The beginners reef guide!!
Many people look at a saltwater fish tank and whether it be at an aquarium or a local fish store and are amazed by their beauty. Then they go home and try to recreate this beautiful thing that they saw and all does not go well. All does not go well because these people without knowing it where selfish and careless with the lives that they took into their hands. These animals are extremely sensitive and require lots of care and knowledge. The environment they live in must maintain a perfect balance of many different chemical levels and have proper recreation of their natural environment. I have done a lot of research on keeping marine and reef tanks and would like to take the time to share what I have found with all you new guy (and girls) to the hobby. If anything in this article confuses anyone or leaves them with more questions please use the search feature at the top in the navigation bar and if after your search you still have questions ASK AWAY!!! There are many kind and very experienced people on this board who would love to help you out.
The first thing one needs to know is that saltwater fish can be expensive. There is no way around this. Many people come to this hobby and think that they can get really cool fish for 10 or 11 dollars, while some like myself find even the “cheaper” fish like this cool you will not find a powder blue tang or a acropora frag for this price. If one wants to properly and successfully keep marine life they must be willing to accept this fact. They must also be willing to be up all hours of the night to take care of a tank that has an ill fish or even miss a planed event or vacation if there are problems with the biotope that they have created. Now that we have that out of the way we can move on to more interesting topics.
In my experience the two most important elements of a saltwater fish tank are water quality and the amount of water flow. Water quality being the more important of these two. Some people judge water quality by how clear their water is and that just doesn’t work. In my short time as the aquarist of a pet shop that is no longer around, I can not tell you how many times people would come in with a dead fish and when I asked about their water quality they would say something like “My water is crystal clear!” These people always got my standard response “So is vodka but your fish wont live in that either!” To properly test water you would need basic test kits. For the beginning hobbyist I would say the least amount of test kids needed would be four. These should consist of ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, and ph. These will allow you to monitor the levels of these compounds to make sure they are at acceptable levels for your fish. If one wishes to keep a reef tank they can expect to by many more test kits that I will not get into at this moment. Water movement is the next thing that needs to be addressed. In nature water is constantly moving and in nature this is called water current. In the home aquarium you need current or water turnover. It is important to use a pump or powered in your tank that will move all the water a set number of times. This would be your turnover rate. For a fish tank that does not contain corals I would suggest a turnover rate of not less than 15 times an hour. That means that if you have a 100 gallon fish tank that all your pumps combined need to move 1500 gallons of water per hour or GPH. If the same tank did contain corals it would need a turnover of thirty to sixty times which would be between 3000 and 6000 GPH. There are many factors to think about when you are figuring out your water movement. You do not want to have any dead spots, these are areas of your tank that do not have proper water flow. The easiest way to get around this problem is with a closed loop water manifold. This is a system that allows you to change the direction of flow from multiple different points in you tank.
The next thing one should consider is what is known in the hobby as “The Cycle”. The cycle is the process of building up bacteria to process wastes or fish poo into less harmful compounds. This is where you will begin using the test kits mentioned earlier. There are many ways to start a cycle. You would add a fish and when he goes to the bathroom it would create waste that would begin the process, you could add a raw table shrimp and it would decompose to start this or you could just add pure ammonia and this would do the same thing. As ammonia is presented bacteria will grow and turn this into nitrite, more bacteria will grow and turn nitrite into nitrate and nitrate is removed by changing part of your water. This is why water changes are important. All of the compounds mentioned are toxic to fish. Ammonia being the most harmful and nitrate being the least. Your cycle will be complete after you get a high quantity of ammonia and nitrate and then they are eliminated by the bacteria until they are undetectable by your test kit.
Lighting is very important to a reef tank but is of no real importance to a tank with no corals. In a fish only tank the lighting is only for the pleasure of the person looking into it. Corals on the other hand are photosynthetic animals that require certain amounts and types of light. This can get very difficult to set up and maintain depending on the type of corals you wish to keep. I would suggest that the beginning hobbyist start with their tank and get it cycling and learn some of the basics before buying their lights so that they can get the lighting that will suit what they need from the beginning as these lights are not cheap and upgrading later only makes things more expensive. This is also where research comes in very helpful. One should look into what they want and find out what they want to keep in their tank and what the requirements of those animals are so that they can build their tank around that animal. If you try to make animals fit into the tank you want it will not work as you will be changing the environment that the fish is supposed to live in and it will either be unhealhty or die.
If after reading all this someone still wants to start a saltwater tank I would say go for it. But remember do your research before you start. Not all fish get along together and not all fish will live in the same type of tank. It takes a responsible person to take care of these animals. If you don’t have the time, money, or drive to do things right you will only give this hobby a bad name when you tell others about your experience.
So I guess I still have your interest if you are reading this far. So Now I will go into more depth about the topics mentioned above and a few extras.
TANK SELECTION
This will be your first step in starting a marine or reef tank. As a general rule beginners should not start with a tank smaller than 30 gallons. This does not mean that a beginner can not get a smaller tank it is just that the smaller your tank is the harder it will be to maintain. I would suggest that any person buying a tank purchase the largest tank that they have the space and money for. This not only gives you a more forgiving volume of water for the mistakes that all beginners make but also allows you more options for aquascapeing and stocking choices. If you are planning to use a tank that was freshwater I would just clean it out really well and you should be good to go. The only exception to this would be if you have ever used copper based medication in your tank. There is then the possibility that the copper leached into the silicon seals and could leach back out and make it impossible to keep invertibrets and corals alive.
FILTRATION
This is an area that confuses a lot of people when they are first switching to saltwater. While you still need filtration with a marine tank you would normally go about this in a totally different way. Unlike a freshwater tank you usually will not be using filter floss, sponges, carbon or bio-balls. These types of filtration although effective in their job only produce nitrate as the end product just like in freshwater. With a saltwater tank you ideally want your end product to be nitrogen gas that is expelled at the surface of the water. This happens by utilizing the denitrifying bacteria in your sand bed and live rock. Most experienced reef keepers help to accomplish this with the use of a sump or a sump / refugium combo. Both of these will be covered later. A skimmer is also an important piece of equipment for filtration in any marine tank. These items used properly will help you have many happy years of reefing. If you currently have an undergravel filter you will want to remove this as it will collect deitrus and cause you to have excess nitrates.