LFS advice - Tank Cycling and ICH

[pentest]

Please excuse the length, first post .....

As a n00b to the Saltwater hobby, as with most new things I end up over researching and finding out just about every potential hangup or problem that could happen. Thanks to this board, I am much more comfortable taking care of my brand spankin new 58 Gal Oceanic Tank FO tank. This was a great present from my wife, and part of the package was that the LFS came out, set up the tank as a suprise.

I would have rather been more involved in that piece, as I was interested in curing some liverock to ease the load and offer some reeflike qualitiy to the tank if I decided to end up with corals and such, but I guess I can move that way later. Anyhow the suprise was incredible! I have a few questions that the archives have not been able to answer for me:

1 The LFS set up the tank to cycle with three damsels and three blue green chromis. After reading up on that, I would have rather just dumped a raw shrimp in there or started with liverock, but its three weeks in, and two damsels are left. Ammonia is gone, but my nitrites are off the charts 5ppm+, with nitrates hovering around 20ppm. The chromis died off early, and the most recent expendable crewmember ended up with what looked like a tiny parasite on his gill and then went belly up two days later. ICH? no other spots other than that one on his gill.

Out of the two, the four stripe damsel (the one I was looking forward to keeping) has similiar problem on his right gill. Now with the tank in mid cycle, do I have to wait another six weeks to see if this will clear up, or could it be something else? I can't imagine putting in a new fish at the end of the cycle to have him get infected, although the reality seems to be that most fish unless completely quarantined will be vulnerable, either from my current situation or the store conditions.

2. Should i just pull out whats left, take them back to the LFS and let the tank finish the cycle on its own, reducing the chance that I will end up with rampant ICH problems on these fish? Have the fish done their part with the ammonia start? I take it now I am waiting on the bacteria to break down nitrite to nitrate more efficiently. I haven't seen any clear results on specific test numbers other than "get em all to zero" so I don't know how long I need to wait to see improvement.

3. Overfeeding the damsels? I have cut back to once daily in the hopes that I wasn't overfeeding, per LFS recommendation, to see if the nitrites/nitrates start dropping.

4. LFS recommended cutting way back on lighting, as I was getting some overwhelming brown diatoms over everything. That has helped greatly.

My tank numbers have been holding steady for the past week:

pH 8.2
sg 1.024
temp 78
ammonia 0
nitrites 5ppm + bottom of scale on test kit. (aquarium pharm liquid test kit)
nitrates between 10 - 20 ppm holding

Any recommendations for starting off healthy would be welcome. I would hate to start trashing new fish right out of the box!

[Ninong]

Hi pentest, welcome to Reefland!

I don't believe you said what was in the tank? Is there a sand bed of any kind? If so, exactly what? Is it aragonite sand or crushed coral?

Is there any live rock at all in the tank or does it just have artificial decorations?

There is always the possibility that your fish have ich. Considering the extreme stress that they have been subjected to, they would have weakened immune systems and be more susceptible to this parasite if it were present either on one of the fish or on something else that was introduced to the system.

As you now know, the fish were definitely not necessary to cycle the tank. This is something that many LFS owners still recommend but it is nothing more than confirmation of their 12th. century mindset.

I would give serious consideration to returning the remaining fish to the LFS. Then you will have to decide how you want to proceed in light of the possibility that your tank might be infested with Cryptocaryon irritans or some other parasite.

If I knew exactly what is in your tank I would be able to tell you whether I would allow it to finish cycling and leave it without fish for the next six weeks or if I would favor emptying the tank completely, allowing it to dry out for a couple of weeks and then starting all over.

[pentest]

crushed coral for the substrate
dead decorations, some nice dead coral decorations.

I was afraid that the fish used to cycle actually infected my tank. How can I confrim this? The stripe damsel has something going on his face, if he gets close enough I'll snap a pic.

Contents of tank are two damsel, the substrate and the decorations. thats it.

I haven't went through setting up an isolation tank, but it seems that if I want to maintain a top notch environment, I will have to at least prepare myself for these types of things. Guess I will have to take a wait and see approach. I think I will move out the damsels back to the LFS and as long as the tank can finish the cycle, hopefully wait till the active state of the parasite dies off and the cycle of infection will give me enough time to clean out the tank.

Any other suggestions? Maybe dishing out the fish now and allow me the lead time on adding cured live rock to make sure i get a completely cycled tank

Hi pentest, welcome to Reefland!

I don't believe you said what was in the tank? Is there a sand bed of any kind? If so, exactly what? Is it aragonite sand or crushed coral?


Is there any live rock at all in the tank or does it just have artificial decorations?



There is always the possibility that your fish have ich. Considering the extreme stress that they have been subjected to, they would have weakened immune systems and be more susceptible to this parasite if it were present either on one of the fish or on something else that was introduced to the system.

As you now know, the fish were definitely not necessary to cycle the tank. This is something that many LFS owners still recommend but it is nothing more than confirmation of their 12th. century mindset.

I would give serious consideration to returning the remaining fish to the LFS. Then you will have to decide how you want to proceed in light of the possibility that your tank might be infested with Cryptocaryon irritans or some other parasite.

If I knew exactly what is in your tank I would be able to tell you whether I would allow it to finish cycling and leave it without fish for the next six weeks or if I would favor emptying the tank completely, allowing it to dry out for a couple of weeks and then sta




rting all over.

[Ninong]

Here is what I think you should do:

(1) Give the fish back to the LFS.

