rt502

I've always thought majanos were beautiful. I'd obviously never introduce one to any decent mixed reef, but I've seen videos of clowns hosting majano colonies. It might be fun to throw some majanos, xenia, gsp, and clove polyps into the 5 gallon and see what happens. Maybe some random macroalgae as well.

I've been kicking around the idea of creating a tank full of corals typically considered to be pests - xenia, gsp, super cheap zoas and palys, etc. I have a spare 5 gallon sitting around that I could add a cheap hob filter to, along with a couple pounds of dry rock. I figure I could throw in a small powerhead and heater and be good to go. I'd add, at most I'd add a very small cleanup crew, maybe a cleaner shrimp, and either a pair of firefish or clowns. I've seen some beautiful nano xenia tanks online, but wonder if anyone else has gone the route of "don't fight it, embrace it?"

And tangs are a bad idea in a 30. You'd probably end up with bullied or dead tankmates. Tangs can be pretty mean when they're in such a small space.

If you don't have any expensive corals, a blue spot puffer would be great. They have a ton of personality, are small enough to be comfortable in a 30, and tend to be very peaceful. I had one for years in a 30 rimless and loved that fish. I'd only caution against one if you have sps since they can nip.

Find a pair of tongs used for reptile feeding. They're inexpensive, thin, long, and usually made of high quality stainless steel. For spot feeding, you can't go wrong with a simple turkey baster. The shy fish will usually begin to associate it with food and come out when you put it in the water.

I appreciate tangs and wrasses, but I love a nice, fat foxface. They're the unsung heroes of the hobby. Rarely hear about them being aggressive or territorial, they eat bubble and hair algae, produce less waste than a tang, and look super goofy. Lots of love for your tanks and nems in this thread, but I felt the need to shoutout the lovely foxface. Awesome tank.

If you’re set on getting a mandarin for a 45, Id go with a spotted mandarin as opposed to a green mandarin. They stay much smaller and in my experience take to frozen foods much more quickly. 45 is way too small for a pair unless you’re doing the Paul b thing and feeding baby brine shrimp every day.its possible to keep one in a tank that size if you’re willing to target feed every day a few times a day, but the reality is that most will slowly starve. Even if you’re cultivating pods, keeping up with a mandarin’s ridiculous appetite is a challenge given their digestive systems. Not trying to be a jerk, you just have to really know what you’re getting yourself into when you pick one up. I had a spotted mandarin for a year in a 40 breeder and that fish took more work to keep healthy than all of the others combined.

Don't worry too much about the algae bloom. Your tank is going to go through a bunch of ugly algae stages as the system finds a balance, given that it's a brand new tank and it started with dry rock. Different kinds of nasty looking algae are gonna coat and discolor the rock as it matures. Keep cleaning the glass, but fight the urge to mess with the tank too much. Also, that's a nice looking clown. In a cycled tank your size, you could add another and not have any issues. Yours looks like a juvenile, so when you add another, try to find one that's noticeably smaller or obviously larger. You don't want to add a similar sized clown or they'll end up fighting for dominance (had that happen when I added two small clowns in an old tank. Lots of lip locking and chasing). Make sure it's another ocellaris. The larger one will almost always become the female and will stay much larger than the male, so keep that in mind when deciding whether you want the next clown to be bigger or smaller than the one you already have. It would probably be easier to add a smaller juvenile since the clown in the tank will already be settled. You're way ahead of the curve for a first-timer (in salt). Just keep doing less than you'll think you need to aside from water changes and you'll avoid most of the expensive mistakes the rest of us made with our first tanks.

