55g Brackish to Reef Project

[malakai]

Throughout the years, I've had many freshwater systems, a couple saltwater fish only systems, but never any brackish systems. I consider myself eclectic and a bit eccentric and liked the idea of brackish systems.

Instead of keeping the system low salinity brackish, I decided to gradually change the salinity to full saltwater in an eight month period and see what survived/thrived from the system.

55g, home made stand, 20g sump, canister filter, hob filter with sponge filters.

Brackish Live Rock - This stuff took over two months to cure/cycle and was a stinking mess!

American Flag fish - this guy wasn't very happy with the salinity change, and even though the change was a gradual 8 months, it took another 3-4 months before him to full acclimate himself to saltwater.

Columbian Shark Cat took to the salinity changes like a trooper!

Sea Urchin

These go by many names, but I call them Dragon Eels, because their most common name, Dragon Goby, is the same common name as another reef fish. I have two of these guys.

King of the Sump, I collected this Xanthid crab in the lower suwanee river, in brackish water. He's around 6".

 

[malakai]

Bad quality, but this is a fighting conch I recently purchased.

A newer pic of the reef system, with a DSB (200-250 pounds?) and lots of live rock, including aquacultured rock, base limestone that I bought (.22 cents per pound), fiji live rock, a brackish rock I collected, and gulf live rock. The DSB was created using two shades of play sand, appx 20 pounds of 'pre-packaged' live aragonite sand, a small amount of atlantic live sand, and pre-packaged dry crushed coral sand. The sump has appx the same mix but also brackish mud that was cycled and slowly converted to full salinity with the rest of the 'brackish' system.

New dual wavemaker and as you can see, an orange chromide. I started out with two orange chromides, but one didn't make the transition to full salt. After being in the tank for about a year, he has really become aggressive. He's attacked crabs larger than himself and chases the monos (also much bigger) all of the time. After going to salt, another one of his behaviors has changed: he now sifts and cleans the sand, grabbing mouthfuls of sand, getting the goodies and spitting the bad stuff out.

Not a great pic, but this gorilla crab had recently molted and decided he wanted to terrorize the tank. So, he went into the sump.

Yeah, I must be the king of bad quality pics.. micro feather duster of some type. Quite a few of these came in on the gulf live rock.

Just a tank shot with moon leds.

The above photos are in various stages of the 'reef' setup. My cleanup crew consists of 2 nerite snails, 5 astrea snails, 10 nassarrius snails (falsely sold to me as ceriths at LFS), a fighting conch, two sea urchins, 10 or so hermit crabs, mostly blue legs, bristle worms, spaghetti worms, and various filter feeders: kenya tree coral, dragon eels, various clams, feather dusters, anemones.

One of the fish that you can't see in any of the photos, because he hides all of the time, is a knight (aka fan dancer) goby. It usually only comes out when there is brine shrimp or ghost shrimp being added to the tank. I also have two really large red reef tunicates that are doing great.

Not all fish made it through the process. We started out with two orange chromides and two American Flag Fish. Only one of each made it. A few fish didn't even make it in super low salinity: platys and dwarf gouramis. Some did fine in low salinity: rosy minnows. A few made it at about half saltwater: Australian Rainbow fish. The two Australian Rainbow fish started to get a skin fungus or disease after so much salinity before dying. These would probably do fine at 1/3rd full saltwater or lower. I also had a bumble bee goby that is said to do well in full saltwater, but I believe the columbian shark cat ate him.

The canister, hob, and sponge filters were eventually taken out of the system, when we got enough live rock to help with the filtration.

The future of this tank: The sump will be upgraded from a 20 to a 30 soon, and I'm adding a separate refugium in-between the display tank and the sump. The refugium is a 20 long and will use chaetomorpha, DSB, filter feeding clams, tunicates, feather dusters, and corals to help filter out the water a bit more. I'm waiting on a lighting system, fiji aquacultured live sand, and a u-tube overflow box to connect this all together. It'll also house a few photosynthetic deresa clams.

I've decided to go ahead and pre-cycle the refugium, to build up some life on the sand bed so that when it's all connected, it's ready to do some work! With these two upgrades, it'll add more bioload capacity to the system.

 

[redsea]

Cool story! Nice tank!

 

[malakai]

Thanks.. I've not been able to get a good pic of the monos (argentus) because they are always moving around and the digital camera has a delay on it, causing just a blur to occur.

The two monos and columbian shark cat will eventually be moved to a larger system, at least 220 gallons, with either a horned or bamboo shark and possibly a sting ray, which you can read about in the DIY section, in a thread entitled "future reef project."

BTW, I've noticed in the new tv show called Tanked that they are using mono argentus in the phone booth/nyc-themed saltwater aquarium they built, even though they don't mention them by name.

I'm not entirely sure what I'll do with the dragon eel gobies in the future though. One so far is about 12", the other around 14". While they do stir and clean the sand bed, they also make a mess of it, digging holes and displacing sand all over the rock work, and they probably eat a lot of the micro fauna that makes a live sand bed 'live'.

