Setting Up And Stocking A New Tank, Plus Stocking Ideas

[Rambo]

ok, got a new tank, an interpet river-reef 50 on sunday, and hopefully looking to set it up in the next week or 2.

basically, i'm looking for a rough, simple guide to setting the tank up, and then possible stocking options.

its a 94 litre (24US gallons) tank, to which i have already got a new TMC v2 nano skimmer, which is one of the best u can get in the UK.


i have good contacts at my LFS, and they've offered to provide me with the water from their coral tanks as well as substrate, which i'v seen is full of little starfish, fan worms etc. And well matured liverock

i was just wondring whether it was advisable to start my tank with all this "old" water and substrate, or whether to start afresh with pre-mixed water and livesand and aragonite substrate.


any advice would be much appreciated




also, if/when i get round to setting it up and cycling it, what would be recommended stocking fish? i'm looking to get a small reef set-up with a few hardy, easily fed/maintained fish


i was currently thinking tHAT, FINAL STOCKING LEVEL, i.e. built up over many months, would be as foolows:



8-15kg live rock (about 17-30 pounds or so)
15kg live sand (30 pounds)

then

2 perc or common clowns
1 fairy or flasher wrasse
a gobie or blennie speicies of some sort

maybe one other fish, poss a small dwarf angel, or other nice looking active fish

then, invert wise,

a clean up crew of 4-5 turbo snails
2 mithrax crabs
2 cleaner shrimp
2 peppermint shrimp
maybe a starfish?


and corals:

a few colourful mushrooms
small xenia frag
maybe a leather coral?




if someone could help me with just how to go up setting up the ideal tank, and whether any of the above speices are incompatible, or perhaps overstocked etc, please can u tell me, as well as any other possible suggestions? i'm hugely open on what to put in, with my only basic aims being hardiness, ease of keeping, and colourful, ideally they'll eat flake or survive on live rock etc


thanks in advance

 

[@ombomb]

The fish list looks ok to me if you take the dwarf angel out. I've thought of adding an angel to my tank several times, but have always decided against it as, IMO, they're just that bit too big and that bit too inclined to be aggressive and nip at corals. I have a single clown a wrasse and a goby in my tank it seems full to me

I'd completely forget about the starfish, they are just not nano reef friendly (bar some brittle stars and I got tonnes of these as hitch hikers), too sensitive to water fluctuations which are pretty much inevitable even in a mature tank and have the ability to destroy the tank should the die.

You could probably do with more rock (I'd aim for as close to 1kg per USG as possible) and more snails.

Forget the live sand, just buy some aragonite sand and it'll seed in no time.

Personally I'd stick to one cleaner shrimp and one mithrax crab, the crab to limit the danger to corals and they are reef safer than most crabs but will still have a nip at a coral or two IME, the shrimp mainly becasue they are such active feeders they make it VERY hard to target feed anything.

 

[Rambo]

ok, my LFS gets lots of really porous fijian rock in, so maybe about 15kg of it as it is really bulky for the weight, that ok?


and i take note about the angel, it was always on the very grey list for size, compatability etc, and given the outlay, which at my LFS has now risen to £65 for a flame angel, which may or may not do well, its just not worth the possible stress to the fish, plus coral damge etc


revised fish list now looks like:

2 clowns, either perc or occelaris, almost certainly tank bred,
1 goby
either 1 wrasse or maybe a firefish, gramma, cardinal, will decide nearer the time, unless there are any reasons not to get one or the other or there's an obvious one that i'v just temporarily forgotten thats tough and easily kept?


invert wise, i take your point about the starfish, again it was just a possible, and i'll just leave it as whatever comes in on the live rock

i'll probs now go for a pair of shrimp, as i'v heard that they can be really shy if kept singly, and if i wasn't thinking of getting anything that'd actually need target feeding, although i was tempted by a sun coral, would 2 pairs be ok?

it'll probs just be a pair of mithrax, or maybe just one

and i'll still get a few snails to help keep the glass clean, maybe an astrea, a turbo or 2 and a nassarius? that way i get the different niches etc


i think thats all, any other advice?

thanx for the help

 

[Crazy fishes]

May I suggest that you get a proper clean up crew. I have the D&D 24g nano cube and for my clean up crew I have 4 turbo snails, 4 narsarius and 3 blue leg hermits which I may actually expand to 4 or 5. I also have 1 skunk cleaner shrimp and 8-9 river shrimp. My nitrate is 5-10ppm and the algae is growing furiously; at the top of my rock pile is a meadow of algae. I mean it is at the point where the hermit can actually disappear in it. The turbo snails are awesome; they cleave bare rock tracks everywhere they go!!
A few months down the line I plan to start creating the reef but I want to wait until I have had several weeks of repeated stability. Remember also the more fish you add, the more waste you produce and the quicker pollutants build up. You ideally want nitrate at 0ppm but up to 10ppm is generally accepted as ok.


Regards

 

[Donya]

Not sure I'd trust two mytrhax in with a bunch of turbos in a 24g tank. Mythrax get pretty darned big (4" carapace) and when the algae runs out they're known to snack on other CUC inverts. Unless you have serious algae problems that the snails can't deal with, mythrax are probably not a great addition IMO.