(2) Remove the dead coral decorations and return them to the LFS. They might give you credit, they might not.

(3) Drain the tank.

(4) Remove all of the crushed coral. Discard.

(5) Wipe the tank dry and allow it to remain dry for two weeks to kill off any possible parasites.

(6) During the two weeks that you are waiting before starting all over again, get yourself a good beginner's book. I recommend John Tullock's The Natural Reef Aquarium and/or Robert Fenner's The Conscientious Marine Aquarist. Later on, if you intend making this a reef tank, get a copy of Eric Borneman's Aquarium Corals. Fenner's book would probably be the better of the two if you are getting only one because it has a lot of information on typical marine fish.

(7) Start over with a 3" deep aragonite sand substrate and at least 45-lbs of live rock.

(8) Cycle the tank with the live rock. No fish! Wait about five weeks before adding one or two fish. No damsels! You would have to be crazy to add damsels. They are too mean and once you get them in there you will not be able to catch them with the live rock.

(9) Do yourself a favor. From now on, disregard everything your LFS tells you. It will save you a lot of grief if you follow that simple advice.

(10) What do you have in the way of filtration? No sump, right? Do you have a hang-on protein skimmer or just a hang-on filter?

Good luck!

[Brian35]

Ninong has perfect advice. One of the first and most drastic mistakes that folks make when getting into this hobby... they rush things. You have to take it slow and easy. The long 5 week wait of only having water to stare at will save you tons of grief down the road. You are trying to build as natural a seaworld as you can for these lil fellas. While your water swirls around and readys itself, try to educate yourself as much as possible.

there is alot to learn and then some more. The knowledge base her eis outstanding and always glad to help. Ask away if you have any questions!

[pentest]

Thanks for the advice. I will pick up the book over the weekend. Add that to the gigabytes of information I have sponged up on my new hobby.

btw, its a wet/dry. No sump, but could convert it if needed. its seems decent, and once i get some live rock established and lean more towards a reef system ill either do away with it and use it as a sump/ w a protein skimmer.

off to read.

thanks.

[Samper]

Ninong, would he not better off with a deeper dsb?
I also read nothing about the possibility of bare bottom in his future. If he is thinking about a reef setup later shouldn't he consider this?

[Reefland]

Live Deep Sand Beds are effective at 3" or greater depths; for a 58gal tank, this would be fine.

Bare Bottoms are, in some peoples mind, going backwards in methodology. Bare Bottoms were used in the 80's and 90's and during the studies of Deep Sand Beds, it was proven that they are more effective at nitrate reduction. Deep Sand Beds became the "fad" and up until the last couple of years, were used almost exclusively in reef tanks amungst hobbyist in the online communities.

After some failures which we're never related directly to the DSB's, and a desire to increase flow in tanks housing SPS corals; bare bottoms started coming back and today, are being used more often. It's not to say that bare bottoms are more effecient; but thats not to say that they cannot be sucessful as well.

[Samper]

When the 75 comes online I will definately have a 6-8" dsb in the fuge but from what I've personally seen with mine being bare I don't think I"ll ever have it any other way in the main.

[Reefland]

I would use a DSB in the main display if the tank were larger; like a 180 or larger, but probably not again in anything smaller.

[Samper]

Definately good to know.

[Ninong]

Ninong, would he not better off with a deeper dsb?

The reason I mentioned a 3" DSB is because that is the minimum depth recommend by any of the proponents of deep sand beds. Yes, a deeper DSB would provide additional benefits but I think you can get by with 3"-3.5" and still consider it a DSB.

As an example of the varying opinions on that topic, Ron Shimek usually recommends 4" as a minimum but he has mentioned 3.5" as adequate at least once in the past in his forum. Rob Toonen has mentioned 7-10 cm as an acceptable minimum. Jonathan Lowery has written that the minimum depth should be over 6".

Or you can set it up with only a 2" sand bed. Or a 1.5" sand bed. But then you can't really call it a deep sand bed. Of course, you really can't keep those in a tank with crushed coral either.

You could even set it up with a 1 cm (0.4") substrate of crushed coral. That would be a different approach entirely and not much different than having a bare bottom.

There are several different ways to do this and they all have their pros and cons. As Rob Toonen points out in his DSB articles, it isn't an appropriate approach for an SPS dominated tank with high current flow. Some folks have managed to get it to work anyway. Kevinpo has a DSB in his large SPS dominated tank and his is composed of fine particle aragonite sand. Wayne Shang has a 3" DSB in his 718-gal SPS dominated tank but his is composed of larger particle aragonite sand (Carib Sea reef floor select).

I also read nothing about the possibility of bare bottom in his future. If he is thinking about a reef setup later shouldn't he consider this?

You can always consider going bare bottom if you don't want to keep a sand bed of any kind in your tank. Doing that means that you won't have any of the filtration benefits of a sand bed or the ability to keep certain species that require a sand bed.

[Samper]

I wasn't trying to question you or anything but for my own knowledge I was curious why you recommended that. Thanks very much as always very informative.

[Ninong]

I wasn't trying to question you or anything but for my own knowledge I was curious why you recommended that. Thanks very much as always very informative.

It's just one way to set up an aquarium, whether it is for fish-only or a full fledged reef tank.

[pentest]

Thanks again for the info. I picked up both books at Amazon, got an incredible price on both books ( about 20 bucks used) and they came in perfect condition. Just a FYI if someone is thinking of picking them up:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/off...?condition=all