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Our first salt water tank! (warning many big images!)

So my wife and I had just lost our 4 year old betta fish Fred III (she has always named her bettas Fred). After burying him in our back yard in a ring box under a tree we decided to go look at getting a new one. It actually took us 2-3 weeks to decide to get another one, we get attached to our pets!

So she took me over to the LFS in our area and talked me into starting up a saltwater tank, and a bigger one because she wanted to have some bigger fish. We decided on the marineland 125g, which is a pretty big step up from our 10g betta fish tank! We bought a normal light, because we weren't going to do any coral, and a canister filter.

So we came home and started filling it up!
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So we made another mistake and just filled the tank up with water from our hose in the back yard... but since we had already filled it up we decided to just let it do its thing and waited....

After it cleared up a bit and we bought some more dry rock we decided to do some aquascaping... We got a different type of rock to go with the rock we had already purchased and decided to get some barnacles too!

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We waited for the tank to cycle we bought a sump and skimmer! My wife was worried about having a canister filter because she had read horror stories about them so we ordered one pretty quickly. I just wish we had bought it BEFORE we put all the water in... So we bought 2 30g trash cans and started draining the water until my brother-in-law and I could move the tank and stand... filled both up and could just BARELY move it. Well after that fiasco the tank eventually finished cycling and we decided to get some fish! Insert Biff:

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So we had another mistake in here and moved water over from the DT to our QT that we had split in half.... I did not realize that the tank would not be cycled if I had just moved the water over to it.... I thought the bacteria was all in the water! Well we put Biff and a watchmen goby in one side and on the other side of the 20g that was split off we put a Caribbean blue tang.

When we bought Biff we did not know he could be a bully and had him with our watchmen goby... Sadly he attacked the Goby in the middle of the night and he died later on that day. I was really upset and thought about taking Biff back... I mean he had killed Goby McFly! After this happened we moved Biff over to the DT and kept the caribbean blue in the QT, still not realizing that the QT was most likely stressing him out.

When we went to another fish store over in PA the person we talked to compared the goby to a hotdog just waiting to be eaten... This is where I came up with the name Biff because everyone said he was going to be this trouble maker in our tank. Well we brought home another friend at this point, a powder blue tang! We moved the caribbean blue tang over and after drip acclimating (we drip acclimate everything) the powder blue we put him in the tank as well. We were worried about the caribbean blue tang getting picked on so we went out and bought a breeder box from walmart and had him swimming around that in the tank. I just wanted to keep him away from everyone! Well I woke up in the middle of the night and he was dead, I was really starting to get depressed because I had the idea of bringing animals to my home and then killing them.

The next morning I wake up and the powder blue tang was swimming really weird and was going up and down and faceplanted against the glass... he died shortly there after. At this point I didn't want to buy anymore fish and was fine with just having Biff. My wife talked me into getting some coral to make me feel better. So we bought a tiny Xenia and Devils hand leather... which started making me feel better. (can't find one of the xenia) What comes with getting coral? CORAL LIGHTS $_$
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Well it worked and I decided, okay well we can just add a few coral... I had a work trip coming up and figured coral would be a safe bet to add. On a side note we were testing out water very frequently to make sure we weren't spiking. We went to the LFS again and found this AWESOME looking yellow fiji leather that I HAD to get.
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(Odin is always so curious, also our first big algae bloom!)

Then Biff got Ich. :( So we started treating his ich with Kick-Ich because it was reef safe. We took the carbon out and turned the skimmer off. The problem with the timing of him getting ich was that we were traveling to California for a week and wouldn't be able to keep up with dosing. Luckily my cousin stayed at our house! She fed Biff and our 4 cats, our dog is weird and loves the pet smart hotel. She actually medicated the tank while we were gone too! So when we got home Biff was looking really good and had lost all the ich, we kept treating because we wanted to finish out the complete cycle. Well of course while we were in Cali we HAD to stop at a fish store out there (we actually stopped at 2!) LAX Aquarium was AWESOME and I had no idea I was talking to the owner the entire time. Once he said that he packs up coral for people to take on planes all the time I had to pick out some stuff! Insert the duncan, lobo and sun coral:

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(lobo left, duncan to the middle ish and sun coral on the right)

More in the next post! (ran out of room for images!
 
