rtelles

I'd be hesitant about throwing an anemone in there if you have a bunch of other corals, especially in a tank that size, and even more especially if you have the koralia running. Had a bad tank crash awhile ago because the 'nem got too big and decided to travel and got sucked into a powerhead, this despite using a powerhead cover. 'Nems grow big, fast, and have a tendency to split, and if they're unhappy, they'll just start wandering. My original rbta started at 3" across and got as large as 15" across fully opened, and that doesn't include 3 splits. I still love them, and I have a couple of large rainbow anemone's in my home system, but for that reason I decided to keep to zoas and other softies and isolate the anemone's to one corner of the tank and sell the extra splits, but over the years I've lost quite a few corals to them. If you're debating getting an anemone to host the clowns, in my experience they're just as likely to host a duncan or hammer or even the gsp when it gets big enough, and you won't have to worry about them damaging the rest of the livestock.

Do you have asterina starfish? They decimated my zoas.

Picked mine up from Tropical Lagoon in Silver Spring. He lived more than two years before I was an idiot and crashed my office tank (metaphorically, no physically).

Hey man. There's a thread in the nano forum titled "fluval edge 12g" that has some info and pics of my old 12 gallon edge. It's actually not that difficult to keep parameters where they need to be with the edge, since there isn't all that much evaporation due to the design. You just top off with rodi or treated water every 2-3 days and do a 1-2 gallon water change every week or two. I cut the a bit of plastic out of the top black cover and added a Wave-point 12-Inch 16-Watt Super Blue and DaylightMicro Sun LED from amazon (about $70) that, along with the stock light under the hood, was more than enough for lps and softies. You'll want 5-6 lbs of live rock - that and the filter floss will be enough biological filtration for a few smaller fish. As for a clown, a 6 gallon edge is decent enough for a small clownfish or pair. It's not ideal, but they tend to hover in a single area of any tank. A small clown goby would also work, or a small goby/pistol shrimp combo.

Had 4 bartlett's in a smaller system for about a year and they were great. One turned male almost immediately and things were smooth aside from a few small battles. They were peaceful and pretty much ignored everytning else in the tank.

True about old gravel, senor Paul, but you also use a reverse undergravel filter and stir up all the old stuff once a year or so (based on other posts). Sounds like OTS isn't what's happening though.

Old tank syndrome? How old is the sandbed?

I had 4 Bartlett anthias in a 40 breeder for a while before upgrading and then later selling. I added them all together as juvenile females and they took care of their own heirarchy, and only one of them made the switch to male during the year+ that I had them. That said, I'd add them first. I had a small, juvenile kole tang in the 75 I later added them to and he terrorized them until i had to sell him.

I had a pair of juvenile clowns in a fluval 12G and they did just fine hovering around their home base hammer coral. Also had a randall goby/pistol shrimp combo (I'd def go with one of those in a small tank, since they just chill in their caves all day) and a yellow clown goby in there. I still have the clowns and randall goby, though they've been upgraded. If a clown isn't interesting enough, you could go with something like a Tanaka wrasse in its place, though they're a bit pricey. Stay away from any type of dragonet including scooter blennies - not enough pods in such a small space. Liveaquaria has a pretty solid nano section that should give you some ideas. As far as corals, I'm a fan of ricordias, and they tend to be pretty hardy and easy to keep. A nice little zoa garden could be neat as well. As far as filtration, I just used the stock aquaclear 20 (or 30? I don't remember which) and added some gfo and basic floss. Add a small powerhead for flow and you're good to go. If your tank is cycled and you do a gallon or two water change each week and top off with a cup each day and you should be fine, given that you're keeping pretty easy stuff. I had my nano up for about 8 months before upgrading it and was pretty straightforward. Be sure to get the full cycle. In such a small space, the concentration of ammonia will shoot up pretty quickly if you don't wait. Don't skimp on the live rock. And post pictures!

Dude. This is incredible.

Really great vids. Seems like there's something in there that brings on that feeding response, and I'm glad it's readily available. The CBB now only has to deal with a typical fat rabbitfish and a greedy hybrid maroon/ocellaris clown who will take entire chunks back to her anemones with her massive mouth. I end up feeding pellet to the clowns while I feed the CBB so that the clown doesn't hog all of the good stuff. I'm really liking how low key and peaceful the 4 of them are. Although the CBB is clearly my fave, I've really loved the personality of the one spot, aside from the few times he tried to spike me when I was cleaning the tank (my fault for moving rocks too close to him and not paying attention, and they seemed like warning splashes).

