Elbeau's Blog

[Elbeau]

I've been doing reef for about 8 years now. I hardly consider myself an expert reefkeeper, but I have learned how to have fun with this hobby while keeping costs...and tank problems...down. I figure I'll write down some history entries in this blog to help others who might be going down similar paths so they can learn from the good and bad times I've had with reefkeeping.

In the beginning...

When I was a kid, my parents...oops...I mean Santa Claus...bought me a nice 29 gallon freshwater tank. This doesn't have much to do with saltwater reefkeeping...but it DOES help explain my mindset going into salt water reefkeeping. My old freshwater tank had painted-green fake gravel on the bottom, and beautiful plastic bubble producing toys scattered around the bottom. It ran on an undergravel filter and I learned that using that filter, I could siphon out all the real crap each month to keep the tank cleaner. It worked well.

That was a long time ago. By 1999, I was married with one daughter and another on the way. It was Christmas time, and my wife and I wanted to get something the family could all enjoy. We looked in the local paper (this was in Las Vegas), and found a beautiful 60-gallon glass aquarium with a great looking oak stand and canopy. It cost us $250 I think, and it came with undergravel filters, nice big flourescent bulbs like our kitchen had, and a couple of powerheads. We were quite proud of ourselves for getting what we thought was a nice, complete setup for such a low price.

So...we wandered into a small local fish store, and the 16-year-old kid there was quite helpful, or so it seemed. We looked at the fresh water fish, then we looked at the salt water fish and quickly decided that we could spend just a little more and change over to a saltwater setup. The fish kid sold us a bunch of great-looking crushed coral for substrate, and this beautful piece of bleached out coral for decoration. He agreed that with the combination of a hang-on-back filter and the undergravel filter, we could have a great little fish tank.

We learned that the tank was going to have to go through this thing called a "cycle"...but if we bought some other stuff called "live rock", it wouldn't really cycle at all. That was music to our ears, because we could just buy this live rock and life would be perfect...we could buy all the saltwater fish we wanted right off the bat. Since my old freshwater tank did so good on flake food, I wanted to make sure to go with what worked so I bought flake food for our new saltwater tank too.

So we went home, proud that we had finally gotten everything we could possibly want for the tank except the fish. We set up the tank...it was BEAUTIFUL. Everything was white, the powerheads were pulling through the undergravel filter just right, we had a cool piece of arching live-rock with this very pretty green hair algae all over it. Life couldn't be better.

We went to Petco and a few other stores the next day and loaded up on a bunch of fish. My favorite was the pearly jawfish, who quickly dug a hole dead front and center of our tank and looked like a paranoid freak poking his head in and out and ducking and hiding every time anything moved. We bought a nice orange clownfish, a medium batfish, some little damsels that the store suggested for our new venture, a yellow tang, and several other brightly colored fish. That was a happy day. So were the next few days. Each day we found ourselves rather obsessed with making the tank prettier...it was a nice Christmas.

Now, right about now I need to take a break from my narative and explain a few things. Any reader can tell I've been a little cynical as I look back at my old setup. Any experienced reefkeeper is probably already either having a heart attack, or laughing hysterically at me...or both.

But fear not...it might not have been a well though-out startup to a fish (and later reef) tank, but it didn't all turn out bad, in fact, even through the learning curve that I'm going to describe here in my blog, I always had fun with the tank.

Here's what we did right so far:

1. We bought a beautiful tank and stand that was quite sturdy and presentable, and it had a very good canopy.

2. We bought a pearly jawfish...who remarkably survived every mistake we made with that first tank.

3. We bought a Jawfish, Damsels, and a Batfish who also turned out to be very hardy...even through the cycle...mostly.

Here's what we did wrong so far:

1. We believed everything we were told. This is not to say we were lied to...but the hardest lesson to learn is to learn how much other people haven't learned about reefkeeping...and how many diverse opinions there are out there. When you start asking around, everyone will give you a different story about everything...not joking.

2. The undergravel filter, this is nothing but bad in any form of salt water tank.

3. The crushed coral. This added a LOT of phosphates and other unwanted chemicals into the tank. This seems counterintuitive, since coral is natural in the ocean...but coral does not get crushed in the ocean, it deteriorates naturally into aragonite...a much better choice for substrate.