I've always thought it'd be really cool to run an iced tea dispenser as a pico tank. If it didn't have any fish, you could keep it covered (either with the included top or saran wrap), reducing the evaporation to nearly 0. Cut a few very small holes in the top and run a small airstone or powerhead on its lowest setting and you're good to go for oxygenation. Use the spigot for water changes and keep easy corals. Maybe a small goby or clown if you go 5+ gallons and do regular water changes. Example: I myself am currently keeping a fluval spec v, which I think is a great little tank. It's well overstocked with a young clownfish pair, two gobies (randalls and tangaroa) and their pistol shrimp (tigers, and all 4 peacefully share the same large burrow) and a fire shrimp (plus cleanup crew). The only coral I have in there are some gsp and a pair of hammers that are all doing really well. I love that it's an aio/peninsula with a long, narrow profile (as opposed to tall). I had to upgrade the pump and make a few other modifications, but overall it's been a fun tank to have on my kitchen countertop.

Santa Monica makes drop algae scrubbers. They're expensive ($200+) but are plug and play. They sell them at marine depot.

Ruffled Feathers seems to have solid reviews and an emergency group that will pick up your macaw and help rehome her. I know it's not ideal, but it could be a solid fallback option in the event that you can't find a home with someone you know personally.

I'm really sorry that you have to downsize and also rehome your parrot. There are a number of bird sanctuaries and rescue groups in the area that you could speak to. I also think Hilary here on WAMAS is plugged in to the avian world and may be able to help. Link to various rescue orgs below. http://bird.rescueshelter.com/DC

In a 13 gallon, you could do a pair of ocellaris clowns (most of the designer clowns are ocellaris, so you have all sorts of choices when it comes to looks), a single or pair of firefish (if you add two at the same time), and a pistol shrimp/goby combo and be fine, so long as you keep up with water changes and add them over the course of a few months once the cycle is completed. You could also add a cleaner shrimp or something like a strawberry crab almost immediately once cycled. The reason they all work is because these fish are all peaceful and tend to find a spot in a tank and almost never leave it, regardless of the tank size, and they all have relatively small biological footprints. I kept a clown pair, a randall goby/pistol shrimp, a fairy wrasse, and blue spot puffer in a 20 nuvo with lots of rock and coral for years before upgrading and they were all healthy and fat, and I never had any issues with water quality (kept sps in there for a while before the maintenance became too frustrating). In your tank no wrasses, mandarins, dragonets, tangs of any kind, or angelfish would be okay, so stay away from those, even if they're small. And as others have said, add slowly.

Puffer is fat Love it.

The CBB is beautiful.

When you feed LRS, try to take a small chunk of it and, while still frozen, stick it to the glass in an area the CBB hangs out in. Or better yet, inside of an empty clam shell. When I had one a few years back, it took him a bit to get acclimated to eating LRS (he initially didn't eat anything out of the water column), but once he did, he was literally eating it out of my hand.

May want to try LRS. Have had some finicky fish and they all went for it.

$100 is a drop in the bucket in this hobby, but tell a beginner that they need an extra tank, a bunch of medication (just in case), test kits for those medications, and the ability to discern various diseases that show up in these incredibly stressed out fish, and the majority would scoff. That may be their fault and we can blame them, but the LFS business model would still chug along. Those who do the research and join groups like wamas and discuss these topics are the exception, not the norm. I agree that, as it is now, it's up to the purchaser to do their background research and learn what is necessary to keep a healthy tank, but that's letting the industry off the hook. In the meantime, way too many fish die for dumb, preventable reasons. The saltwater ornamental fish trade is a mess and underegulated, but that's an altogether different discussion. One market niche that I haven't seen filled would be a fish hospital of some sort. Your fish have ich? Bring them over, we'll treat for a fee and you receive a % back if your fish is lost. Maybe the idea isn't viable and would be too costly to run, but when I was new and had the first of many different disease outbreaks, I would have happily paid to take my fish somewhere to be treated instead of having everything die either because I lacked the proper medications or because I couldn't get a hospital tank up quickly enough. Some of the losses were devastating and initially made me stop keeping fish altogether.

