[Cuttlefish]: FF218's Cuttlefish Reef

[dreadhead]

Cool pictures, little ones.

 

[Paradox]

Looking good!

I havent had a chance to go through everythin in your post in detail, but saw you were thinking of using a lesser skimmer because you want to rely more on the phosban reator and a denitrator.

In my opinion, the skimmer should be the main filtration and the reactor and denitrator are supliments to a skimmer. A good skimmer should remove the waste before it converts to phosphates or nitrates. I would add a good skimmer and wait till later to see how the tank matures. Down the line if you start seeing nitrates creep up and youve looked at all possible reasons and still cant control it, I would look into denitrating options. Phosban reactors are cheap and very efficient. If you are going for a reef as well and have this installed from the get go, you may see that your corals will be faded. Your water will be too clean. There needs to be a balance with the correct amount of nutrients in the system to get good colors. Too much you'll have problems. Too little you will have problems. Because of the low nutrients of a new system, I didnt add my phosban reactor until 6 months in. The same goes with carbon.

Im sure with the cuttles, a low nutrient tank is fine, but with corals, you will need to ease into it and find the balance for your system.

 

[Fishfreak218]

thanks for the incite paradox!
I just figured that the cuttlefish would be a pretty high bioload on the little 35g-40g system. On my 90g. reef tank I have a Euro Reef and I love it so maybe it is smart to just go with a strong skimmer and a phosphate reactor and hold off on the denitrator. I figure the cuttlefish will have a large bioload so I doubt my corals will become that pastel/pasty/faded look, especially if I dont have the denitrator.

Update:
The cuttlefish both ate a ghost shrimp today that was roughly the same size as them. For now they are getting about 10+ mysids a day and gut loaded ghost shrimp until my shore shrimp come in from aquaculturestore.com

 

[Fishfreak218]

here are some new pictures and a video of them eating! Pictures are hard to get because of the blue lighting and the net breeder, all of the frontal shots are actually taken through the net which makes the pictures faded but oh well. Enjoy!

 

[Fishfreak218]

Update:
Well today was a big day at the cuttlefish reef . The cuttlefish have been named by my friends; the big one is Walker and the small one is Texas Ranger. Texas Ranger seems to be the more social one who isn't really afraid of the camera or me. He tends to stay up towards the front while Walker (who happens to walk a lot ) stays toward the back. Anyway, I decided that today I was going to do a water change. While I was doing a water change I noticed that I only had about 25 SW ghost shrimp left :o. Since Walker has grown so much in the past few weeks of having him I decided that I would collect all of the ghost shrimp out of the tank. Once I caught them all I released Walker and Texas Ranger into the ten gallon and then put the shrimp into the net breeder. Of course, it was a very stressful event and whilst doing this whole thing I managed to suck out every single bristle worm! I hate those things with a passion. I also managed to get some pictures edited and uploaded, so here they are:
Texas Ranger:

Texas Ranger eating a ghost shrimp:

Texas Ranger:

Walker [pissed off at me, and eating simultaneously]

Walker stalking a ghost shrimp:

Hope you guys enjoyed!
P.S. they have eaten frozen mysis, a dead crab, and dead ghost shrimp so I'm hoping they will take to frozen well.

 

[Fishfreak218]

They ate frozen krill today!
This is such a relief because I had just ran out of shore shrimp and was only feeding them ghost shrimp for the past week.
Now I have another (cheaper) source of saltwater food!

 

[Fishfreak218]

They are becoming quite friendly now...
They have come to realize that I'm the one who brings the food and they have eaten out of my hands 3 times! I hope to get a video and some pictures of this soon. They are eating the frozen krill really well, which I am surprised at. They have started showing a lot of begging behavior also. I notice that they don't hang out together a lot. I usually see them on opposite sides of the tank or in different depths (one at top, one at bottom). I haven't seen any aggression yet which is good. I think they are about 2.5 months old now... the larger one is a good 2 inches and the smaller one about 1.5"
Is this the right growth rate? I think its almost time that they can go into the display tank (granted I turn down the flow and test the parameters)
We will see!

 

[Paradox]

Growth rate sounds about right for well fed cuttles. When we weree still experimenting with appropriate food and diets, my cuttles would be 6 months old and only 2-2.5"s. Since weve found more appropriate foods, they get fat fast!

Congrats with the krill. For some reason, not all bandensis seem to go for them no matter how hard you try.

 

[Fishfreak218]

Growth rate sounds about right for well fed cuttles. When we weree still experimenting with appropriate food and diets, my cuttles would be 6 months old and only 2-2.5"s. Since weve found more appropriate foods, they get fat fast!

Congrats with the krill. For some reason, not all bandensis seem to go for them no matter how hard you try.

I remember reading that from you somewhere which made me a little nervous because thats really the frozen invert that is most accessible to me. The next best thing would be silversides which is fish and I know cuttlefish mainly dine on inverts so I was a bit nervous. They are starting to look at everything I place in the tank as food. I dropped a snail in there to help clean up and they struck at him (only to be very dissatisfied). Hopefully I can get them to eat a variety of frozen foods now that they think everything I drop into the tank is food.

 

[Paradox]

Silversides are fine. I feed them that 3x a week.