Feeding?

  • We are currently upgrading MFK. thanks! -neo
The foam piece would just be a little pre filter, sometimes foam like that can hold nitrates and stuff in them. If you have good size fish that wont get sucked up you should remove it. I would not think too negative of the fish shop sometimes they really just don't know what's best sometimes them selves never learned anything else.

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Foam holds nitrate? sigh.

Upside of the foam: might hold some more bacteria that helps filter the water.
Downside: will slow the water flow through the filter.
Upside: you can take the foam off and squeeze it in some old tank water.

Food the filter picks up isn't out of the system, it's just decomposing out of sight somewhere, which isn't necessarily a good thing either.

IMO the last thing you need right now is to remove something that might be harboring beneficial bacteria. I'd squeeze the foam in old tank water and put it back until the tank cycles. As a rule, however, I'd only advocate foam on a filter when you have small fry in a tank (clearly not the case here).


Did you work out what filter you're running?
 
An Aquaclear on its own isn't going to be enough to filter a ray tank so it's entirely possible you'll always have ammonia / nitrite until you add more filtration, certainly if the rays start eating well.

Aquaclears are for little community fish. Rays put out a lot more waste once they get eatin' - and the smaller the tank the more concentrated that waste is in the water. I'd add something like an FX5 or a pair of Emperor 400s.
 
I'd also suggest that you add a sponge filter to add some extra in tank bio filtration. Also that you take out the bigger pieces of decor so that the rays have more swimming room

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DIDYSIS said:
Yes, can and has happened to me. If you have the foam on there it needs cleaning like any other filter.
Click to expand...

No. It can't and it didn't.

The sponge can, and will, build up with food and mulm and stuff. Those will break down into ammonia, be processed into nitrite and then nitrate by the filter and voila your nitrate reading is higher than if you actually removed the food/mulm from the system in some way.

That's why you clean the sponge, not because it "holds nitrate". If the sponge held nitrate, people would be happy because there'd be less nitrate in the system.
 
Ugh...more bad advice from LFS I suppose. I changed the foam like a month ago. I didn't just squeeze and clean it then put it back. The one on there is looking gross.

So, squeeze it out into tank, clean it off good, and put it back?

Or leave it alone?

Or squeeze it and remove it?

Geez, I will surely get this all figured out eventually lol. With all this wonderful advice, of course ;)

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