Sand sifters?

I hope this doesn't come across as harsh, but my advice is to Stop adding fish! Especially if you just added two recently. Every fish you add after the outbreak of Ich and Marine Velvet, the more your livestock (present and Future) have the potential to become stressed out, and infected with parasites. Give your fish a chance to recover and fight the parasites. If you find that you're having problems like Ich and Marine Velvet outbreaks, then something in your system is out of whack and you need to get it figured out before you add anything else to your tank. Garlic has helped my livestock to keep them healthy enough or immune enough to fight off the disease before it becomes a problem, but there is no substitute for a healthy environment in your tank. If you have algae growing out of control, then you more than likely have a different problem, and you need to figure that out too. In the meantime, my advice is to add more hermits and clean-up crew. But don't add more fish until the problem is fixed.

Ich and especially Marine Velvet, can take longer than a month to run it's life cycle. Marine velvet is especially difficult to get rid of.

I speak from experience on this one. I lost plenty of livestock because I was overanxious to add fish to my tank. In every situation, I was losing fish because water conditions/parameters in my tank needed to be corrected.

Hope this helps.


Edited by Ryan Willden

I'm going to agree with Ryan and suppor the "don't add" theory.  In fact why not wait 4 or 5 months?  I would like to see pictures of the tank, if that is possible.  I think that will help others (and me of course) to make better recommendations.

When in doubt.... do nothing and wait.

Adam

Here are four pictures I took tonight.  I have a 10 gal. tank on the right side of my 55, so it is hard to get a picture from that side.  The tank(s) sit in a room with no windows.  What daylight gets in is reflected or indirect.  My actinics are on from 12:00 to 10:30 p.m., my white lights are on from 1:00 to 9:30 p.m.  You can see a couple of snail trails on the front of the tank.  There is a little green and a little red algae on the glass tonight.  It will probably be gone tomorrow.  The snails do an excellent job!   I am having a hard time with the be patient and wait part of this hobby.  When I lost the fish earlier it seemed like that happened quickly (One night=all is well, next night=fish swimming funny, next night=dead fish).  For some reason I have not seen any copepods that I know of.  I have found some little fish (about 1/8th inch long in the LR) that are definitely light shy, but that is all!  I have one feather duster that I did not buy, and one Chiton (I think that's what it is), and a bunch of red sponge.  Recently my BTA (green) split into three, so now I have the BTA's, one Seabae anenome, a moon coral, some yellow polyps, some star polyps, a Xenia (My favorite), three green mushrooms (I started with two), and three button polyps from last month's WMAS fragging. a Candy cane and a Sun polyp.  We bought two Emerald crabs, one has mutated to a huge monster, the other has pretty much remained the same size.  All my SPS, snails, crabs, and Tiger cucumber have grown more than I expected.

Anyway, here the pics.  If anyone has hints on how to get better pics, let me know.  I am no photographer!

The last pic (Bottom) is why I asked about getting something other than a Golden Head Sleeper.

 

 

Edited by rstruhs

I agree with Adam. Looks good, but the Biological filtration needs a chance to stabilize. You could add another 2-3" of sand (either live, Utah Oolitic, or caribsea aragonite) and seed the new sand with your current live sand. (Just don't cover up all of your live sand at once...)

Keep up the good work. And keep posting your progress.

Ryan

Reading this thread was a BEAR!!
Rstruhs, Could you please edit your post box with the pics by hitting the "Enter" key after each pic text link so that they will line up vertically instead of horizontally?
Thanks.

I also see eveidence of a new tank that has too many fish and not enough coral and algae growth. Please don't be alarmed at my straight forward manner. I intend no offense.

Coral are excellent for stabilizing a reef tank. And why is that? Because they harbor Zooxanthellae algae in their tissue. Algae eats nutrients/purifies the tank water. Because they capture and eat the free-swimming stage of the ich parasite. Because they usually come on good LR that was kept submerged which allows sponge and other helpful organisms to make it to your tank in half decent shape. These are just some of the reasons.

Give it some time and some coral and some algae. In it's current state I'd give it four months before adding any more fish, not even replacements. If you get it going with coral and algae, the four months becomes meaningless.

Actually there are probably few people that use those long rubber gloves.
The older it gets with more coral and such, the more it can handle clean hands and arms. This may surprise some people but if you wash hands and arms with soap, rinse several times and dry with a clean towel you'll have "No worries mate."

You asked for comments. I hope this wasn't too much info.
P.S. Bristleworms are our friends!

Hi, rstruhs! We had a 10 gallon sump on our 55 and it worked great! We put a regular plant light bulb on it and it grew tons of calurpa. The cool part with a sump is, you can put a deep sand bed there and have even more biological diversity. Crawly things grow like crazy in a protected sump.
   If you ever decide to move the tank or get a different one, you have a already established deep sand bed! We moved our 10 gallon sump to our new 180, moved all the 55 gallons stuff and everything did wonderful!
The flow can be slow so it doesn't mess up the sand. We just had a small power head in ours, with just a tube running to it from the tank. One thing I did learn is, you need 2 just in case a snail gets sucked in! If you want to make an overflow out of acrylic, I've got some leftover pieces. It's really easy! I've got some spare tubes ,too.
Once you get the refugum going, you can take the emporer to the "swat" meet!
You're tank looks way cool!

Cyanobacteria, that slime algae stuff is not all bad. It is one of the major algal species of the world, producing an unusually disproportionate amount of the world's oxygen.

Usually a reduction in feeding and/or an increase in direct water movement and/or some kind of herbivore (hermits, snails, goby, sea star) are the best options for reducing cyano. There are some chemicals that can temporarily eliminate it but most of those products also kill the good bacteria.

Here is some that has come and gone over the past year. It's in a receding stage right now. It's actually kind of a pretty bright green so if anyone wants some just let me know. It may outcompete the uglier stuff.

All,

Just to keep you up on what is happening in my tank, one of my clowns died sometime during the day.  When I left for work, all noses were swimming.  When I got home I found one clown down by some rocks on the side of the tank and next to the glass.  It was wedged in there pretty good and looked like its' left side had been smashed.  I do not know what happened, however, I do know it was not MV or some disease.  It had not been picked at yet, and like I said the left side was damaged.  Its' eye had been smashed, its' gills were disfigured, and it appeared to have a vertical cut just in front of the gill slit.  Could I have an errant crab?

Ryan,

"is the damage consistent with smashing into rock, or does it appear to have been attacked?"  I am no expert by far, but it looked more like an attack.  It was just on one side though, if it were a crab is should have been marked on both sides, if it ran into rocks for some reason it seems like the damage would not have been so noticable.  I should have taken a picture.  They were juveniles, however, they were sharing the same anenomes. they would both move from one to another.  I have four for them to play in, so they kept busy trying to please all four.

If the other clown dies in the next few weeks I will still have to consider Marine Velvet strongly.  Although it did not appear to have been infected/affected?

Just an udate on the tank.

My other clown died shortly after its' friend.  All the other fish are doing fine.  I have been watching for "critters" at night and have seen a lot of little crawling things.  Some look like fleas, others are about a 1/4" long.  I have even seen a couple of bristle worms.  There are some long, thin tenatacles that come out at night from some white tubes on the rock.  I do not know if they are good or bad, but since they are so little, it probably does not matter.  There are also two forms of Chiton in the tank.  One has a partial shell, is long and fast, the other is almost perfectly round and very very very slow.