to walk a fine line.

I think it can be done without CO2 but none the less I have a CO2 system standing by :p . So only some species of tangs will go on some specific macroalgae and I think all rabitfish. Are angels macroalgae eaters ?