Better to start with corals or fish?

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Experiment397

Experiment397

Redtail Catfish
MFK Member
Feb 26, 2010
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Probably the Poly section
Would It be okay to start a tank as a fowlr but having reef safe fish and inverts then slowly adding coral, or would it be better to start with corals and one or two fish species and eventually putting the other fish in after my wallet recovers?


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It's your choice - their are arugements for both. A few things to know while choosing are, the highest jump in both nitrate and phosphate comes with feeding fish. Both nitrate and phosphate "builld" in an aquarium, they don't rage overnite. The slowest growing B+B is denitrifying bacteria, this can take years for a tank to denitrify on it's own. The most testing, dosing, and maintence is most definately corals. If your not at all familiar with whats associated with care of corals your gonna have to learn and master an awful lot overnite. Either or take it slow and test for everything frequently. Research will give you a clue - frequent testing will help you understand your water chemistry both cause and effect.
 
Okay. As you know I'm goin with easy easy corals and already am figuring that out. I will start looking for rock. I've got around $100 bucks to spend on rock so that will have to do for the first little bit and I'll get it up to around a 100 lbs before adding any sensitive fish and just keep adding rock from there. I'm going to fill my Fx5 with carbon and some ammonia fixing media. Then have around a 15-20 gallon fuge section in the sump with another chamber for the skimmer and heater. then a direct drip line into the tank for dosing and feeding the corals and other inverts on the rock.


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If you read the directions that comes with carbon it says " for limited use in a marine enviorment, 1-2x a week only, add trace often". The reason this says this is that full time use of carbon in a marine enviorment will deplete/absorb too many trace elements that are essential for all marine life most esp. all corals and inverts.
 
The fowlr is the easier start. one with hardy fish is as easy as a standard fw tank

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Experiment397 said:
Would It be okay to start a tank as a fowlr but having reef safe fish and inverts then slowly adding coral, or would it be better to start with corals and one or two fish species and eventually putting the other fish in after my wallet recovers?


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Have you cycled the tank yet, or are you just setting it up now? If it's already cycled, I'm assuming you might already have the live rock in there. If so, I'd suggest adding a couple reef-safe fish to the equation, just one or two, and some cleaner crews. You'll want to wait then for the system to catch up with the new biological waste additions, and then slowly add a coral at a time. You never want to add corals into a tank that hasn't matured for at least 6mo-1yr because though there are some pretty hardy soft corals, they still require a more stable and pristine environment than most fish and inverts and other plants do. Not to mention, they're expensive, and under threat in the wild, so it'd be a shame to just rush out and buy them because they're so amazing, and then contribute to their decline by not being able to properly maintain it. Everything in salt is better done slow and steady.
 
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