Beginner's 20G Fowlr

[j3tang]

Hello everyone, I've taken this log that I started from another forum and decided to post it here as well.

I've been lurking and reading for some time and finally started my tank up. I had a 20 gallon tank with stand sitting round the house that was used probably 12 years ago by my parents for freshwater fish.

I'll use this thread as a log as well as a place for me to ask questions as the tank progresses. I'll keep the log here in the OP, and then maybe make comments and ask questions in subsequent postings. My intention at this point is to keep a FOWLR setup with just 2 clowns.


----------------------------------------------------------------------


Mid-October, 2010
Saw that J&L Aquatics had a sale on Koralia powerheads, bought 2 Koralia 425: 1 for the tank, and 1 for water prep. bucket. Bought a 100W Ebo Jager heater off Kijiji for the tank, still in need of another for the bucket. Tank slowly filled with salt water made from RO at home and tempered to about 26 degC.


October 25, 2010
Added (dumped!) 20 lbs of CaribSea Ocean Direct (original grade) live sand, and boy was that a mistake. The smart thing would have been to put the sand in the tank first and then put a cup or dish in the tank and then pour water into it to let it overflow into the tank of sand. Oh well, live and learn. The tank is super cloudy and I can't see a thing (not that there are things in the tank to see yet ).


October 27, 2010
Found a decent deal on Kijiji for live rock some time ago and arranged to meet with seller to purchase all of it (25 lbs). He wanted $4/lb which was fine by me. He threw in for free 2 heaters (1x50W Eheim Jager & 1x100W Marineland Visi-Therm) and a AquaClear 402 powerhead (that has no accessories what-so-ever: nothing to connect to the input/output ports, no tank rim hanger), and an electrical timer. Left the live rock in a bucket with heater and salt water and powerhead until the tank cleared.


October 29, 2010
Put all my live rock into the tank and have it all arranged. The seller said there were 2 blue hermit crabs in the live rock when he sold it to me, after looking at the rock for two days and putting them into the tank today, I've only seen 1, which is fine by me


October 30, 2010
Where I had previously found my parent's tank, there were also 2 AquaClear HOB filters! Only one of them has a powerhead though. I cleaned it out and started using that with just a sponge for mechanical filtration. For anyone interested, the HOB filter is called an AquaClear Junior The funny thing is, while I've been reading online about the more recent AquaClear filters, I come across people with DIY mods cutting up the basket it comes with to create baffles to compartmentalize filtration media. My "Junior" just comes this way with 3 separate compartments!


November 3, 2010
Bought Kent SuperBuffer and Alkalinity tester. Tested the hardness and got 9 dKH which doesn't seem all that bad. I added a small amount into the tank and some into the new salt water mix.


November 5, 2010
Picked up 5 dwarf zebra hermit crabs and 2 nassarius snails. I got home and tested the tank water and the pH is up to about 8.3. I then drip acclimated them with my tank water and removed some more water from the tank to do a water change. The snails are pretty interesting to watch!


November 12, 2010
Picked up the two ocellaris clownfish that I've been meaning to keep yesterday and acclimatized them with the drip method for 4 hours.

While they were in the bucket being acclimatized, they would not swim anywhere around the bucket, they just flapped their fins and stayed on the side opposite of where the water was dripping from. I thought, maybe the dripping is causing the water to ripple and scaring them so I submersed the tip to avoid the rippling effect. However, they still wouldn't move around at all and as the bucket got filled the water level rose but they still only stayed at the bottom (still moving around though).

At the end of it all after the 4 hours, I put the two into my tank and one of them landed in a cave area and the other one landed closer to the end of the tank where the powerhead was. The one by the cave just swam/floated around in that one area for the whole evening and the other one by the powerhead started to move around in that half of the tank.

I went and watched a movie upstairs, came back down and the two clowns found each other and were swimming/exploring that same end where the power head was. But the one that was hiding earlier looked like, for a lack of better terminology, was ramming its head into a small cave area. Silly fish.


November 13, 2010
I woke super early up like it was Christmas morning all excited to come downstairs to unwrap presents but I only saw one fish and it was the same fish that was cowering inside the first cave area it was in when it first came into the tank. I thought, oh great silly fish is at it again ... wait, was it doing this all night?!?! Then I start looking for the other fish that seemed like it was coping better and I couldn't find it and I started panicking. I eventually found it in the back corner and there were 2 zebra hermit crabs and 1 blue legged hermit crab and 1 nassarius snail eating it I'm not too sure about the snail, but it was stuck to the side of the fish, so I assume it joined in as well.

