New to the Marine Aquaria Hobby

[Midman]

Hi fellow reefers....

I'm new here but need some advise and opinions please. I'm confused with all my setup. It all happen when my sea apple went missing one day and died inside the LR. All the livestock went berserk and eventually died. I managed to save my lionfish, blue damsel and watchman goby but I lost 4 fishes. As for the corals and anemones I can't save them. I feel so devastated and almost give up the hobby. I have to do a major cleaning on the fish tank as well as the LR. Then started a new cycle again. The problem is after 3 weeks of cycling the water, I put in my corals in stages and eventually introduced my fish into the tank. However the corals closed up and my inverts started to dies off after the 2nd week. I tested the water parameters is ok but I'm still losing them. My calcium is about 440 mg/l and the temperature is at 25 degrees. Did 30% water change but it worsen the situation and finally lost my inverts & corals again. It was a heart pain to see the lost ( feeling guilty and horrible). Now I only have FOWLR and a dying tube anemone also died two hours ago. What went wrong when I'm still using the same setup to cycle the water?

FYI I have 4x2x2 tank, eheim cannister filter(pro II),overhead filter, Atman chiller, prizm and queen turbo skimmer, actinic & white light(55watt on each side), #0 substrate at 4" depth and 3kg LR. Please help and do explain it in a simple way as I'm new here

[roidan]

you should never have put a sea apple inside in the first place..if i were u...i will restart the tank again..with new rocks...

i believe the sea apple released toxins that are still in your rocks now

[Jimaroon]

I was told that sea apples are toxic when dead. Or when they puff out toxic substance in the water. So in future do not start with sea apple.

Another thing is that try cycle the water longer, like more than 3 weeks

[blueheaven]

agree with roidan bro......also, your lionfish would eventually eat up all your fishes. i guess you have a serious form of atypical newbie disease. sometimes people just buy whatever they see pleasing to the eye and eventually lose them and worse still, cause heavy fatalities. research before you buy, thats what i am practicing.

[shiraz]

hmmm for a FOWLR, your lights are sufficient but definately not for corals.. 110watts for a 4 footer? u need quite alot of light if u want corals... 3kg of lr if way too little... tube anemone is like a waste of space because NO fish can go near it... u just have to waste that hugh amount of space it occupies... fishes can't swim there and u can't place corals there... try touching it.. DON'T DO IT!

they really DO sting!

[Midman]

agree with roidan bro......also, your lionfish would eventually eat up all your fishes. i guess you have a serious form of atypical newbie disease. sometimes people just buy whatever they see pleasing to the eye and eventually lose them and worse still, cause heavy fatalities. research before you buy, thats what i am practicing.

what can I say....but my initial setup was doing fine for the past 6 months. It just tat this sea apple gone for 2 days and the next thing it just died don't know why. I only realised after I saw my fish and inverts behave weirdly..just to find out the sea apple was dead inside the LR cave. Aiyo so sad leh..... anyway thks bro

[Midman]

hmmm for a FOWLR, your lights are sufficient but definately not for corals.. 110watts for a 4 footer? u need quite alot of light if u want corals... 3kg of lr if way too little... tube anemone is like a waste of space because NO fish can go near it... u just have to waste that hugh amount of space it occupies... fishes can't swim there and u can't place corals there... try touching it.. DON'T DO IT!

they really DO sting!

Hi shiraz...I did touched it accidentally..hehe but the tentacles do give me the creeps..hahaha. How many watt should I need then for the 4 footer....please elaborate more as I really wanna know. I did read the articles posted by AT on the lighting but I got myself even confused.....

[shiraz]

maybe 2 150watt MH lights... which would add up to abt 300 watts.. then plus 2 T5 atinic lights... would bring your total wattage to around 400watts... definately enough for normal corals... however, not enough for SPS...

[Achilles Tang]

Hi Midman,

Welcome to SRC and sorry to hear of your plight. I hope you will learn to keep a successful reef tank in the future and the key to success is knowledge and patience.

