When it comes to learning something new, we all tend to look for an expert to learn from and follow. It has been my intention to be that expert for you. And today, in line with that intention, I’m going to introduce you to another expert who has created an ebook that will help you greatly – especially if you are new to aquarium keeping – but even if you are experienced too – it will still help you.
Over the years of attending different aquarium hobby club meetings where there was an expert guest speaker or at aquarium conferences where there were other expert speakers, I noticed a common flaw that many new saltwater aquarium enthusiasts fell into. Here it is. The flaw was in following multiple experts at the same time and then trying to apply everything that all of the experts were recommending.
So what is wrong with that? There are so many ways to do a saltwater aquarium right, but unless you choose one way and stick with it, you’ll likely end up with a system that doesn’t work well and is a hodge podge of multiple methods. The best way is to choose one expert to follow and stick with them, and do what they say until you have some experience and success under your belt. THEN – and only then – does it make sense to begin experimenting with different methods.
So today, I am exposing you to another expert for you to learn from, to give you a different perspective.
Let me know what you like the most in Andrej’s ebook and how it helped you.
Here’s another great question I got today about combining multiple filtration methods
on one aquarium (a reef system). Here’s the question and my answer:
QUESTION: “Warren did I understand you to say that you like to use multiple filtration methods on one aquarium? Like aJaubert plenum with a deep sand bed in the display tank with a mud filter refugium in the sump with return water flowing thru a uv. This is exactly what I would like to do on my new 135 gal reef tank. What are your thoughts on this combo???”
ANSWER: So, to answer your question about if I like using multiple filtration methods on one aquarium, my answer is no – and I’ll explain.
Do I think it’s a good idea to use a Jaubert plenum in your exhibit tank with a mud filter refugium in the sump, along with a UV? Yes that could work well.
Overall, my philosophy is that while there are many different methods or filtration formats for a successful reef tank, you generally want to pick one and stick with it. In other words, you don’t want to install an algae scrubber, with a protein skimmer along with a living sponge filtration system and a UV sterilizer and a trickle filter and live rock (I think you get the idea). The different components that are used for one method may counteract other component from a different method. And what you end up with is a mess that doesn’t work, and has chronic water quality problems.
For example, a UV sterilizer would kill off any water borne bacteria and phytoplankton and would thus partly starve a living sponge filter. Or using an aggressive protein skimmer with a living sponge filter system would not work, as the protein skimmer would starve the live sponge of its food source.
Or another example would be the use of bioballs/trickle filter in combination with an algae scrubber. The bioballs/trickle filter would add to the chronic nitrate levels that the algae scrubber or refugium is designed to reduce.
So, yes it’s OK to combine a Jaubert plenum in the exhibit tank with a refugium/mud filter in the sump, along with a UV sterilizer. Just don’t go overboard trying to install every known form of filtration into your system.
I’ve seen a public aquariums do this with their 1,000 gallon reef tank (this was years ago) and the exhibit was a nightmare to operate – plus it didn’t look anywhere near as good as it should have at the time.
Also, with your Jaubert plenum, you may likely find that depending on how large your calcium/magnesium demand is, that you may need to supplement for calcium and magnesium (alkalinity too).
I only have a little experience with Jaubert plenum systems, but did research them aggressively years ago when they began to become popular. What are you hearing/learning about their effectiveness?
Leave a comment here and let me know what filtration method you are using and what your experience has been.
If you ask most people what words come to mind when they think of saltwater aquariums, most of them will eventually mention “complicated”, “difficult”, or “a lot of work”. And – yes – saltwater aquariums ARE inherently complicated. BUT, they don’t have to be difficult or overwhelming or “a lot of work”. What if it were simple, easy and fun? What if it could be this way for you?
Well, I am here to tell you it can be. I don’t like to toot my own horn, but if there is one thing I am good at, it is taking things that are inherently complex and making them simple. In fact, if you are going to be both successful at saltwater aquariums AND have fun doing it, you must learn to keep it simple or simplify.
When people ask me what does it take to make a great saltwater aquarium I tell them that it is as simple as this:
If you put stuff in, you have to take stuff out – otherwise you end up with pollution. Another way of saying it is that in order to prevent accumulation of bad stuff (nitrates, phosphates, organics, detritus, waste, etc.) you need to always be removing it. There are many ways to accomplish this, such as: water changes; activated carbon, protein skimmer, refugium w/ macro-algae, water changes, phosphate-removing media, etc..
Stop and just stare at your tank regularly – few skills are more crucial to a successful saltwater aquarium than observation. Observation is absolutely foundational to your success. And the good thing is it is really easy to do. Just stand and stare, and do it on a regular basis. You will learn more, discover more, prevent more problems and come up with more solutions by just getting quiet and still and just watching your tank.
