Many or One at a time

[forde_11]

I am trying to find out if I should add fish one at a time or a bunch at once. I am looking at 4 or 5 fish for my tank and I have to decide if I should buy them all at once or over an extended period what do you think?

[Gizmo]

I learned from this expereince very early in the game not to overload your tank too quickly.

Now if you had say a 20G tank, definatly 1 at a time, If I could do half a fish at a time I would but that would be messy.
In my 70, I have added 3 fish at a time MAX. only reason I got 3 that time was a pair of clowns and a blenny I had been waiting for.
LFS will always try to sell you on adding as many as you want. BigAl's is horrible for that. AI told me I could load up on fish that day, but err' on the side of caution, i didnt.

[muck]

If you add too much too fast you may have another small cycle in your tank because your de-nitrifying bacteria can not keep up with the bioload. Nothing good happens fast in this hobby. It is always much better to take it slow. Your fish and inverts will thanks you..

[Beverly]

Depends on a few factors:

- size of tank
- how long it's been set up and cycled
- what kind of fish you want to add

Tell us more about your tank and the fish you want to add.

[trilinearmipmap]

Go slow.

[danny zubot]

Yes tell us more! I voted pairs just because thats would I'd do in my tank.

[forde_11]

I have a 65 Gallon, and it has been setup for just over four months. But I had to move the tank last week due to flooding. But I kept all the water and everything is back to being happy if not happier. Their are two damsels and one false perc in their right now. And I am looking at a Six Line Wrasse, Algea Blenny, and some kind of Goby, and I don't really know what else (I want a Tang of some kind but it needs but I am warry of tank sizing). Just kind of wanted to know what other people thought. It isn't like I have a list of 10 fish I want to put in all at once, just really trying to gain some wisdom from all you experts.

[forde_11]

I also read an opinion that you should only add new fish about once a month, what does everyone think of that?

[EmilyB]

It takes time for the biological filtration (bacteria) to increase enough to support the new addition. There are some ways around this, but patience is usually the winner.

[StirCrazy]

Ok this is a waist of time unless we know what size your tank is, weather you have a sand bed or not and how much live rock you have. Also you will need to tell us how long this has all been together and if it is finished cycling or not.

reason being if you just finished cycling a 20 gal tank with 5 lbs of LR and a sand bed you can add a lot more than a 20 gal tank that has nothing else, on the same token a 90 gal tank with 180Lbs of well cured LR will handle almost any bio mass you can reasonably throw at it.

the old 1 fish per month rule and such were created with freshwater tanks that are new and have a thin layer of coarse smooth rock which means the water column is going to be supporting the majority of the bacteria that break down ammonia and nitrite.

in a reef tank with live rock that has finished the initial cycling the initial population of bacteria will be immensely larger than a tank with no liver rock and sense Bacteria doubles when it multiplies it can adjust faster.

for a stupid example take a 20 gal tank that just has water in it, for arguments sake lets say it has 5 bacteria and that the reproduction rate of the bacteria is it doubles every day, so day 2 you have 10, day 3 you have 20, day 4 you have 40, and day 5 you have 80 little bacteria.

so lets compare this to a 20 gal tank that has 30lbs of live rock and for arguments sake well say the rock supports 100 bacteria with the water initially, well day 2 you have 200, day 3 you have 400, day 4 you have 800, and day 5 you have 1600 little guys

so you can see because the second tank can produce bacteria faster it will be able to support a larger initial addition of bio mass.

oh and for the record the numbers I used for the bacteria are a little low but I am not digging out my book and trying to figure out what the sustainable density per gal is