To answer u:

1. A Sea Apple is not called a Sea Grenade for nothing. They should not be even sold to the hobby trade in the first place. They are highly toxic and will guranteed a total tank nuke once they are injured or dead. In fact, you may have to even throw out your sandbed and LR because the toxins may still be in there. (That may have still caused your other livestock to die).

2. 3 kg of LR will not function as a good biological filter in terms of denitrification. I suspect you have high nitrates in your tank. The overhead filter and canister will contribute to that and do nothing for denitrification. How old is your tank BTW?

3. Can you let us know your water parameters? eg. salinity, ph, ammonia, no2, no3 levels etc? Prior to the crash and after. Don't worry too much about low levels of calcium... its not as important as the above parameters.

4. Can you explain to us how exactly you setup your tank?

[blacknails]

Ermm.. Perhaps the main problem could be that the toxins from the sea apple are still present in Midman's tank, hence causing all new additions to die?

Maybe he should dispose of everything, give the tank a good cleaning and start anew or run lots of activated carbon in his tank before adding anymore LS...

[nutx]

Hi,

I would suggest you go through this section, to see what others are using for their setup and equipment.

http://www.sgreefclub.com/forum/index.php?showforum=34

I pickup quite a lot from here, to understand what type of equipment is needed for what type of setup (as in what you want to keep inside the tank too).

Then decide/plan for yourselves the required equipment, then post your design here for comments before commiting into buying, and eventually make the final decision yourselves.

Reading from internet/books, can be quite confusing sometimes (at least to me...) From this section, you can see real example and you can find the equipment available locally too!

cheers!

[Deep_Blue]

maybe 2 150watt MH lights... which would add up to abt 300 watts.. then plus 2 T5 atinic lights... would bring your total wattage to around 400watts... definately enough for normal corals... however, not enough for SPS...

sorry for hijacking... just wanna ask... how much is considered enough for sps?

[SharkBait]

It depends on a few factors.eg. size of tank etc. But the least would be 250w.

[Midman]

Hi Midman,

Welcome to SRC and sorry to hear of your plight. I hope you will learn to keep a successful reef tank in the future and the key to success is knowledge and patience.

To answer u:

1. A Sea Apple is not called a Sea Grenade for nothing. They should not be even sold to the hobby trade in the first place. They are highly toxic and will guranteed a total tank nuke once they are injured or dead. In fact, you may have to even throw out your sandbed and LR because the toxins may still be in there. (That may have still caused your other livestock to die).

2. 3 kg of LR will not function as a good biological filter in terms of denitrification. I suspect you have high nitrates in your tank. The overhead filter and canister will contribute to that and do nothing for denitrification. How old is your tank BTW?

3. Can you let us know your water parameters? eg. salinity, ph, ammonia, no2, no3 levels etc? Prior to the crash and after. Don't worry too much about low levels of calcium... its not as important as the above parameters.

4. Can you explain to us how exactly you setup your tank?

AT...here is my summarise to your question

1) Agreed with you I should have throw away the LR and the sandbed. Honestly I removed and washed the sand thoroughly...even put it under sun...hehehe... I will have it changed soon.

2) Oops my LR is 23kg...typos...sorry....I have tried to use overflow system but it was a disaster..my house flooded...lucky my wife wasn't at home... Fyi I started marine abt 10 months ago. Didn't know abt this SRC until I do some surfing on marine stuff. After reading some of the topics here I gather my courage to post my question hoping to learn from my mistake and save our reefs

3) Last test taken 4 days before the Salinity-1.022, Ammonia-0.1. Nitrite-0.2, Nitrate-10mg/l, Kh-10dkh & Ph-8.5 but did not take any test after..too busy removing the LS. Hope I give enuf info liao.

4) Cycle water - put the mix salt water into the tank and check for salinity...then put sand and LR...let the cycle run for 3 days then put dead prawns (activate skimmer)-done water test every 4 days to monitor ANN and wait till 3 weeks...after the ANN is more consistent I started to put in those hardy corals by stages and follow with some hardy fishes (damsels & clownfish) so on....

Shooh!....had to dig back all my notebook to answer these question...hehehe...no problem at all..I wanna learn B4 things turns ugly again.... better to be safe then sorry...haha