What can I do next?

[Bigsteve]

So I'll start with what I have:
a 14gallon AIO cube
with
2 false percula clowns
A CUC consisting of 2 hermit crabs, 5 mexican turbo snails, 2 nassarius snails
Coral frags consisting of an evergreen starburst coral, a kenya tree, and candy cane coral.

Now comes my question on what can I sucessfully add to the system that is generally hardy and easy maintain for the near future until i can sucessfully take care harder to care for fish and coral?

[philosophile]

Duncan coral? Or zoanthids? Ricordea mushrooms, Yumas might be perfect for your tank, if it isn't lit too brightly. Most lps should do fine in your tank assuming you're keeping your tank clean enough.

Just an observation: keeping a nano tank like yours, is significantly harder to keep than a larger system. So if you're having long term success with you 14g tank, and you were thinking of upgrading, then by all means, do so!

[Bigsteve]

One thing i am doing in terms of keeping my tank healthy and maintaining my small system is by doing a weekly 25% water change replacing it with reef crystal water so far normal feeding and cleaning have kept the tank pretty hardy

[Bigsteve]

I was hoping to get a green sinularia i really like them

[Bigsteve]

or a xenia

[Neptunes World]

With a 14, your kinda maxed out on fish already unless you get a small clown gobie or something like that.

Maybe get a nice frogspawn or hairy mushroom? GSP would look cool and some zoas. Try your luck with some pink xenia. Great thing about a nano is it cant get that out of control. Well, it might but it is easily remedied.

[Bigsteve]

Yeah a buddy of mine has some frogspawn that he is going to frag for me, i guess i cant really put to much coral in it can I?

[Bigsteve]

I wish i could get some more input, sometimes people just dont wanna give advice I guess...

[Neptunes World]

Just 14 gallons of pure coral ecstasy, if you dont want fish, lol.

Your friend is very nice. I would NEVER frag "my" frogspawn! :D

[Bigsteve]

Well with 2 clownfish it shouldnt be a problem, correct?

[Neptunes World]

I wish i could get some more input, sometimes people just dont wanna give advice I guess...

How much more you want, lol? Lots of good advice already



One thing i am doing in terms of keeping my tank healthy and maintaining my small system is by doing a weekly 25% water change replacing it with reef crystal water so far normal feeding and cleaning have kept the tank pretty hardy

When your tank hits the 1.5 year mark, that will tell you if your doing good. You could go a year and not see anything funky happen, but, doing water changes is always good.



Well with 2 clownfish it shouldnt be a problem, correct?

You can keep anything in there you want, just not a lot of it due to space. The clowns will get big so you have to plan for that. I would use half the space for rock and coral and the other half for water volume for the fish, so, get whatever you want coral wise, just remember, only half the tank for rock AND coral whatever you get.

[Bigsteve]

right now im at about maybe 3/4 of the tank for water, i will have room for my clownfish definately

[Neptunes World]

A nice "C" shape rock work around the tank with a high spot in the middle coming down to the sand on the ends with maybe a little cave and a frogspawn over hang like a tree with some zoas on the side and a ricordia mushroom on a rock in the middle........ Would look nice and cozy.

[Bigsteve]

I wish i could show my tank but just cant figure out how to attach a picture

[sponger0]

I say LPS over softies as they have alot much more color than softies. And lots of different ones to chose.

[waltj11]

I agree, LPS, at least for me, tend to grow slower than softies. One mushroom could easily turn into 10 and in a nano tank, that doesn't leave a lot of room for other corals.

[mthomp]

your kenya tree will take over that tank and you will soon have a kenya forest.

[Bigsteve]

Once my kenya tree gets to big its simple to frag and i will just sell that and make my money back and more

[sponger0]

You would like to think that lol. I know people that cant give them away.

[Bigsteve]

Well my lfs buys them, i already discussed that with the owner

[Metal Man 1221]

I wish i could show my tank but just cant figure out how to attach a picture


http://i1228.photobucket.com/albums/ee457/metalman1221/info.jpg


How old is the tank?

My girlfriend's 12g is only about 6-8 months old and she already has coralline up the wazoo. IMO its time to throw in a nice frag of sunset monti or something similar.

As long as you are keeping your maintenance consistent and your parameters stable, you would be fine with a stony coral or two. LPS are easier to care for than SPS so frog spawn will be a good start. Just make sure you do your research.

[Zoomer22]

Some Caulastrea would be neat, over time you will notice some good growth in your tank. Some montipora may fair well in there too, I also like the suggestion of a Duncan. A piece of advice would be to stay away from torch coral as they grow and expand their tenticles they take up a lot of real estate and will burn other coral (learned that the hard way).

Good luck :)

[greech]

Kenyas don't just get big, they drop their branches and pop up new ones. It's more an issue of attaching and spreading and they are not easy to fully remove from rock work unless your intent is to kill them. Xenia, star polyps and many shrooms are in the same category, IMO. If I had a smaller cube like yours, I would go with small LPS frags that will grow out. Sinularia is fine. It won't spread, just gets big and is easy to frag.

[Bigsteve]

Thanks for the input guys a lot of good ideas for corals to add

[Cloudburst2000]

I would look into some acans too. Some are very pretty and colorful. Also, some colorful zoas would be nice. My brother-in-law has a similar tank (the 15g biocube). He has a large hammer coral (that started out as a frag of one head), a large Kenya tree that drops babies all over the tank (he's constantly removing the baby frags), a nice red acan, some mushrooms (constantly removing some of those too), a rock with some pulsing xenia (constantly trimming it back), and a rock with some GSP (that overtook some ugly zoas...so no real loss but he does have to trim it back regularly.) He really wants the GSP to grow up the back wall which it is doing and then he will probably pull most of the GSP off the rock and put zoas there and only have GSP on the back wall. He has recently added his first SPS, a montipora. It seems to be doing okay so far.

He also has three fish. He has a clown, a tailspot blenny, and a yellow watchman goby. He added the tailspot blenny after he thought the yellow watchman goby was dead. He hadn't seen the goby in months. The goby disappeared shortly after its shrimp passed on. The shrimp was fairly old...at least, three years old. I gave it to him from a tank I broke down to upgrade. My brother-in-law always joked that the goby couldn't stand life without his shrimp. Anyhoo, he found the goby living in the return about two weeks ago. It had been back there for, at least, four months. It must have jumped over the divider. So now he has three fish instead of the two so three fish are doable but his tank is well established at about two+ years. He has also modded some of the filtration in the back. He has a fuge set up back there and also uses a bag of phosban or some such back there too. He does weekly water changes as well.

He also has a skunk cleaner shrimp, a peppermint shrimp (for a small aiptasia problem that is no longer a problem after the pepp ate them all), a scarlet hermit crab, a porcelain crab, and several snails.