Become a learning and reading maniac and ask lots of questions. Learn as much as you can about the animals you are keeping and have a strong sense of wonder – Whether it is animals or filtration equipment, it is vitally important that you learn as much as you can about them. Let’s face it, this part takes a while, and yet there is no way around it, unless you are going to hire someone to take care of your tank for you, which may be an option for you. You will need to learn about their life history, ecology, husbandry requirements and compatibility with other potential tank mates. And filtration equipment or life support equipment must be understood in order to select the right one and to operate it properly. So read as much as you can (books, magazines, online forums, blogs), join a local saltwater aquarium hobby club, attend seminars, workshops and lectures, and above all be open-minded. Know you can never know everything, and be willing to be contributed to. Be willing for the other guy to know more than you, so that you can learn something new (this alone has taken me very far).
Be consistent and keep a routine – There is no beating around the bush. Saltwater aquariums require consistent routine care, and if you skimp on your consistency or miss a day or a week here and there, it can come back to bite you. Tropical coral reef thrive with consistent conditions, and your saltwater aquarium is no different. You must be regular and consistent with your saltwater aquarium maintenance routine. I have seen amazing tanks whose only difference from mediocre ones was that their routine was amazingly thorough and consistent. The bottom line is that saltwater aquariums need regular attention.
Prevention, Prevention, Prevention – The saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is alive and well with keeping saltwater aquariums. To the degree that you focus on preventing problems with your saltwater aquarium, you will be more successful. This is an area I have been forced to become very good at as the owner of Gibbons Aquaria, Inc., a high-end custom saltwater aquarium design/installation/management company. With multiple customers and multiple tanks (most of which are more than several hundred gallons) my business and my customers cannot afford too many problems. And to be frank, saltwater aquariums require good problem solving skills. Even if you are wildly successful, you will still have your share of surprises, such as mechanical failures, leaks, disease outbreaks, animal aggression/mortality, etc.. All of these unpleasant things are going to happen to you eventually, no matter how good you are. The key is to prevent, minimize and respond to them so that they don’t cause big problems for you. In other words, if a pump stops working and you don’t even know it, you can lose your entire tank. Or even if you notice in time that the pump has stopped working but you don’t have a spare, you are in trouble. So prevent problems in the first place. Minimize them when they do happen. And then set yourself up with some kind of monitoring system to notify you so that you can respond when they do happen.
Be like a boyscout and be prepared – Preventing problems is one thing (and it’s absolutely huge), and being prepared for problems is different. If you can afford it, keep spares of as many critical life support components as possible (pumps, light bulbs for reef tanks, heater, etc.). Also, part of being prepared is making sure you know that problems are going to happen and design your aquarium setup to accommodate them. An example of this would be to make sure system fails “safe” in the event of a power failure. This means that your sump will not overflow or your system is capable of starting back up without you needing to be there when the power comes back on. Another example is to have your aquarium notify you of key life support failures when they happen by using a monitoring system (I love the Sensaphone 400 and Sensaphone 800).
Become a critical thinker and ask lots of “why” and “how” questions – It is vitally important that as you learn, that you actually understand what you are learning and why the thing you are learning is so. The opposite of this is like kids in school who just want the teacher to tell them what’s going to be on the exam. Just learning the answer won’t help you if you don’t actually understand why it is the answer. In fact, this failed approach leads to more problems whereby you are mystified and confused, but now with even more problems that you don’t understand.
Move lots of water – Proper water circulation can be almost magical in its beneficial impact on a saltwater aquarium. Here are some of the benefits of proper water circulation: helps keep detritus and other waste up in the water column so that it can be removed by filters; helps increase oxygen levels and reduce carbon dioxide, brings nutrients to corals and invertebrates, provides ideal respiration for all animals and plants, acts as a treadmill for fish to get exercise, allows for better density of coral skeletons, helps create more natural coral growth forms, increased coral growth rate, etc..
Lighting: The proper quantity and quality of light – Simply put, you need enough of the right type of light. One rule of thumb for reef aquariums with photosynthetic corals is to use 2.5-4 watts of lighting per gallon of aquarium. So if your tank is 70 gallons and you want to keep stony corals, you will want to be at the upper end – at 4 watts per gallon. So if we do the math: 4 watts x 70 gallons = 280 watts of lighting. A fish-only aquarium only requires enough lighting for aesthetic benefit - about 1/4 of the wattage per gallon.
Build it fail-safe – It is one thing for bad things to happen with your saltwater aquarium. But what if something bad happened (like a power failure) but no bad consequences came of it. This is what happens when you design and build your aquarium’s life support system to fail safe. For example, the aquariums I install and maintain can easily accommodate power failure, pump failure, leaks, overheating/cooling, and unwanted changes in water levels. All of these can happen without any negative consequences to the tank and its inhabitants, because it was built to fail safe.
