my sw journey

[chefjamesscott]

At present I have been into sw for about a little over a year.

Have done searching and reading of many different sources, as well, have created a whole bunch of systems and recipes that my being a chef was a great part of.(Things I just came up with that I really have not seen anyone else doing). So I thought I would share my pudding as it is said the proof is in the pudding .

My first tank is a 65g old school metal rimmed tank. Present population is 4 scats, 1 panther grouper, 1 engineer goby. It has been up over a year and came about as a result of a leaky pipe collapsing the roof over my then 90g brackish set up which housed the scats.

Needless to say when I got home from work I did the fastest tank flip I have ever done in my life, and I figured since I was having to set up a new tank for the scats, I may as well push them from brackish to full salt. I threw together their new home using some old rock I bought from someone who had shut down their tank and took the salinity immediately to 1.015 or so hoping I would not kill my scats. I ran out and bought a magnum hob with bio wheel and a aqua 70 for this tank and powered them up and then hoped for the best and did many many many wc and tweeks. I worked the salinity up to 1.022 over about 10 hrs so that the now rehydrated dead corals stringing of the rocks would have a harder time spiking the water. A reef keeper on another forum told me a higher salinity would help keep the dead coral from killing the tank. I will show the couple of pics that I have of it. I am about to convert a 100g lungfish tank i have in my living room into a bigger and better home for these guys. The smaller fish in the pictures recently went to the 75g reef that I set up that I have some ideas in mind for hope to see it work.

In this 65g I tried corals but my scats ate them and my niger trigger ate the starfish's lega and messed with my cleaners. So here are some pics.


the goby was blind in one eye when he was given to me




the one thing I find with sw is the way that fish eat fish very different than any of my non predator fw tanks

So when I put the panther grouper in the 65, I knew for sure I better get a tank set up as fast as possible for my small one or else. I just could not pass up getting the grouper as it is one of those someday fishes for me and someday came and since I only had the 65 the smaller ones had to learn to swim for dear life. I have over the past few years been mass purchasing a lot of fish stuff both fw and sw and had some rock holding in a tank in my basement, which is where all this rock in this tank came from various purchases. So I set up this 75g let it work for 2 weeks tested the water, did a 75% w/c and then retested a day or so later and the results came in just a touch over the safe line so I put in my small guys 2 clowns, 2 domino, 1 niger trigger and 3 crabs.

My game plan with this tank is to try the whole make your live rock your biofilter avenue. I have 2 aqua 30 and a aqua 110 power head on the tankright now and I tried to configure the rock a few different ways and finally decided that I would try to make it look like a reef build up on the right and hide the gear with a slopping drop off to the left. I have had much success with breedin in more than a few of my fw set ups so with this tank it is my goal to get the smaller fish to make babies. To that end I am going to make sure this tank is only for smaller fish. Another reason for the smaller fish is that I might even be able to get some coral and stuff going. So here are a few pics of this one for ya.

when I first set the rock and tank up(edit:this tank was a used sw from a pet store hence the back algae I just left on to help season it)

the clowns checkin out the tank

my second attempt at scaping

then after a few days i redid it to look like this, I made sure there is lots of tunnels and hiding spots for the smaller fish to move about in the rocks. as well I tried to design it to the water flow has room to to a perfect circular configuration and tested the design with flake food to see how it moved in the water. I just had this image in my mind of veins and arteries being free of cholesterol.



I am also going to try to make this a tank worthy of totm on some forums. I am sort of a go balls to walls 100% or nothing person, just sort of how I was raised to do things. Now to see how this works with a sw ecosystem.