I immediately checked the water parameters and nothing was out of the norm.


November 15, 2010
My other clown fish still seems timid and I can accept that. It's still hiding behind rocks when the lights are on and will only swim out when it's totally dark. I sprinkle some pellets on the water surface and hope he eats them as I can't confirm that he eats since it's dark when he comes out. I hope it doesn't stay this shy

End of the day, I get home from work and I find my remaining clown's ..... remains. It didn't make it either. One of my dwarf zebra hermit crabs had dragged it under a rock and was picking at it. By now, I feel god awful and I have absolutely no idea what's wrong.

I realize patience is the number 1 thing in this hobby, but is this a sign of impatience? If it is, I certainly have no problems continuing to wait. Or is there something wrong with my tank? Or is there something in my tank killing my fish?


This is the development up 'till now, I'll migrate some of the other information over in subsequent posts.

[j3tang]

Equipment
Tank: Standard 20 gallon 24x12x16 with approximately 20 lb. Aragonite sand (new) and approximately 25 lb. of live rock (not sure what type it's called) from a 2-yr old tank. Canopy is equipped with 2 x 15W Philips 6700K fluorescent bulbs

1 x Aquaclear HOB filter in the back, left w/ sponge doing mechanical filtration and water movement
1 x Koralia 425 powerhead on right wall
1 x 100 W heater on back wall



Water Conditions
----- Date ----- SG | pH | Ammonia | Nitrite | Nitrate | dKH
2010.10.30 - 1.025 | 7.8 | .25 ppm | 0 ppm | 10-20 ppm | --n/a--
2010.11.03 - 1.025 | 7.8 | 0 ppm | 0 ppm | 0 ppm | 9
2010.11.07 - 1.025 | 8.3 | 0 ppm | 0 ppm | 0 ppm | 11
2010.11.09 - 1.025 | 8.3 | 0 ppm | 0 ppm | 0 ppm | 11
2010.11.13 - 1.025 | 8.3 | 0 ppm | 0 ppm | 0 ppm | 11

[j3tang]

This is what the tank looked like October 30.




It actually looks to me like there's a lot of tiny fuzz/hair on the live rock, is that hair algae?!?! or is it just harmless microalgae? also, it appears as if there were a few dead white worms(?) plastered to a piece of the live rock, should I have removed it before putting it into the tank?


OMG! WHAT THE HECK IS THIS?!?!?! I frequently stick my head into the tank and never noticed this until just now! Stuff like that scares the crap out of me! Is that a bristleworm? It's huge!! Some people remove them, some say it's part of the eco-system and should be left in there to do it's job. I've left it in there (because I'm bug-aphobic and don't want to go anywhere near it).



So far one of the things that I've had issues with is the pH. I've received some help from another board member, but can't quite pin point the source. However, the use of Kent Superbuffer has cleared that problem up.


Anyways, this is a FTS of the setup of death currently.



There were 5 dwarf zebra hermit crabs, 2 nassarius snails, and 1 blue legged hermit crab in the tank (along with that nasty looking bristle worm). I found the remains of 1 dwarf zebra hermit crab the same night I found my second dead clown fish so now I'm down to 4 dwarf zebra hermit crabs. I was given extra shells for the hermit crabs, but all the shells seem a little large for them at this point.

I think it might have just been too soon to add the fish even if the live rock was already cured. I will refrain from adding anything for the next 4-8 weeks unless someone else thinks otherwise. I'm just wondering now what I should do with the CUC that's already in there. Should I remove them, will they starve? I've also refrained from turning the light on since the clowns would not come out when it's bright and I don't intend to turn the lights on for the next bit as the 6700K just seems to promote plant/algae growth anyways.

[Myka]

It's hard to hard without seeing the head, but that looks like a Eunicid worm. That is a bad worm, and needs to be removed. They can kill fish by grabbing onto them and quickly pulling back which rams the fish into the rock. They can move at some silly rate like 200 ft per second or some such thing!

I would suggest you remove the rock you saw it go back into and dip the rock in freshwater. If the worm is in that rock he will come out quite quickly when dipped in freshwater. If he doesn't, try a different rock. Don't leave the rock out for too long, and don't leave it in the freshwater for more than a couple minutes. This will probably cause a bit of a cycle in your tank.

Anyway, the worm may be the cause of your fishes demise, but the new tank could be the cause as well. Your tank doesn't have any algae growing yet which is probably why the hermit died. No food = starvation. If i were you I would try to take the hermits and snails back to the store, until there is more for the little guys to eat. There is also no need for 5 hermits and 2 snails in a 20 gallon tank even later on. Too many, they will just starve to death.

