Hello everyone! New to Saltwater and Fish keeping in general~

Betation

New Member
Hi everyone! Im relatively new to fishkeeping. When I was stationed in Japan I fell in love with freshwater aquascaping and tried my hand in it but didn't work out very well. I was very inexperienced and wasted a lot of money and sadlyfish too. I moved to San Diego and tried to set up a 20g long saltwater tank but I again made some mistakes and ended up getting rid of the tank after a few months of struggling to get it cycled and making any coral grow.
Luckily now I did more research and got the IM 20g AIO tank and have taken my time cycling. I have set up a good light (A160 Tuna with the controller), a skimmer, live rock and recently added copepods after my tank finished cyclying and brown algea started to appear. I dont plan on adding any coral or fish until im comfortable enough with the tank and mixing water. I don't have anyway to mix water yet so I have being relying on IM premix saltwater. I hope to learn a great deal on these forums and hopefully upload my tank as it grows.
My hopeful stock list:
2 clownfish
1 indigo or orchid dottyback
1 goby - not sure what kind
1 blenny - not sure yet either
soft corals
5 to 6 hermits and snails - my mistake last tank was adding way too much hermits and snails. they competed for food and a bunch of snails got eaten
 

Uncle99

Well-Known Member
Welcome, starting with zero TDS RODI, using a salt whose parameters match what your going to keep, and deploying and maintaining the 8 major parameters will in itself lead you on a path of success.

Don't chase numbers, it's stability of those 8 parameters which is paramount.

Good luck, slow is better.
 

DaveK

Well-Known Member
...
Luckily now I did more research and got the IM 20g AIO tank and have taken my time cycling. ...
My hopeful stock list:
2 clownfish
1 indigo or orchid dottyback
1 goby - not sure what kind
1 blenny - not sure yet either
...

Welcome to RS.

First I want to tell you that I'm not trying to beat up on you because your new. Everyone here was new once, and everyone has made major beginner mistakes.

What you have is a very small tank at 20 gal. By the time you add enough live rock and optionally live sand, that water volume is down to about 15 gal. In a SW system you want to set your stocking limits to about 1 inch of fish per 5 gal of water. This translates into 3 to 4 inches of fish or about 2 or 3, at most, very small fish.

Your stocking list has 5 fish on it and unless your very selective in the exact species, most are going to range in the area of 2 1/2 inches or so. Keep in mind that you also need to allow some room for growth. You will also find that many dottybacks, gobys, and blennies require a tank size of about 30 gal, but there are a few smaller species that will work in a 20 gal tank.

As a note, you do see some people stock their tanks to much higher levels, but this is a tricky balancing act and a single serious mistake can easily result in a tank of very dead fish. I don't recommend trying this.

If you want to insure long term success, I suggest you reduce your stocking list to about 2 fish, maybe 3 if they are very small. The other option is to get a much larger tank, but that would be very expensive.

On the indigo or orchid dottyback, dottybacks tend to be very aggressive. Ideally you should keep them in a larger tank so the other fish can get away from them. I suggest choosing something else. Here are a few possible choices, Royal gramma, black cap gramma, another goby species, one of the firefish species, or pajama cardinalfish.

Lastly, properly done a small tank can be a real gem, but you do need to be very selective about what you keep in there. Every addition of livestock needs to really add something to the tank.
 
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