I think I was either really lucky with my CBB, or I'm doing something right with his feeding schedule as my little guy is still getting fatter and coloring up beautifully. He loves him some LRS nano and will literally grab it out of the rabbitfish or clownfish's mouths, or reach out of the water for a bite. He'll still pick at mysis and enriched brine shrimp, albeit with much less enthusiasm. My clownfish pair and the rabbitfish go ahead and take the majority of those, as well as the formula one pellets I drop in for them every day. I tried to trick the CBB into eating pellets for some bulk by coating them in LRS, but he simply sucks off all of the lrs and spits out the pellet. It could be that the pellets are too large (or that he's no fool), but I'll try it with some of the much smaller ORA hatchery pellets later this week. I know that pellets aren't ideal, but I figure if I can get him to choke some of them down, he won't become reliant on one or two types of food, as I've heard of many CBB's that were incredibly picky and then suddenly stopped eating, and then slowly starved. I also bought a bunch of cheap live freshwater clams a few weeks ago and froze them. I open them up and rinse them off for a bit, and then slice the interior of the clam with a paring knife while keeping the meat attached to the shell. I then just drop it in the normal feeding spot and the CBB will pick at it throughout the day. I set up a remote camera to see what the fish were up to while I was at work, and the CBB will pick at the clam for a minute or so, swim away and pick at the rocks for a bit, follow the rabbitfish around, and then come back to the clam and pick at it again. The rabbitfish will take a few bites as well, and by the end of the day, the entire clam is completely clean. It seems as though one of the main issues people have had feeding CBB's is that they're very slow, very methodical eaters that graze throughout the day, and they can't take in as much food due to the shape of their snout, so this seems to do the trick. I've also used mussels, and although he picked at those, he did so with much less enthusiasm and neither he nor the rabbitfish finished them by the end of the day. I'll still keep them in the rotation for the reasons mentioned above. I may also add a mesh cover to a rock and coat it with some lrs/brine/mysis to see if I can encourage the same tendency on a non-shellfish, but there's no rush. I also throw in some live black worms when I can get out to silver spring and buy some, and unsurprisingly, he goes nuts and will eat more than his fill. All that said, the little jerk won't touch any of the aiptasia that I cultivated prior to purchasing him, so I'll be picking up some aiptasia x this week. I used to have a bit of bubble algae as well, but my rabbitfish eradicated those very quickly. One thing to note is that I judge the quality of my tank entirely by how my CBB is doing (easy to do given that my clowns and rabbitfish are basically tanks), and I keep very easy corals that enjoy a slightly dirty tank (softies, rbta's, zoas, etc), so I'm not worried at all about leaving in clams and coating the rock with various foods. My nitrates are much too high for sps, and lps are hit or miss in there, but the softies and zoas are exploding, and my anemones are obnoxiously large and i'll need to part with one or two pretty soon. I'll also be upgrading in the summer and am in the process of curing a few larger pieces of LR for when I do so. I'm set on an 80g dd, so I'm on the lookout. I don't plan on adding any other fish or corals.

Agreed about the LRS food for the CBB, specifically their nano blend. I hand feed mine a few times a day and he can't get enough, though he's very deliberate. You can also buy whole clams cheap from a grocery store and freeze them as well. Pop it open and rinse it out really well and let it sit on the bottom of the tank and the cbb will pick at it throughout the day if he has a taste for it. Live black worms will likely get a nice feeding response. It's great that he's eating mysis, but you may want to add some bulk in the form of the aforementioned foods. He looks great though!

That's a beautiful stand.

The nano frenzy seems to be the right size and consistency for him to swallow whole and not do the copperband eat/spit/eat thing. I tried regular reef frenzy, but the chunks are a little too big and he gets outcompeted by the clowns and rabbitfish as he picks at it. Little guy already begs when I so much as walk by the tank. My goal is to make him fat.

