Aquariums Thread

I haven't seen an aquarium and other aquatic pets thread yet, so anyone who wants to ramble incessantly about the set up, care taking, and trouble shooting of the most useless of pets should do so here.

I myself have a small 5 gallon, DIY saltwater jellyfish tank that at the moment is refusing to cycle. I THINK it's starting to build the bio-filter but it's been a painfully slow process. I'm doing a fishless cycle with pure ammonia so that I don't kill a fish or foul the tank.

I guess I'll include a picture even though there aren't any fucking fish in the thing.


Do we have any other aquarists on the forums?

 

Before putting fish in a new tank, salt or fresh, you're supposed to establish a biological filter that will turn ammonia into nitrate, then turn nitrate into nitrite, which you then control with regular water changes.

The biofilter is a colony of bacteria that grows on every surface of the tank, particularly craggy rocks and the mechanical filter well. It likes filter pads a lot, which is why they say to put old filter pads in a new tank.

For my jellyfish tank I can't use a mechanical filter because it would suck the jellyfish in and shred them like wet tissue paper, so I need to have a strong biofilter going before I introduce actual fish to the tank. It's either that or near daily water changes to keep the ammonia down and I'm waaay too lazy for that.

If you've ever heard of new tank syndrome or tank shock, the lack of a biofilter is what causes those. Putting fish in a new tank without an established biofilter is a good way to lose an entire tank of fish to ammonia poisoning.

 

Oh yeah, it's easy to mess up at first.

I guess for beginners; do not start with a saltwater tank. Just don't.

Always have your three basic filtration systems going before introducing fish. Those are mechanical, chemical, and biological.

The mechanical filter will usually come with a new tank, or you can buy one separately. That's the first thing people think about when they think filter. It sucks the water in, puts it through a mesh or whatever, and spits the water back out.

The chemical filter helps to purify the water of toxins like ammonia (fish pee/poop/rotten food). You basically get sacks of the stuff and it sits inside your mechanical filter along side the mesh so that the water is sure to flow through it. A lot of this is activated carbon, but there are other kinds that don't remove trace chemicals from the water. But just make sure you have SOMETHING in there.

Finally the biological filter, which is what I was talking about in the other posts. An under gravel filter is good for that, or liverock, or all kinds of things they sell at the pet store.

After all that is set up just make sure your water is clean BEFORE you pour it in the tank and you're good to go. I strongly suggest using RO/DI water that you can buy by the gallon. Water conditioners that are meant to treat tap water are nooot great. You don't know what's in your local tap water, and it's doubtful your fish want to breathe it. Also, you'll want to have something making bubbles somewhere in order to oxygenate the water, or your fish could suffocate. There is SOME oxygen exchange at the top of the waterline, but often rooms with closed doors/windows are low on oxygen in the first place and it's not good. Put an airstone in there somewhere, or one of those treasure chests that bubble. c:

When you go to buy fish, make sure they won't eat each other, breed a million babies, or stress themselves out to death. Don't get fish that need wildly different water temperatures. If you can buy from a well established, non-chain fish store then do that, they'll be less likely to die on you right away.

Finally, some basic tips. Weekly partial water changes will prevent a wide number of problems. Just do it. Do not over stock or over feed your tank. Few fish and small meals means a clean, happy tank. Put some live plants in there if you really need the thing to look full. Lastly, do everything twice as slowly as you feel like you should. Make sure your biofilter is 100% up to speed. Acclimate fish to new water veeery slowly. Expect to have a totally empty tank for at least a month after you add water. Make any major changes over the course of days, not hours.

AND... have fun. ;p

 

@liminal Plants can be part of a very effective bio-filter but unless you have a very compelling reason there should always always always be all three types of filters going.

My jellyfish tank CAN'T have a mechanical filter, and that means I gotta be twice as attentive to it.

As for reef tanks, those are super hard mode, much more difficult than any fish. To start you'd want something no less that 20 gallons. I'd go even higher though as a beginner. The bigger the tank the more forgiving it is to mistakes.

 

How does salt get in my airline tubing? There is air going through it constantly, it shouldn't ever even get wet on the inside, so how the fuck is salt getting in there? ARGH.

 

Eh, for the filtration systems, you CAN have less than all three, as I intend to for my jellyfish, but it's always better if you do have a bit of each. Also, I said that bacteria mostly live in the filter well, hence old filter pads being good for cycling a tank. Without filter pads you want live rock or an under gravel filter or something. There are a wide variety of substrate materials specifically designed to house your bio-filter. Also, if you have a mechanical filter that has space in the well at all I can't see any reason not to have a chemical filter. Activated carbon and other chemical filters assist the bio filter by removing ammonia and stuff. Products like Chemipure and whatnot. They also keep your water very very clear, which is good for display tanks and vital for marine tanks, especially jellyfish. Just because a tank can survive without all the filters doesn't mean an extra kind of filter wouldn't help make it better.