4. Assumed that we would not cycle...because we bought live rock. EVERY TANK CYCLES. There is NO WAY AROUND IT. It's a natural balance that every tank has to find on it's own. Sure, live rock, live sand, and pure luck help...but ALWAYS COUNT ON CYCLING...no matter what anyone says...no matter what you read...you WILL cycle. But the good new is...you will cycle...meaning you will get through it.

5. The pretty bleached decorative coral...also a source of unwanted chemicals in the tank.

6. The hair algae on the live rock.

7. The pretty fish that had no business in a cycling tank.

8. The assumption that our spending was anywhere near over.

Anyways...more tomorrow...gnight

[Elbeau]

...continued from last week:

After my somewhat rocky start, I had a tank that looked great, but had several built in problems that I described in my last entry.

It didn't take long before my wife and I started becoming mezmorized by the beautiful corals living in the fish store tanks. We were told that you have to have actinic lighting to grow most corals, so we upgraded from 40 watt kitchen-style flourescent light bulbs to 40 watt actinic and daylight bulbs. We were sure that people were exagerating about how important light intensity and other things were, so we just used the same old ballasts and bought the bulbs at petco that said they worked for reefs.

So, once we had what we thought was a great lighting setup, we started out by buying a flower pot coral. It looked great in the store, and it looked great in our tank....for a while. We started adding other (mostly stony) corals, including elegance, plate, and bubble corals.

Now our tank was about 2 weeks old, and all of a sudden the brown plague hit us. Everything turned brown...the beautiful decorative coral, the bright white crushed coral...all turned brown. We quickly asked around and decided to throw a Kent Phosphate Sponge into the tank in a high-flow area. This did nothing, the brown plague just had to take its course with our setup.

Soon, our corals all shriveled and died, and our fish were afflicted with small white pokadots. One after another they kept dying. We bought fish after fish, and coral after coral. Some, here and there, would live, but most kept dying. This went on for several weeks, especially during the first month cycle. We kept getting very bad advice from pet stores that claimed to be experts.

We figured that our stuff was all dying from coral and fish diseases, and one store had a great UV sterilizer that we bought to try to stop the various pestilences from killing everything in sight. This did nothing.

...see...the problem with this phase of learning reef...is that SOME stuff was working successfully...the Jawfish was alive, happy, and entertaining, the clown was happy, a couple corals were doing good, there were little buggy buggers all around the tank, the cleaner shrimp was happy. In other words, we FELT successful at some stuff, so we didn't realize how many things were wrong from the get go.

So on we went, with live rock to handle the amonia cycle, but with a UV sterilizer to kill the good bacteria the live rock was harboring. We had an undergravel filter doing nothing but harm, and a lot of crushed coral leaking phosphates into the tank. We were oblivious to calcium and PH levels, and were sure everything was fine because our amonia was astonishingly low.

Over time, we kept studying and found a lot of our startup errors. The UV sterilizer found a permanent home in our attic, and was replaced with a protein skimmer. The skimmer was a "Cyclone", that basically looked like a tornado in a tube. I later found that a lot of people hated the Cyclone, but it really worked great for us.

The best thing we did was we bought 180 watts of power compact lighting and started monitoring calcium levels. This did wonders for the corals, and we even kept some Clams quite successfully. We kept the tank for a little over a year, then we had to move. The move pretty much devestated the tank, and we gave what was left over back to the local fish store.

Here's some things we learned from the first fish tank (besides the things from last week's blog):

1. Buy some SERIOUS lighting. The 180 watts of power compact lighting might sound like a lot to someone startup up a tank, but it is still quite minimal for a tank my size.

2. Study on your own. There are too many VERY WRONG opinions that you can get by following advice of fish store workers. They might be well-intentioned, but you might not get the whole story.

3. Soft corals are easy...stony corals are hard. Clams are hard but worth it

4. Limit yourself. Just because it's pretty, doesn't mean it will live. Here's a rule of thumb - if it costs a lot, that's probably because it's really hard to keep alive long enough to sell it to you.