Water quality rules: If you don’t have good water quality, nothing else you do will matter - Test the following water quality parameters once a week and graph your results so you can track trends over time (pH, salinity, alkalinity, calcium, magnesium, nitrates, and phosphates).
Disease is always present, so use a ultraviolet sterilizer - Since there is always disease in every aquarium all the time, use an ultraviolet sterilizer (U.V. sterilizer) to help prevent an outbreak. Your fish and corals can live happily with a chronic low level of parasites, as can we humans. But when stress levels increase in your aquarium (for whatever reason), disease can spread quickly and is difficult to get back under control once an outbreak occurs. Thus, a U.V. sterilizer prevents such a thing from happening and in my opinion is mandatory as part of your saltwater aquarium’s life support system
Prevent stress and you will significantly lessen the occurrence of disease, aggression and deaths. Just like in humans, stress is accumulative – even for fish and corals and other invertebrates.
When it comes to checking the salinity of your reef tank or fish-only tank, are are you using a hydrometer or a refractometer?
Well . . . which one? The reason I ask is that there is a big difference in accuracy between the two. Years ago I used to use hydrometers – you know the
plastic ones they used to give away with a bucket of salt. The scary thing was that if you bought five different plastic hydrometers, then you would get
five different readings. This wasn’t the case with the glass hydrometers, but they are just too easy to break, and my idea of fun reefkeeping is not cleaning
up broken glass.
Back to the plastic hydrometers – as long as you used the same one for your tank, and cleaned it often with vinegar or muriatic acid to keep minerals from giving you a false reading, you were fine. But still – this was a pain in the … well.. you know.
Now, we have the refractometer, which is much more accurate. And the prices have come way down in recent years. And not only are refractometers a lot more accurate, they are a lot more durable and easy to calibrate too.
Calibration was a strange process with the old plastic hydrometers. I remember having to write with a sharpie on the side of the hydrometer “reads 3ppt too low”, or “add 3ppt to reading”. This is no longer necessary.
If you don’t already have a refractometer, you can get one here.
I just uploaded a video on a secret tip on water quality testing you can use for your saltwater aquarium – one that few people do, but if you do it, it will make all the difference.
Click Here for the video. or just paste this into your browser http://swaqsecrets.evplayer.com/?seed=are-you-doing-this-with-your-water-quality
Let me know what you think and leave a comment or question below the video.
In the reef aquarium, it is important to remove as much detritus and organic matter from the system as possible, because the collection of detritus and organic matter is one of the biggest causes of water quality problems and algae problems. Strong water movement in your display tank is crucial, but nothing can take the place of having the right animal to do the job for you. In fact, no manual effort can even come close. You need animals that will get into the sand and rock to kick up the detritus into the water column where it can then be removed by your protein skimmer or mechanical filter. And the Yellow Headed Sleeper Goby (Valencienna strigata) is one of my favorites.
Yellow Headed Sleeper Goby
Aside from using a hand-held powerhead or turkey baster to blast the detritus out of the rock (a great manual method to be done weekly), few other fish can clean your sand of unwanted detritus and organic matter.
I think that this fish should have been called a SIFTER Goby, rather than SLEEPER goby. After all, they are constantly busy sifting through the sand. I call them the steam shovel with gills. They scoop up a mouthful of sand and then tilt their head up and sift the sand through their gills, where gill rakers act like baleen on a whale to sift out the food (small crustaceans, worms, copepods, and detritus).
And the best part is that as they sift the sand through their gills, they throw the detritus up into the water column where the currents keep it suspended, so that it can get removed by your protein skimmer or filter sock. And this is how this fish helps control phosphates, by helping to remove detritus, which is usually loaded with phosphate.
Their diet is important to note. These fish have a high metabolism, what with all the sifting activity they do. So they do well when offered at least one type of sinking pellet along with several frozen foods. My favorite sinking pellet is the New Life Spectrum pellets (small – 1 mm diameter).
As for frozen foods, I prefer Piscene Energetics brand of mysis shrimp, and enriched adult brine shrimp by San Francisco Bay Brand.
This fish will easily pair up and stay together, and do well as a pair in most aquariums 50 gallons and larger. They will lay their eggs on the under side of a rock, which they accomplish by digging out a burrow under live rock. You don’t have to get them as a pair, but they do seem to do better as a pair, plus it is fun to observe them together.
One additional note here about building your live rock structure. Always be sure to build live rock structure directly on the bottom of the tank and then add the sand after the live rock structure is completed. This way your live rock structure is not vulnerable to collapse caused by animals that dig out burrows at the base of the rock.
As for compatibility, the yellow headed sifter goby gets along well with most other fish. The only likely possibly conflict would be with another species of sand sifting goby, such as the others from the genus Valencienna. They are available through most local fish stores and online retailers.