With regards to LFS', it seems like a complete toss up in regards to the health of the fish you receive, unless you have someone with a dedicated protocol (Marco), and it seems obvious that the majority aren't willing to pay extra for quarantined/treated or captive bred fish. I think we all know that it's mostly out of the hands of the LFS, since they're all ordering from the same wholesalers and generally all take the same basic precautions (formalin/methylene/maybe copper/etc). It's expensive to put fish through a protocol, since you're taking on all of the losses that you'll inevitably get and we the consumer won't pay for all of the dead fish that went into the way more expensive healthy fish when we can take our chances at 1/3 to 1/2 the price elsewhere. I rarely get to pull this card, but as an economist 'fixes always crooked tie,' we know that price is the #1 factor in consumer choice. Only some sort of regulation that caps the number of doa fish or penalizes stores for sick fish would make a dent (and it's not at all feasible). Paying $150 for a healthy leopard wrasse that won't die and/or nuke your tank is reasonable, but most would rather pay $65 and take the risk. As a new saltwater guy, I was legitimately shocked by the general acceptance of high mortality among fish collected and the number of fish that are diseased at LFS'. It's great that Paul has success with live blackworms and clams and immunity and what not (though I still can't believe he loses fish to jumping) but I was one of the many, many people who got into saltwater, learned on the fly, learned all about ich and brook and sourcing the hard way via crashes, got alienated and left, and got back with some more knowledge. Now, I just expect that the fish I purchase will be of dubious health. I generally dip and don't quarantine and just feed as high quality of food as I can (Paul B school I guess, made easier with high quality foods like LRS, lots of amphipods, and proximity to a good seafood grocer). If a fish I add gets hit too hard with ich and the others aren't showing, I'll remove that fish and treat in a hospital tank until healthy enough to put back. Worked before I had to get out last year (no losses in years) and has worked so far with my new setup. All that said, I'd be happy to pay 2-3x what I pay for a pre-treated fish, but the options are limited, and adding an ERC fish to my tank, for instance, would probably lead to that fish getting parasites regardless, since they're already in my system. It's not ideal, but it's what has worked for me.

Had a copperband about a year before breaking down the tank and selling him, and the way I got him to eat initially was to put an open clam or mussel at the bottom of the tank for him to pick at while I was gone, and then weaned him onto lrs, and finally other frozen foods. He ended up being a fat, healthy pig, but it was the cbb chapter in Paul's book that really helped get that guy started. Fwiw, one clam goes a long way

ORA would be captive bred, no? Ethically, even if a hybrid, that seems exponentially better than what is usually done to to get our fish (taken from the wild, shipped across the world in tiny bags, high mortality rates, etc., and I'm very guilty of keeping fish caught this way).

3 foxfaces (love the magnificent), 3 yellow tangs and a purple tang all getting along? Well done.

Ended up going with royal reefs. Ordered 2 packs of '1000' pods plus 10 astrea snails and blue legged hermits for my nuvo wrasse tankfor roughly $80 (inc shipping). Received the order today (they forgot to include the snails and hermits, so I'm following up), and the amphipods were similar to what I used to order from aquarium depot back in the day. Multiple sizes and very few doa despite 2 day shipping. Water quality was not great, as expected, but much better than the ad orders. Did a quick rinse with tank water and added the filter floss with pods to the tank after feeding and my wrasses are now in heaven, particularly the melanarus and leopard, whose bellies are larger than I'd though possible. The Mccosker and tricolor seem to be enjoying themselves as well (added all 4 together and have had 0 aggression issues so far, but have been monitoring closely). I have a lot of porous rock, so plenty of the pods made a quick and safe getaway, and hopefully will survive for a decent amount of time in literal hostile waters. Aside from the missing items (assuming that gets resolved), I'd order from royal again.

2-3 years ago I sold my cbb and one spot rabbitfish to a reefer here who specifically wanted to get rid of these hydroids and was about to break down his tank out of frustration. The cbb wiped them out. Not sure if this is an option given the size of your tank.

You pretty much have my dream fowlr tank. I love this. Planning to add any others or are you set? (I love me some magnificent foxfaces).