Recent content by SAT

OK, so you can ignore all the comments about pods and dragonettes. The trouble is "indo pacific brown blennie" narrows it down to about a zillion species with many possible habits. Many blennies are territorial, but mostly towards just their own (or similar) species. Make sure you see it eat.

Copepods, which are basically all a dragonette will eat. The short answer is you shouldn't put a dragonette in a 6-week-old tank. It will most likely starve to death.

The arguments against silica sand are: (a) No buffering. In practice, aragonite doesn't contribute significantly to buffering or maintaining calcium levels unless the pH drops below about 7.5, so that's not a strong argument. Aragonite will tend to stabilize the pH deep in a sand bed, but it's...

BTW, there are a few species available on aquacultured live rock from TBS or GulfView. They're not the major reef-building varieties, but maybe similar to the ones on your off-shore rigs.

I've been watching the boards for this topic for a while. The few people who have Caribbean hard corals in the US either have permits which restrict them from distributing frags, or collected their corals illegally in the first place and aren't anxious to get in trouble. It's actually not...

I basically agree with tazdevil. As long as your pH stays high you probably won't be able to measure copper in the water. If it ever drops, however, copper can be released from the sand.

North Coast Marines has it too.

Yeah, mold can be a health problem. You shouldn't tolerate it. You can either isolate your tanks, increase the ventilation, or use a dehumidifier. The good news is you have a mild climate with moderate humidity (most of the time). Increasing the ventilation should be a no-brainer during the...

I wouldn't bring the salinity back to normal since that would terminate the treatment for Crypto. However, I might bring it up slightly, say to 1.011 (15ppt). The danger of hyposalinity is you're very close to the normal osmotic pressure internal to the fish. If you drop even slightly below...

Sounds a lot worse that just plain Crypto. My guess is the eye was damaged and infected in transport. Twirling indicates some internal problem, possibly related to the eye. I've never had a fish in this shape survive, but here's a few suggestions: A) Double-check your salinity. If it's...

Seeding the tank as you suggest should speed up the cycle considerably... but there's nothing I know of that will eliminate it entirely. You should still feed it with ammonia or dead shrimp or something and wait for it to cycle.

Cleaner wrasses should be left on the reef... their diet is very particular and they rarely do well in an aquarium. Good luck!

A 55 should be plenty big enough. I wouldn't lower salinity unless (a) it's higher than normal (35ppt) or (b) you decide to try hyposalinity as a treatment. I woudn't do the latter in a display tank except as a last resort (but I would do it before I used copper). It's possible, however, that...

IMO, UV will cut down on the rate of reinfection but won't eliminate the problem. Crypto can be killed by UV, but it's a large protozoan that requires a heavy dose to be highly effective. Besides, reinfection typically occurs while the fish are sleeping near the bottom of the tank. A chronic...

MH ballasts are typically sized for a particular wattage bulb (and sometimes even more specifically than that). If you want to go to 250 or 400, you should plan to buy a new ballast (or set of ballasts).