My first reef tank...going strong so far
by
, 02-08-2010 at 09:15 PM (4317 Views)
Its almost three weeks now since I set up my tank. If you saw my previous posts then you know that I've got an atypical setup for a newbie because I bought a tank that came with a hippo tang and lots of fully cured liverock encrusted various corals. Water chemistry is doing great!n I experienced a little nitrogen and phosphorous spike the first, probably due to a mini die off from the live rock being transported to its new home. For the past two weeks Temp, pH and alk are all very stable at good levels (78-79F, 8.1-8.2 and 3.6meq/l). I've haven't seen any PO4 for for two weeks since adding a reactor with PHOSaR. Nitrates peaked somewhere around 20-40ppm but I performed a series of 3 ~40% water changes that broughte them down to around 2.5 ppm. Today I tested and only found 0.02ppm. I will double check tomorrow for testing error but I wonder if this could indicate that photosynthesis is really starting to take off (can NO3 drop that much in 2-3 days)? I spent several days slowly dosing CaCl from around 350 to my target level of 420ppm, so along with Mg of 1280-1290ppm I think water chemistry is doing really well.
I've started to learn how to feed my corals but I think that I've got to blend the food more finely. My cleaner shrimps are definetly piggy thieves stealing food from the hammer coral, but they are so cute that I can't hold it against them. This week I also installed my ATO system, which is much needed because I get almost a 0.001SG change in salinity while I'm at work. I setup a second QT tank this weekend for two bangaii (sp?) cardinalfish this weekend. So we'll be able to stagger our initial fish purchases by every two weeks. Two more weeks and the clowns get released into the display tank!
Okay, so I know that it is important to "go slow", but that is very relative to your circumstances. There is no similarity between a 3 week old tank started with dry Marco's rock versus a tank with transferred liverock. I know that some parts of my system are very young - my sand has little life and my constructed rock wall background is clearly settling in as that is the only place with algae growing on it. But, my question for everyone is this. Given that I started with well matured liverock and a lot of aged saltwater, how "jump started" is my tank? I'm a biologist so I understand the basics of the chemistry, nutrient cycling etc (but acknowledge that the details of dosing are new). I'm still wary of a potential major disaster and recognize that I might have missed something but I'm beginning to add more critters to my system - a candy cane coral and a coco worm this weekend for instance. I know that i have to spot feed the worm, but I feel that if I wrote this post on certain other websites the only comments and feedback that I'd receive are a dogmatic "you are going too fast". I'm willing to consider that to be the case but only if someone can explain why. If water parameters look good and everything in my tank acts healthy then why not add a couple of corals or other critters each week? Seriously, I would like you input. Don't worry though, no giant clams or mandarins for quite a while!