After experimenting with a wide variety of foods, my copperband has developed a taste for reef frenzy nano and does a little dance whenever I approach the tank. I feed him lrs twice a day and attach a small clam or mussel to a rock once or twice a week for him to nip at during the day, which he does at his leisure. He also likes frozen brine and mysis shrimp, though not quite as much, so I'll spray some of those into the rock work a few times a week for him to scavenge as well. I see him pick at the various spots I spray, so he seems to enjoy the hunt and has put on a considerable amount of weight and colored up nicely since I picked him up a little over a month ago. Like most fish, he also goes for blackworms when I have them handy, and he didn't seem to mind baby brine shrimp either. Unsurprisingly, he doesn't touch the SA hatchery pellets I feed my clowns. The sad irony is that I purposefully added a small number of aiptasia to my tank prior to purchasing him so that he could fall back on those if he was finicky, but he has no interest in them, so I'll be manually removing them. He's pretty bold now, and doesn't hide or scare when I'm doing maintenance, only when I bring out the net (in which case he immediately bolts into his cave). He's currently only housed with a timid, fat juvenile one spot rabbitfish and a bonded pair of hybrid maroon/ocellaris (female) and black ocellaris (male) clownfish, so I don't have any issues monitoring his food intake, since he's the main challenge and focus of my setup. Unfortunately, he's currently housed in a 30 shallow cube (I know) because my 80 dd cracked, but I don't plan on adding any other fish either now or when I upgrade, and he seems like he'll be okay until I get a replacement within the next couple of months. Video below. https://youtu.be/APANMHtG1Cs

Oh, forgot to add that you'll want to either quarantine any fish you purchase in a separate tank before adding them to yours or buy them from a lfs that already quarantines and/or treats them before they sell, such as Reef eScape or Exotic Reef Creations. Unlike freshwater tank illnesses, which can usually be treated in the tank itself, it's generally really difficult to treat sick fish in a reef tank since treatments such as cupramine will kill your inverts and corals. Having fought battles with numerous parasites over the years such as ich/flukes/etc, it's worth the extra $10-15 up front to know that the fish you add to your tank have already been cared for and treated. Given that clownfish and many other reef fish can live anywhere from 10-20 years if well taken care of, you'll save yourself a fair amount of head and heartache.

That thing is awesome! Interested to see what you do with it.

As others have said, keep it simple. Unless you plan on doing regular testing, stick with softies such as mushrooms/zoas/palys and easy lps like hammers. Skunk cleaner shrimp are great scavengers and are pretty personable once they get used to you, and I think every tank should have one. As for other inverts, I would actually caution against any of the typical clean up crew packages offered by most online retailers and lfs'. Until your tank is a bit more established, there won't be enough food for more than a few snails and maybe a hermit crab or two in your system. They'll end up starving out and dying and adding all sorts of crap to your tank as they decay. Regular maintenance via glass cleaning and what not will be much safer and easier than depending on snails or hermits, though others may disagree. Once you've cycled, you may also want to purchase a piece of live rock from a wamas member that has some brittle starfish. They're great scavengers and are generally self-sustaining when it comes to their population. I'd stay away from asterina starfish, though, since some will eat corals (asterinas decimated all of the zoas in my office tank over the course of a single weekend). As for fish, clownfish are always a solid choice, since they're incredibly hardy, relatively peaceful (unless you get demon spawn maroons) and will generally eat almost anything. Same with cardinals, though I'm not a fan of their look. Firefish are great in nanos, so long as the tank is covered (it looks like yours is, and if it's not, I'd highly recommend doing so, as even clownfish jump), and if you don't mind your sand getting messed with, a pistol shrimp/goby pair is really neat to have. The fish I named are also pretty inexpensive, especially if you get the basic varieties and not designer clowns or rarer firefish. Stay away from dragonets and mandarins altogether, since your tank is too small to propagate the correct food for them, as well as fish like anthias, since they will quickly outgrow your tank. I also caution against anything considered semi-aggressive, like damsels and many wrasses, since they have a tendency to become really territorial and pick at or flat out kill any relatively timid fish. For other nano choices, check out liveaquarias nano section, which has some neat fish (like Tanaka wrasses, if you want to spend a bit more). Finally, it may be worthwhile to add a small hob filter. They're cheap (an aquaclear 30 is about $25 on amazon with Prime) and will add some mechanical filtration and/or carbon along with a bit more surface agitation given that the 20 looks like a tall and not long. Good luck!

