Complete newbie requesting help with first octopus setup!

[djkaty]

I think the anemone keepers on wetwebmedia will lynch us for our lights CaptFish :P They want to see 4-5W per gallon. Thanks for the tip on lumens. On a related note, is there any way to tell the colour temperature of my white light? It was just given to me.

Where does your BTA sit in your tank CaptFish? Mine is near the bottom which I thought was strange, but I think it may be trying to protect itself from the heat of the lights, from what I've read elsewhere. Has your anemone lost any colour? Is it brown or pink?

 

[CaptFish]

I think the anemone keepers on wetwebmedia will lynch us for our lights CaptFish :P They want to see 4-5W per gallon.

I dont care. That's ridiculous anyway, As I said you cant compare Halide watts per gallon to florescent watts per gallon I have an octopus tank that happens to have a anemone.

 

[DWhatley]

Katy,
I know you said the mixing bucket is new but it is the only thing I can think of that would cause the issues you are having (actually something that is in the bucket that you don't see). One way to determine this is to reverse your buckets and see if you get ammonia in the RO water.

 

[djkaty]

Easy CaptFish, I'm not passing judgment.. if I didn't trust that you were correct about the lights I would not have bought the anemone in the first place. I just don't want it to die. It wouldn't eat again today and I think it is starting to lose its colour, it's stressing me out. It spends alot of time curled up deflated.

D, I don't think it can be that. The process I have used is to produce RO water in a bucket then mix the salt into that same bucket. The RO water always has zero ammonia. In other words I only use one bucket in the whole process. I have now prepared two buckets, one at 1.025 and the other deliberately at 1.040, I will compare the ammonia - if it is the same, that rules out the salt, and must mean I am contaminating it myself with my hands or gloves. I don't see any other options, other than misreading the instructions on two test kits that work completely differently to each other, but if that were true, the RO water wouldn't show zero ammonia.

 

[Lmecher]

I used to have a 250 w.HQI over my 50, it looked nice and my bubble tips loved it but the heat was insane. Btas don't need that much light, mine are under appx. 160 watts of T5 lighting, it is midway up in my 120 w/Diablo and doing fine. I have only 2 left now. I gave 2 to Dwhatley and a few to a local friend.
Yours is at the bottom? It is shying away from the light, common for a stressed anemone. My very first one did this in my biocube. I had inadequate lighting, it languished for months, shrunk a little then bleached and finally died. We all make mistakes in the begining, there is a learning curve, things will get easier.

 

[Joe-Ceph]

I Googled ' ammonia "salt mix" ' and found this interesting thread from 2004 which says:

I have had some issues with my freshly mixed salt water. Mainly getting positive ammonia readings when testing brand new distilled water + salt mixtures. ... I then called Aquarium Systems, makers of Instant Ocean salt. They told me that their product does contain an average of .05ppm of ammonia in each batch. Some have more and some times have less. He said its not uncommon for a home ammonia test to read .25 for freshly mixed water made with Instant Ocean.

Damn them!
I guess the solution is to stop testing the water after you mix it, and just pretend that it's perfectly clean (like every body else does )

 

[DWhatley]

Interesting, I will run a test on mine when I make a new batch. I never use my saltwater immediately after mixing and always run either a pump or an air line in the vat until it is used. If this post is correct, then the ammonia evaporates over the time between mixing and using since I show no ammonia in my tanks or the small feeder tanks I completely dump and refill when I get new live food.

 

[djkaty]

The ammonia tests I did yesterday were 16-20 hours after mixing. I haven't used the water yet though so I could test it again today.

 

[djkaty]

Here is an update then, I have been keeping a small spreadsheet.

The anemone seems to have settled into a pattern of shrinking up around 4pm each day. The ammonia level in the water has 'stabilized' at 0.05ppm.

I did a 10% water change and added calcium last night, the anemone perked right up and I haven't seen it shrink since then.

The aquarium has now been running for a week and there is practically no waste at all in the protein skimmer, just a couple millimetres of brown-ish water. Is this normal?

Today I noticed there is orange stuff (algae?) growing on the back tank wall. You can't see it from the front, I just noticed it now looking through the tank sides. What should I do?

 

[CaptFish]

The aquarium has now been running for a week and there is practically no waste at all in the protein skimmer, just a couple millimetres of brown-ish water. Is this normal?

With only the clown and anemone your not like;y to get a whole lot of waste. So yes that is normal.

T

oday I noticed there is orange stuff (algae?) growing on the back tank wall. You can't see it from the front, I just noticed it now looking through the tank sides. What should I do?

Yup algae, it should wipe right off. I am pretty lazy about cleaning the back wall in my aquariums and I usually let the algea go a little before I clean it. I clean the other wall as much as twice a week, but I will only clean the back wall maybe once a month, sometime longer.

 

[DWhatley]

I will only clean the back wall maybe once a month, sometime longer.

LOL, I black back my tanks (or buy tanks already black backed) and don't clean the backs at all

 

[djkaty]

LOL ok... so the algae is normal and will always grow? I see it is on some of the sand too.

 

[CaptFish]

Yup, it will be a constant battle. It is also a good sign that your tank is cycling properly, at least that's what i was told. Your LFS should have some critters that will keep the sand clean.

 

[djkaty]

Cool. There are 4 crabs in there, what should I add re: the sand?

A couple of other things:

I tested the saltwater again 40 hours after mixing. The ammonia level had *risen* to 0.3ppm (from 0.15ppm 20 hours after mixing) which is totally baffling.

The anemone has now not eaten anything I have tried to feed it for two weeks. But it has eaten something because I saw its waste in the tank.

 

[CaptFish]

Starfish, crabs, cucumbers,.....there are a lot of options. I would just ask what they have in stock and see what they suggest for sand cleaning critters, I just dont know what is and isn't available to you.