Well if you look closely in that last image the leathers do not look happy... and my Xenia was throwing heads off like crazy.
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We checked the water and we had a MASSIVE alkalinity spike... it went from ~8 to 2. I was gone for a week so I didn't know anything was happening and my cousin doesn't know anything about corals so she didn't know anything was wrong. Well we started using Seachems fusion 1 and 2 and got our levels back in order. I was pretty worried about all of this and didn't want to do anything else until we got the levels back in order. Funnily enough when we finished fixing that and the ich treatment Biff was fine and the corals started looking better again. Minus the yellow fiji leather.

We decided to go get some more fish now that the tank was stable and things were going back to normal. Insert the Clowns and Goby Mcfly II:

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I was actually really excited about getting more fish in the tank and really wanted a watchmen goby! I love their sand castles! Well my joy did not last long. Goby Mcfly II jumped into our return box and got sent to the overflow box in the back... We have caps on our pipes to reduce the gurgling and he was in rough shape when we woke up in the morning. He died later that day and I was sad again. I REALLY wanted a goby but felt horrible that we had lost two.

In that same purchase we decided to get a test sps coral and this weird green one from ora.

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We wanted to test it out and see if our tank was good enough to get some SPS. Also the other corals we had picked up in Cali were doing great!

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More in the next post!
 
So everything was getting back to normal but for some reason the yellow fiji leather never came back. It turns out it had something living in it and this was when we learned about dipping corals... Or at least when I learned about it. My wife had talked about it before but I hadn't really thought about it. This taught me my lesson and I will never put another coral in my tank without dipping it. It made me sad because that yellow fiji leather was AMAZING looking. So what do you do when you are down about losing a coral? You go buy more. :)We decided to go out to Aquarium Care Center: Insert the golden aussy plate, another plate which i dont know anything about and some GSP. (also on a side note they had a dragon moray eel which was badass!)

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Talk about awesome!!! We also decided to pick up some fish while we were at it. Enter in the Christmas wrasse(Tropiquarium) and rabbit fish (aquarium care center).

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The christmas wrasse actually has a deformity, his lower jaw has a growth on it but we thought it just gave him character!

At this point everything is going well and we decided to take a trip out to That fish store (lancaster). Our levels were solid with no fluctuations and we were ready to look for some more tank mates!

I want to say this was around the 3 month mark and we wanted to try to get an anemone for our clowns to host! Our clowns are skunks so we were looking for a Long Tentacle Anemone.... I actually didn't take any pictures from this trip because we brought in Goby McFly III and I didn't want to get attached because we had lost the other 2 within a day or 2 of bringing them into our reef. (spoiler Goby McFly III is fine and has an amazing cave!) We also bought our first frag of zoas and a nice colony of hammers! (pictured later)

A couple of days in to our anemone being in the tank it tears open its foot. We were advised to just let him be and it would heal given time.... so that is what we did. Two weeks later he is still in the tank and we purchase our tangs! Two smaller tangs a blue hippo and a powder blue(Sea Gem Aquatics). The blue hippo had been picked on but I just really liked the way he looked and had no issues helping him heal back up!

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more in the next post!
 

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So I was feeling pretty good about things and wanted to check out some more corals, so we paid a visit to Mark at Ultimate corals (super nice dude).

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Also missing in these is a kenya tree and a jedi mind trick monti. (also notice in the last image what our goby is doing to my poor neon green coral, it has been moved to a higher nicer spot!)

He had so many nice corals I didn't know what to do with myself. He was also really helpful and explained some things to us. Again can't say it enough he was a really nice guy.

So after spending too much money on corals... what did I do the following week? spend more obviously but this time at TSM corals which is super close to our house! :)

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Then it happened... our anemone ripped a bigger cut into his foot and we pulled him out and put him in our QT tank to give him some medicine to try and help him heal up... later on that night died, he perked up when we gave him the medicine but shortly after he sucked himself through the cut in his foot. (we checked his foot when we bought him and he was perfectly fine.) I was super sad about the whole thing... so I splurged a bit and bought some more corals. Currently I do not have any pictures of them because we just bought them over this past weekend. They are a Darth Maul paly frag, pink krak zoa frag, scrambled egg zoas and fire and ice zoas. Silly names but really cool looking!