You could always pick up a bottle of tisbe pods as well. They're incredibly small and you can barely see them, but they'll propagate on the rocks and in the sand if you seed them in the tank and there aren't any predators. The same goes for amphipods and other small inverts. Don't go for tigger pods, they can't live comfortably in reef temps and will die out (learned that one the hard way). Agreed that you should try to find some grunge from an aquarium shop, and since you won't be adding any fish for a while, you won't need to stress about introducing parasites or any of that mess. As for the algae, you're going to have some terrible eyesores as the tank develops and matures (nasty looking diatom outbreaks, hair algae, other nastiness), and you'll be tempted to do stuff to pretty it up (getting large clean up crews early, etc), but fight the urge. So long as you're feeding the bacteria and doing water changes, it'll move through the ugly sooner than you think.

If you don't have a sump and you have mechanical filtration in the fluval, then it's really building up some nastiness in there. If you're not doing weekly maintenance on the fluval, at the least, I'd get rid of it. I was running an external canister filter for a while and the trade-off wasn't worth and I got a sump. Don't know the size of your system or what kind of bioload you have, so assuming it's overstocked like most of us, you'll want to do it gradually by removing the little bioball things over the course of a few weeks instead of just pulling the plug completely. You may want to throw on a hob filter for some mechanical filtration in the meantime. All that said, I had a 40b aio-type system for a while and didn't have a sump and didn't get the hype, until I got a sump, which was (and is) literally a cheap 20 gallon high aquarium with no baffles that I keep 70% filled. I would never have a system larger than 20g without one now, if only for the filter socks, ato, and a place to stash all of the other equipment, and it also comes in handy as a time out and/or space to get new fish acclimated after qt without the stress of going straight to the DT. I used to be intimidated by the concept of a sump since there seem to be so many options, but it really could be as simple as an overflow, a cheap aquarium, filter sock holder, and return pump. Could throw in some rubble or bioball type filtration in there if you want, but it doesn't have to get crazy or too expensive.

I dealt with a really nasty case of this stuff and it looked exactly as bad as your last pic. Diatom outbreaks are normal, and that's not what you're dealing with. I have it under control now, but had to take a number of steps (there are tons of threads about this stuff, but this is what worked for me). If you have a sump and filter socks (ideally one that's really dense), use a basic tube and siphon as much of that stuff as humanly possible immediately into a filter sock and into the sump (so you're filtering out the dinos but keeping the water in the system). When you've siphoned everything, replace the filter sock with a clean one and repeat every day. This will get rid of worst of the outbreak and get you to a new starting point, and doing it daily will keep it from spreading. Next, lights out/blackout. They're photosynthetic, so even really small amounts of light will keep them alive, so you'll need to cover your tank for 3 days, entirely. No light whatsoever. Luckily you're still cycling, so you won't have any angry corals or fish. If you have a skimmer, run it during this period. Repeat this every 3 weeks or so, while siphoning off any visible dynos that you see daily when the lights are active. Ideally, you'll see fewer and fewer while the cycle continues and you'll start to get things like diatoms and hair algae that will compete for nutrients. Lastly, don't change the water until the end of the period. This will also help starve the dinos. Don't try to use any cleanup crews - the dinos are toxic and will kill snails and crabs. This may seem like a lot of work, but after the initial bout of siphoning the dinos from the rock (I was thorough so it took about 45 min), it only takes about 5 minutes every day to siphon any that pop up, and the blackout periods are easy, you just have to cover the tank so that no light seeps through. I get the odd dino every now and then in my tank now, but it doesn't effect any of my livestock or corals. Also, I've never tried peroxide dosing, but it seems to have worked for others.

Depends on what you're trying to do. If you want a refugium, the 3 gallons or so of space you'll get for it will be nice but won't do much for nutrient export or for pod propagation, but if you mainly want a sump for filtration (sock/carbon/etc), a skimmer, a space for a heater/ato/doser/etc, then a 10 gallon should be enough for a 40b. I ran a 10g sump on my 40b for a year and it was fine, and I used a hob cpr refugium on the display. That said, you'll only be able to use 6 or 7 gallons of the space to make room for overflow water in the event of an outage. If your main reason for wanting a sump is for chaeto growth, you may be better of creating the sump and instead buying or diy'ing an algae scrubber, which would probably be more efficient, but others may want to weigh in on that.

If you already have the glass, and it's just for a diy sump, it won't be all that difficult to make your own cuts using a basic kit from lowes, as someone above suggested. The only thing you'd need to do is sand the edges after you're finished cutting, but the cutting process itself is pretty straightforward. How thick is the glass and what size sump are you building for?

Pm sent for ato and kessil if not sold as whole. Wish I had the space for the whole thing (a freakin juvenile black tang...).