Now What?

[davidhughes85]

My tank is now a week and a half old (55 gallon) nitrites and ammonia have finally went to 0. I have 25 pounds live rock and twenty out of sixty pounds live sand, my protein skimmer in not yet producing the skimmate just white foam.....now what.....dont want to rush things....but i want something...fish....soft coral...shrimp......anything besides my snails and hermits...so what do i do now or do i still play this horribly agonizing waiting game

[timmy_boy188]

add some damsels, maybe a clown fish or yellow tang, make sure they are the straight blue damsels though, they are the least aggressive out of them all

[mg426]

What ever You add if anything, I would go small and slow. better to err on the side of caution. Damsels do grow up with a major attitude.

[timmy_boy188]

get the damsels small and after that if you dont get it out make sure all of the other fish you get are bigger than your damsel and usually they will be cool (the straight blue ones anyway)

[mikenpam]

One thing to consider is that for reef tanks that 1 to 1.5 lbs of live rock per gallon is recommended.

If you add additional live rock you could have a mini-cycle.

[Sk8r]

Maybe a mushroom or two, of the tougher sort. I'd avoid damsels---they're hard to catch, and you always end up wanting to... and fish other than damsels tend to be a bit delicate. Have you had algae yet? Green, then brown algae---snail fodder. Then the small shrooms, granted you have light. Zooanthids when the shrooms are happy. Depends on what dominant direction you want to take the camp. Every critter will 'talk' to you about tank conditions, and you want to get one happy and expanded before you move on to the next more complex. Let whatever-it-is settle in and get happy, before the next step.

[davidhughes85]

Damsils are out I hate those things ....with a pashion...I havent had algae...I have one piece of rock that had algae on that i had bought and it was starting to spread so i scrubbed most of it off...should i let it grow back ????? Right now i have 40 watts flourescent but i have 4x65 watt PC commin in the next week and a half from ebay. So whats teh story on these algae cycles are they good or bad what should i do about them and when is it ok for the fish

[Sk8r]

The algae cycles are a necessary part of the tank chemistry: I swear green algae just floats in our atmosphere---I used to have a marine tank while living on a freshwater lake, and the battle was eternal. There are a lot of critters that eat it---and they produce excrement the same as fish, which feeds the corals and the algae, and the algae feeds copepods that the fish eat, and so on: it's a cycle of life. Unfortunately in a new tank there are no natural 'brakes' on its growth, and it runs amok, then fades, then you add a fish: his bio-input goes into the sand, back come more algae---etc. It's sort of like bouncing a ball on pavement. First bounce is high, and then it sort of tails off, and it will happen to a greater or lesser extent with every change you make (like adding a critter, adding more light, more flow, additives) until the tank is so complex and solid that a single critter's biomass can't flap it. At that point a tank generally runs like a top---give or take.