The real reason I don't have pictures of those corals is because I was too into our new tank mates, and likely to be the last. Meet our Blue Dot Jawfish and Golden Midas Blenny (Sea Gem Aquatics)!

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The jawfish was a bit jumpy the first night but seems to have finally settled in and the blenny has been swimming around and then perching back on his power head ever since we got him. I am sure I missed a few things a long the way but man have I learned a lot in a short amount of time. I have never had such a hobby that gave me so much stress relief and at times more stress than I really want!

The only issue we are currently working through now is the tangs have ich and we are currently treating them with kick-ich (it worked the first time!) but everyone is eating and seems to be fine. Hopefully it will just pass by and we will not need to worry about it in the future!

Well I hope you all enjoyed reading that... Sorry for the long thread but I figured if anyone wanted to read it it would be enjoyable!


edit: oh and the reason we have tangs and the trigger fish even though we only have a 125 is because we are planning to upgrade as they are about to become too big for out tank. I am sure that will be a nightmare but I don't want to have to give away my pets!
 
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I love the jawfish, he is hilarious. When any of the fish swim by him it looks like hes yelling at them, and if they stick around long enough he goes into his house and comes back out to spit sand at them. None of them have gone after him or anything and just move right past him.

Yes, we are up to 9 fish and I think I am happy with that amount. One of the shops we went to said we could easily add more but I feel like it would be crowded in there... everyone has their own little section of the tank right now.

oh! I actually forgot... we have 6 turbo snails, 4 hermit crabs (2 blue 2 red) and 2 conchs! I always forget to mention them.
 
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redfishbluefish

Officer Emeritus
Officer Emeritus
Welcome J.R. Nice story on the start up of your tank. Now the bad news...Kick-Ich doesn't work. THERE IS NO DT TREATMENT THAT ELIMINATES ICH! The only way to rid your tank of ich is to get all fish into a hospital tank and treat that tank with either copper, CP (Chloroquine phosphate), Tank Transfer method or hyposalinity......and let the DT sit fallow for 76 days (with no fish).
 

redfishbluefish

Officer Emeritus
Officer Emeritus
Marcus, he mentioned he was super close to TSM.....so exit 3 on the Turnpike or exit 25 on 295.....south Jersey

You're welcome to borrow my 100 gallon stock tank if you wish to set it up as a hospital tank. Could use the canister filter to run that if you wish.
 
Well that is the second "bad news" I got today. turns out our jaw fish jumped out of the tank somehow last night. I am guessing he went through the plastic cover in the back. :( Today has not been a very good day.

Guess I will need to talk to the wife to figure out what she would like to do. It seemed like the treatment was working because the Ich was dying down.
 
So after discussing what we were going to do. My wife and I went out and purchased a 100g stock tank, I appreciate the offer @redfishbluefish to let us borrow yours but we decided we would get one just incase we ever needed it again. I also really appreciate the help via PMs and directing me towards a good post on R2R for this.

So to the most frustrating and depressing thing ever... netting the fish. This took is about 4 hours to get all of them, we had to be especially careful when catching the rabbit fish. The problem was that we had given them so many good hiding spots in our tank that it was hard to actually get them out.... so we had to take everything down......


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it sucked pretty hard, especially because we knew we would not be able to put everything back the way we had originally constructed it.

We weren't confident our fish would play well together so we separated our clowns and golden midas blenny from the rest of the fish... we also separated the clowns and the blenny just in case. The blenny seems to have a bite mark on his back so he must have gotten nipped.

So what we did was take every one out one by one, minus the clowns they came as a pair, and gave them a freshwater dip (ro/di). None of them were all that happy about it but we could see that it did help. Once we got them into their respective tanks:


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hard to see the blenny there but he is the black line at the bottom of the bigger side. He is fully colored now and seems to be okay.

I don't have a picture of the stock tank yet, but will get one tomorrow.