Speaking of jellyfish, it sounds like you've read what Jellyfish Art has been spreading around about what jellyfish need in a living environment. Moon jellyfish don't need a Kreisel tank, and in fact the Jellyfish Art tank is very unsafe for jellyfish without fairly important modifications and heavy maintenance. Also it's made of acrylic, so no thanks. Here, I'll pull some information from the JellyfishAquarist: "There are several basic types of tanks that can house jellyfish: kreisels (or true kreisels), pseudo-kreisels, stretch kreisels, cylinders and modified boxes, bullnose or bow front tanks. The last category are by far the easiest to build yourself, you can take almost any standard aquarium and modify it to meet the needs of your jellies. If you already have a successful reef aquarium, it is quite easy to tie in a separate jelly tank to your sump." The important thing is water flow that keeps your moon jellyfish from getting stuck in the corners, stuck to your substrate, or really touching anything at all. Of course, if you went for some other type of jellyfish with different needs like Upsidedown Jellyfish you would need a totally different setup.

My tank was built using these instructions. As you can see, the under gravel filter has been modified for water circulation so that the jellyfish would be suspended somewhere in the center of the tank. I might build an ugly grow tank once we move into a house so that I don't have to buy my jellyfish all the time, but for now this is my display tank.

For buying a jellyfish tank, I'd highly recommend The Cubic, it is the best out there right now for home aquarists and will keep your jellyfish very easily for their full lifespan. The water flow in The Cubic is much more natural than what the Jellyfish Art tank has going on, and it's got all your filtration built in. Plus there is a forums specifically for it where they'll troubleshoot with you about issues. Really, if I had the money I'd have gotten one myself, but I don't and I also wanted the fun of building my own.

 

i've got a 55 gal freshwater at room temp, nothing in it but guppies rn. obvs they are breeding like mad; gonna have to bring a bunch to the fish store soon.

what i want is to have a local ecosystem tank, with crayfish and snails, based on the cannon river which is near my house. but the river is full of carp, and like hell i'm having carp in that tank. they'd uproot all the plants and make a huge mess. so the guppies are kind of a stand-in.

the problem is, guppies are too fast for crayfish to catch, and quickly learn not to swim too close to the bottom anyhow. so i need a swimmy predator. and the only local ones i can think of are either too big (like walleye pike) or amphibious and can't live in a tank (like frogs or fishing spiders).

 

Ah, yeah, the the only two types of jellyfish commonly on the market right now for sale as pets are moon jellyfish and upsidedown jellyfish. If someone has a license they can keep wild caught jellies, but I'm not sure of where you'd go to catch them. We have moon jellyfish in the harbors around here but I don't have a license so I don't want to get in trouble wild catching them.

But yeah, the first company to start selling jellyfish tanks to hobbyists was Jellyfish Art, and the information I've seen floating around tumblr in the jellyfish tag has been almost exclusively from the guy manufacturing those tanks. The whole "no corners" requirement originated there. Sorry for assuming.

 

Moon jellies are a lot like plants, they'll grow to fit their environment. They're also like plants in that they grow in competition; if you have more than one they'll compete to see which gets bigger first, and from then on the bigger one will grow quickly and the smaller one will stay about the same size no matter how well you feed them. Without that competition they don't grow nearly as large as quickly. Unfortunately they're again like plants in that they are seasonal animals. They bloom and die in the wild on a yearly cycle, though ones kept in tanks can live longer and grow larger because they're not put under the stress of producing polyps and reproducing as quickly.

And yeah, there are lots different species of moon jellies. I really like the Japanese moon jellyfish but I have no idea of how I'd get a hold of some (also it's probably illegal; they'd be an invasive species around here and I doubt MA wants to deal with that in case I'm one of those awful people who'd abandon their fish in the ocean.) In general though, moon jellies are the lowest form of jellyfish and actually a staple food in the diet of many other jellyfish. Sort of like the feeder fish of the jellyfish world. If you were to own almost any other kind of jellyfish you'd also cultivate moon jellies and chop them up for its dinner every now and again. Those ones are stressed to grow big and reach sexual maturity quickly so that more polyps can be produced and more jelly can be fed out.

For my tank, where I plan on keeping them alive and not feeding them to anything, I plan to order three tiny ones and let them grow out. They're delicate, so most likely I'll end up with one big one after a year that would hopefully survive for a year and a half or even two years if I'm super careful with it. The moon jellyfish tanks you see in aquariums are always really crowded but I don't really want to even try and attempt that. Most jellyfish growers sell them in sets of three, but I might actually just get two because I don't want to stress them in my little tank.