seahorses in refugiums

[bfeit]

can you have seahorses in a 20gl refugiums work form 180 reef

[Reef Engineer]

In a nutshell - sure but there are a few things that you need to take into account. Seahorses typically don't tolerate temperatures above 78 very well and many types prefer much cooler temps than that. Additionally, they need to be protected from intakes and such since they can easily get caught in the return to the main tank. Since they're such poor swimmers, they wouldn't be able to escape and die there.

Seahorses have an extremely short and thus poor digestive tract so they need to be fed a high quality food several times a day. They would easily strip your refugium of suitable food before too long if you did not plan to supplement with nutritious food such as PE Mysids, etc.

Have you gone over to www.seahorse.org? They're a great site for information on these awesome little guys.

Randy

[reefhead]

I would say no

[Reef Engineer]

Care to expand on that? It's always good to hear the reasons behind the answer rather than a simple nope.

FWIW, I don't think most people realize the "special care" that's required with seahorses which is why I went into some of that above but the question was can it be done. Sure it can - anything is possible. Now we need to give him a reason as to why it's not practical.

Randy

[Mikeman]

I would say no



Why have a refugium if seahorses are going to eat everything in it? Also they are diffucult to keep, so you should have a seperate system dedicated to keep them. Also hydroids might be in the reef live rocks which aren't good for small horses.

kudas on the seahorse.org great site

[nuff]

I can attest to the fact that this is not a good idea....I tried it and failed miserably! They did fine for a while, then I was always removing the small male from the return line, and they devastated the pod population quickly, and the pod population never recovered.

Agree that you need a seperate, dedicated system for seahorses.

David