We decided to use Seachems cupramine. We dosed the 20g tank slightly under the suggested dose, the fish were already super stressed. As for the stock tank we dosed half the amount needed because they were not looking fantastic. today they are looking MUCH better and everyone minus the goby ate... still kind of worried about him because there isn't a sand bed for him to hide in. Also our christmas wrasse is a worry because we are unsure of how he will handle the copper treatment, plus he likes to sleep in the sand bed.

We actually just finished constructing our new aquascape... and I am not 100% happy with it but that is because I really liked how we had it before. Please excuse the mess... our sump has been off for about 10 hours and all of the red algae that had been building up while the carbon was out and skimmer had been off.

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the bleached looking stylo is due to 2 cracks we think.... overall the entire process sucked, it isn't exactly what we wanted but everyone is currently doing well and none of the coral have died.... poor stylo.
 
Looking at your setup a quick remark now that hopefully you can fix before the fish go back in. I see you have glass tops, the problem with this in SW tanks is the lack of gas exchange. It would be a lot better to cover the whole tank with a fine mesh top, that A) will allow O2, CO2 to move into and out of the tank. B) will not allow the smaller jumpers(jawfish) to escape. My tank is entirely open so I don't buy jumpers, but still have had problems in the past because fish jump. I think they do it when I am watching to see me freak out. In any case mesh is a better solution.
 

redfishbluefish

Officer Emeritus
Officer Emeritus
Glad to see you've got it all figured out.

A couple pointers, and I apologize if you're already aware:

1. Do not start the clock on treatment until you reach therapeutic levels of copper. If at any point during the two week treatment levels drop below therapeutic levels, you need to start the clock all over again. If a water change is needed, bring the new water up to therapeutic copper levels before preforming the water change.

2. Do not use any other treatments when treating for copper. Some of these other treatments enhance the poisonous effect of copper, which could kill your fish. An example would be any ammonia absorbing product, such as Prime.

3, Once the two weeks are up, either transfer to a new tank or start doing multiple large water changes to lower copper levels. I would not do anything more than 50% water changes. Keep fish out of the DT for a total of a minimum of 76 days.

4. I would include a small Tupperware container of sand for your sand dwellers. Take note of copper levels when adding because sand could bind up some of the copper. Once the treatment was over, do not use that sand in your DT....dispose of it or hold on to it for future copper treatments.

Best of luck.
 
Looking at your setup a quick remark now that hopefully you can fix before the fish go back in. I see you have glass tops, the problem with this in SW tanks is the lack of gas exchange. It would be a lot better to cover the whole tank with a fine mesh top, that A) will allow O2, CO2 to move into and out of the tank. B) will not allow the smaller jumpers(jawfish) to escape. My tank is entirely open so I don't buy jumpers, but still have had problems in the past because fish jump. I think they do it when I am watching to see me freak out. In any case mesh is a better solution.

It is funny that you mention this, the day he jumped we ordered one of those BRS mesh kits! I honestly can't wait to get it in and put it on the tank. I don't want to go through another jumper scenario... I still feel awful for the little guy.
 
Glad to see you've got it all figured out.

A couple pointers, and I apologize if you're already aware:

1. Do not start the clock on treatment until you reach therapeutic levels of copper. If at any point during the two week treatment levels drop below therapeutic levels, you need to start the clock all over again. If a water change is needed, bring the new water up to therapeutic copper levels before preforming the water change.

2. Do not use any other treatments when treating for copper. Some of these other treatments enhance the poisonous effect of copper, which could kill your fish. An example would be any ammonia absorbing product, such as Prime.

3, Once the two weeks are up, either transfer to a new tank or start doing multiple large water changes to lower copper levels. I would not do anything more than 50% water changes. Keep fish out of the DT for a total of a minimum of 76 days.

4. I would include a small Tupperware container of sand for your sand dwellers. Take note of copper levels when adding because sand could bind up some of the copper. Once the treatment was over, do not use that sand in your DT....dispose of it or hold on to it for future copper treatments.

Best of luck.

1. I did not know about this! my wife has been doing most of the dosing, and says that we aren't even up to the therapeutic levels. She is bringing it up slower because she is worried about our christmas wrasse, which funnily enough seems to be doing really well. I am pretty sure he was trying to spit water at me when I checked on them last night.