Do you have experience with keeping this fish? We’d love to hear your comments, as it is always helpful for others too.
If you are interested in seahorses and other Syngnathids (seahorses, pipefish, pipehorses, seadragons), you might want to attend:
The Husbandry, Management and Conservation of Syngnathids (seahorses, pipefish, pipehorses, seadragons) Symposium
Where: Hosted by the John G. Shedd Aquarium, Chicago, USA http://www.sheddaquarium.org/
When: Wednesday 2nd – Friday 4th November 2011, with an icebreaker on Tuesday 1st November.
Co-organised by Project Seahorse, the John G. Shedd Aquarium, Monterey Bay Aquarium and Zoological Society of London.
As with previous symposia in this series, the aim is to include a mix of expertise from aquariums, aquaculture, academia and conservation organisations. There will be a combination of invited speakers and talks selected by a program committee from abstracts submitted. We also plan to publish peer-reviewed proceedings.
Whether you have a reef tank or a fish-only tank with live rock, the aiptasia anemone or glass anemone can become a real pest in your saltwater aquarium and can even overrun your tank, killing off corals and covering your live rock. They can even cause problems with your fish too. Here are some of the biggest mistakes to avoid and what to do instead.
Mistake #1 – Not Inspecting New Invertebrate Additions For The Presence of Aiptasia Anemones - This is one of the biggest mistakes aquarists often make. We get excited about adding a new coral, snail, hermit crab, or live rock to our tank and do not take the time to inspect them for the presence of these pesky anemones.
Solution: Inspect any new additions to your tank (especially invertebrates) for the presence of aiptasia anemones. The best way to do this is to setup a small quarantine tank, in which you can place new additions for to observe them for any nasty hitch hikers such as aiptasia anemones. It doesn’t take long, perhaps a few hours or a couple of days of observation. And if you find them there are many ways to remove them.
Mistake #2 – Depending Only On Manual Removal - In the event that you do get one or more of these anemones in your saltwater aquarium, you will want to remove it. And while there are many products on the market for manual removal of aiptasia, not all of them work. And even for the ones that do work, manual removal is only part of the total solution. This is especially true when you consider the fact that aiptasia anemones reproduce asexually by pedal laceration. This fancy term breaks down to the words “foot tearing”. As aiptasia anemones crawl along (yes they are motile) they leave behind pieces of their foot, which then grow up into more adults.
Solution: Think prevention and biological control. This means putting animals in your tank that eat aiptasia anemones. Examples of such animals include, Copperbanded Butterflyfish, Bristletail Filefish, Berghia nudibranchs, Auriga Butterflyfish, Racoon Butterflyfish (not reef safe).
Mistake #3 – Over Feeding With Baby Brineshrimp And Other Small Suspended Foods – While they are photosynthetic, aiptasia will really begin to reproduce quickly with the presence of suspended food items such as baby brineshrimp or Cyclopeeze, which they can capture with their tentacles with great efficiency.
Solution: Limit the offering of baby brineshrimp and other small suspended particulates and be sure not to over feed. The less particulate food they catch, the less they reproduce and the easier it is to control them.
Mistake #4 – Removing Live Rock Pieces and Corals To Kill The Aiptasia Anemones – Often when people go to remove or kill the aiptasia anemones in their tank, they grow on live rock or on the rock base of a coral. And the mistake made here is removing the rock from its position to kill or treat the aiptase anemone. The problem with this is that the rock almost never gets put back into the exact same position, and worse it destabilizes the live rock structure. This destabilization leads to rock slides and collapse of the rock structure, which can kill fish and corals and other invertebrates. It also shrinks the size of the live rock structure, ultimately turning the live rock structure you took so long to get just right into a pile of rocks. This takes away hiding places for fish, reduces water circulation through the live rock, which causes it to collect detritus and organic matter, which degrades water quality.
Solution: Leave the rocks and corals in the tank when removing aiptasia anemones – even when killing the aiptasia anemones by hand. You are better off focusing your removal efforts on using biological controls and let the aiptasia-eating animals in your tank do most of the work. They are much better at it than we are.
Have you ever made any of these mistakes, or others not listed? Please leave a comment and tell us what you think.
If you listened to yesterday’s teleseminar interview on bryopsis algae control, you were introduced to one of my partners Al Leun of Aquatics By Design. Al just sent me this picture of a recent new tank installation he finished in Manhattan, New York. The tank is 3,500 gallons and is a fish-only saltwater exhibit. Check … this … out:
Recent 3,500-gallon Saltwater Aquarium Installation in Manhattan
Just wait until you get to see the video of the life support room (filtration room). Prepare to be blown away.
Post a comment below, and ask your questions about this tank installation, and stay tuned for the video.
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