Well, that's my 2-cents worth for today, next time I'll tell you about a much more successful tank or two.

[KarenM]

Sadly, I've also learned the hard way not to even ask the fish store workers, but to log onto several forums like this one and post your questions. You'll still get wildly varying opinions, and some people will get mad if you don't accept their opinion as fact, but you'll also get the best advice available. I apologize to those LFS employees who DO know what they're talking about and work hard to help us keep successful tanks, and I wish all of them had your integrity.

I've also learned you can't have a "wrong opinion", but that different tanks behave differently. What works perfectly for me may be a disaster for you. It's like raising kids, we can talk and research all we want but in the long run we have to make our own decisions and learn from them.

[Elbeau]

Sadly, I've also learned the hard way not to even ask the fish store workers, but to log onto several forums like this one and post your questions. You'll still get wildly varying opinions, and some people will get mad if you don't accept their opinion as fact, but you'll also get the best advice available. I apologize to those LFS employees who DO know what they're talking about and work hard to help us keep successful tanks, and I wish all of them had your integrity.

I've also learned you can't have a "wrong opinion", but that different tanks behave differently. What works perfectly for me may be a disaster for you. It's like raising kids, we can talk and research all we want but in the long run we have to make our own decisions and learn from them.

It's true...like you said, there are people who really do know what they're talking about, but they're almost impossible to distinguish from workers who just want to look like they know what they're talking about and end up giving you bad advise. If you look around enough, you can find someone to tell you ANYTHING.

I think a lot of the problem is what you pointed out...each tank has a personality, and what works in one tank doesn't always work in another. Then, when you ask a worker a particular question, there are so many interdependencies between different things in a tank, that even a good answer isn't good unless it is tied in with other subjects. Like protein skimming...everyone will tell you it's great....but they may not tell you that you also need to supliment trace elements because of it. One answer without the other hurts your tank.

[Elbeau]

...continued from last week.

After enjoying my first reef tank, despite it's challenges, I took a break from reefkeeping for a while. My wallet and I started getting along a lot better then. Of course, once an addict, always an addict, and I always had that itch to start a tank back up again.

As it turned out, I got a job at a place where my boss gave me a lot of freedom. As long as my work was getting done, he didn't care how I managed my affairs...so...I decided to put a little tank on my desk at work. The tank had to be small and quiet, and the Eclipse 6 fit the bill. I didn't go into the Eclipse blind, I know that a lot of reefkeepers don't consider it a decent setup, but I had enough experience by then to know what was hardy and how to manage it.

I set it up, and put a couple pounds of live rock and a couple of damsels in it. This time I didn't succomb to the temptation to stock the tank too soon. My co-workers thought it was great, and loved the little damsels...so some of them were quite sad when the amonia and nitrite cycles completed and I returned the fish.

I then bought some small live rocks, and several rocks covered with soft corals - buttons, mushrooms, star polyps, etc.. I stocked it with a nice little percula clown, a pearly jawfish (the ultimate fish for a reef tank), and a firefish, along with various hermit crabs, starfish, snails, etc..

The tank was overstocked, so I had to do water changes every week or two, about a gallon at a time - no biggie. Also...at that time I still hadn't learned that crushed coral was bad as a substrate and would leach phosphates into the water, so I had high phosphates along with the nitrates. This caused green hair algae to bloom, so I got a lawnmower blenny. He kept the hedge trimmed quite well.

Then...I just let the tank grow...and it did grow. The soft corals all reproduced like rabbits, I had a wide variety of micro-stars, and I had a certain species of common small snail (white with brown stripes) that reproduced extremely fast...so fast that by about 5:00pm every day, you would litteraly see hundreds of them on the glass...but by morning, you could only find one or two...they were magnificent at hiding during the day. Those little snails probably grew so out-of-control because of the algae blooms resulting from the nitrates and phosphates - Isn't it interesting to see nature start to balance itself out like that.

The tank just grew and grew, with corals propagating everywhere until my I found employment elsewhere. When that happened, my new boss wasn't nearly so cool...so I gave up my little nano for another season and gave my livestock to my wife for her tank.

I've got about three more tanks to tell you about...so keep expecting these longwinded, overindulgent articles for a while .