2. Thankfully the threads you pointed me towards mentioned this.

3. I think we may go the route of large water changes. the only way I would tank transfer is if we found a cheap 100g glass tank lol. At least I would be able to look at them.

4. I wasn't sure how that worked! We a goby and a wrasse. I was thinking it might be better to use new sand but I Don't know how that works. This is good news, I am sure they will be more comfortable if we do this.

Thanks again! I really appreciate your help!
 
Wife here of J.R. :p We are dosing with Seachem Cupramine, on the bottle it says 0.5 is the therapeutic range but is it really a range of 0.35-0.5? Just curious on what people have had success with. Everyone has been eating well, but our red tail trigger has been very shy and not eating as much as he normally does (which is odd because he is usually the most friendly out of all the fish). We have been using the Hanna Checker Copper LR, is this okay to use when dosing cupramine? LFS said it should be fine because its still a form of copper (ionic).
 

redfishbluefish

Officer Emeritus
Officer Emeritus
Hello wife. I've got some bad news....Hanna Copper Checker doesn't work with saltwater (and that's from the mouth of technical support from Hanna). Only works for freshwater. So your LFS gave you some bad info.

The therapeutic range for ionic copper (Seachem Cupramine) is 0.35 to o.5 mg/l. You need to use a test kit specially for ionic copper, such as Seachem or Salifert copper test kits. You can not use API test kit since that test kit is for chelated copper (such as Coppersafe), which also requires a much higher therapeutic range.

Hope this helps.
 
holy cows I felt like i read a years' log in just a few days. It saddens me that someone sold you Biff without asking what other fish you had in the tank. It's like building a HS and the first kid you put in there is the bully who has teeth. Anyways now that your fish are no longer in display - I suggest adding them in the order of least aggressiveness. So a blenny would go first - before the trigger/tangs.

in terms of difficulty - i would argue your gonipora/flower pot coral is going to be hard to keep. I think mnat or some of the veterans here have kept them successfully. Gonis require food.

the sun coral is actually easy to keep but ironically a pain in the tush because you need to feed those polyps. you could use like an upside down soda bottle and squirt food at it - this will prevent the rest of your inhabitants from ripping the food away. or you could take the entire coral out and feed it separately.

The other corals are easier - as they require appropriate light for "food" and good water conditions.

As the "devils" advocate - i would just say this - i have had my tank for many years without a mesh top and successfully kept the pearly jawfish. The jumping can be caused by something that startles them, or the lack of a suitable place for them to dig in/hide. Trigger fish - even pelagic ones can freak out burrow-dwelling fish. My guess is that the jawfish was seeking a new spot and freaked out when Biff came along. If you still want a jawfish, if at all possible add him first before the larger tangs/trigger go into the display.

welcome to you both to the forum and keep us posted on your progress!
 
Just posting an update on everyone, all fish are eating well and are at therapeutic range. Happy that the tangs are fat and happy and responding well, the blue hippo was def the worst but he now has great color.

We added a cleaner shrimp and long tentacle anemone to the tank along with some nerite snails, we are not going to put anything else at in the tank but that restarted our timer on the DT so July 28th is now our 76 days.

As for the jawfish, he had an odd behavior where as soon as the lights went out he would swim around the surface of the tank and do little jumps out of the water, with lights on he would just stay in his little burrow. Would this be considered normal behavior? All of the other fish immediately "go to bed" when the lights go out but that guy took it as an initiative to have a party to himself, maybe it was because he was freaked out and didn't feel comfortable.

As for the corals I try to feed them 2-3 times a week. I usually move the suncoral where I can reach each polyp and I have infact taken tweezers with mysis and fed each one individually. Gonipora seems to like the oysterfeast/reef roid mix and has had a good feeding response.

When it comes time to put everyone back it will be in an order of aggressiveness.

What it all comes down to is this is a learning experience for us, we hear and read so many different things and have learned our "lesson" to say the least.... In other news there is an explosion of copepods and isopods in the DT probably because there is no one around to eat them.
 
need help with hitch hiker ID
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