It could very well be that the clowns were not in good health when you bought them. Some of them can be quite sensitive and some of them never seem to acclimate very well.

I would also suggest you try to get another small piece of live rock...something with some color (purple/pink is good, green is not so good) in hopes of seeding the tank a bit better. Your rock is awfully white and looks as though there is not a terribly large amount of life on it.

Once you get that worm out, and let your tank sit for another couple weeks monitoring the ammonia and nitrate (no need to test for nitrite in sw aquaria) you can try fish again. I would also suggest you not worry about pH so much, and quit dosing the buffer.

For more information on pH use the link in my signature. The write-up is aimed towards reef tanks, but the part on pH is relevant to FOWLRs too.

Good job keeping a log going! That will be helpful in the future.

[j3tang]

I will definitely give all that a try. I think tonight's mission is to try to get the worm out first. I'll have a go at the suggested reading too, depending on how successful I am with the worm tonight By "freshwater" you just mean something that's not the saltwater mix right? so like tap water or something ...

So it may be a possibility that when the clowns were hiding/sleeping in the rocks, the worm got to them?

Actually the dead zebra hermit crab .. it were pieces of its legs that I recognized on the sand (out of it's shell). The pieces are gone now so something must have eaten it.


Thanks again for all the suggestions!

[beefORchicken]

i see you're running an ac filter. i do the same on my tank and by the looks of it you took off the grate part of the intake. i've done the same on mine and my starfish crawled in one night had got cut up a bit. i suggest doing a little diy. what i've done is actually cut the grate end of the pipe off, cut the bigger size ring off the tube (the part that fits over the intake in your tank now) and use the big ring to friction fit the grate to the intake. then you have a grate but the darn tube isn't so long. if you need a picture i can try to show you that way.
just a tip!

[j3tang]

do you mean the slotted cone shaped thing at the bottom - the intake strainer? It's actualy attached. I didn't take that part off, it's still in stock form.

On the contrary, instead of being annoyed with it being too long, I actually find it a bit too short. I've done a couple water changes (about 20% each time) and the water level dips below the intake tube so I gotta turn off the filter and prime it again once I'm done. Not a big deal and I can certainly extend the intake lower too if need be, but I'm not concerned at this point


Although I am still kinda curious about what you did with yours, I would love to see some pics



edit:

ok, I thought luck was on my side when I walked through the door when I got home to see the nasty worm sticking out of one of my pieces of rock. I immediately threw down everything and went for the worm.

By the time I got to it, the worm had already slithered back into the hole, but at least I knew which rock it was in. So I pulled the rock out of the tank and put it in a bucket and just flushed it with warm tap water. The rock was there for a few minutes but the worm didn't want to come out. After a bit of waiting, I had to put the rock back into the tank .. with the worm still in there .. somewhere.

Right now I've just got red light shinning on the tank hoping it will come out on its own.
Mine actually looks kinda like the one in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXmb9MpikyA

[j3tang]

I'm getting the feeling that maybe there is the chance that the tank hasn't cycled at all. I've seen stories where people can't get ammonia up above .25 ppm so there isn't enough of it to get the tank cycle started. I've attempted to add ammonia myself.

[j3tang]

ammonia has been added over 2 days and there are readings for ammonia and it looks like it's slowly getting converted to nitrite. I wasn't attempting to make a huge peak so I didn't bump the ammonia up too much. Since it does look like the ammonia is getting converted, I'll let the tank do its thing and hope for the best when I add fish (again).

[j3tang]

I talked to LFS dude and he says to me:

1) RO water that I'm using comes out at a pH of 6 (which can't be true, that would make my water acidic! Maybe he meant to say 7? which would be correct.)

2) pH of 7.8 is low (I concur), so use the Kent Superbuffer I have to bring it to 8.3. He disagrees with the fact that having a fluctuating pH at 8.3 is worse than a consistent 7.8 pH (and I can accept that that is his opinion).

3) he thinks I drip acclimated my 2 clowns that died for too long (4hrs), he thinks I should have dripped quickly to achieve double the volume of water in approx. 20 minutes to avoid the temperature of the bucket's water dropping. Should I have put in a heater into the bucket if i dripped for 4hrs? or should I do what he says and do it quickly (which seems kinda counter intuitive to me)?


I've read Myka's links to water parameters before, but I'm still unsure about what to do. I don't think I'll continue dosing the buffer, but can anyone else chime in? Any other advice at this point? this is getting a little discouraging for a newb :s