When the larger fish are moved out of this system, there will still be a chromide, a knight goby, and american flag fish left, and when I re-stock fish in the future, I generally want to stay with fish that are get around 2"-4" max. That's large enough so that they hopefully don't get stuck in the overflow (like all of the guppies have in the past) and 'small' enough so that it doesn't put a huge drain on the bioload capacity. Any recommendations?

Some of the fish that have caught my eyes are: royal dottyback, purple pseudochromis, royal gramma basslet, firefish goby, and a lot of the smaller gobies and blennies.

 

[scubasteve03]

Very nice tank love it

 

[xxlbreed]

Doing the same with my green spotted puffer. Great project perfect setup! This is by far the most thoughtout brackish tank I've seen! Good work! Did u use any plants? Mangroves?

 

[malakai]

Doing the same with my green spotted puffer. Great project perfect setup! This is by far the most thoughtout brackish tank I've seen! Good work! Did u use any plants? Mangroves?

In the beginning, I've used a few brackish-friendly plants, but none of them made it past about half full saltwater. I just recently picked up a red mangrove seed pod that washed up on a beach recently, a bit too far north to survive the winter. It's in the sump right now.

 

[xxlbreed]

Cool stuff! What plant survived the longest? I'm at 1.010sg now...

 

[xxlbreed]

Did you have any inverts that survived the entire process and helped your tank at the same time?

 

[malakai]

The moss ball survived the longest, but it's hard to say actually how far in salinity it went before dying, because it didn't just turn brown and die. It just shrunk over time and eventually disappeared completely.

I had some tadpoles caught from a local lake that actually survived and turned into frogs at about 1.015sg, and a combination of freshwater and brackish water ghost shrimp that made it for awhile, and some even had babies. Many did not make it, and the ones that did were eaten as you can imagine.

I also had ramshorn snails breed like crazy in brackish but can't remember the SG. Despite being considered pest snails by some, they do get large and have very nice color variations, from red, blue, brown, even translucent variations of those colors. Snails that breed this easily could be used for puffer fish feed.

---

I'm strongly considering attempting to breed the orange chromides in this system when I move the monos and columbian shark to the shark tank next year. I have no idea if they can be bred in a reef system, and I'm sure the knight goby would have to go to another tank or be traded off, because it loves to eat small things that swim around. It just isn't big enough to put in a shark tank. The 'saltwater' flag fish will probably be given away as well if the time comes for that.

If you've kept up with my other thread in the DIY section, you'll know that I'm planning a reef network system and recently decided that I'm going to setup a new brackish tank for 3 more columbian shark cats, at least one mono sabae, and hopefully I can score a school of orange chromides, use it as a quarantine and acclimation tank, until it reaches 1.025sg over the period of several months. The mono sabae, mono argentenus, and columbian cat sharks will be put in the shark tank, and the chromides could then be put in this 55g tank.

The orange chromide I have is the one that stays orange and is considered a manmade/man-bred, unnatural coloration of them. Despite that, it looks more like a reef fish than any of the other chromides out there. Also, they appear to be very seasonal. I had to go to several aquarium stores to get them to order some, and I was told they either couldn't get them or the ones they had access to were way too small for their liking. So, let's hope I can get score a school of them!

If they don't breed in saltwater, I'll still have a pretty reef tank full of beautiful orange fish. If they do breed and the fry are successfully raised, the hobby will have a new saltwater 'reef' fish on their hands, something a bit unique!

 

[malakai]

Plans changed a little for this system a little, evolving over time. I got a fairly good deal on 3x overflow boxes at the LFS the other day and am going to have the overflow from the display tank go to two different tanks, one on each side: 21g long on left, 10g on the right. The overflow on the 21g will go down to a 29g.

Both the 10g and 29g will overflow into the sump, and the 10g will be a refugium separate from the sump. It will eventually house mostly macro algae but also a deresa clam, some corals, tunicates, maybe a couple oysters, feather dusters, and possibly a pincushin sea urchin.

I've bought the overflows, 10 more feet of 1" pvc, a 'contractor' pack of 1" elbows, and some (****ed expensive) ball valve socket switches.

Instead of buying aquarium nozzles and trying to retrofit various size pipes and tubes, I'm just going to use a combination of 1" pipe and elbows to create the overflow drains. It'll be a bit more permanent, but that's ok.

The 10g will have a deep sand bed in it, probably 3"-4", and the 21g long will have a snowflake moray eel and maybe a brittle star in it. I have no idea what the 29g will have in it, maybe some chromis, a clown, etc.

The 29g is currently my sump, but I'll be swapping it for a larger sump, somewhere around a 40g. I have no idea where the large xanthid crab that's living in the current sump will go, but since I am going to put a cleanup crew in the sump, he'll have to find a new home. I'm sure he's a good filter feeder, but he would probably eat all of the small cleanup crew too!

For a cleanup crew for the sump, I'll probably put in a serpent or brittle starfish, lots of blue or red legged hermits, cerith, nerite, nassarius, a fighting conch, and trochus snails, maybe peppermint or some other type of shrimp. I've tried periwinkle snails, but they always crawl out of the water.

On the main display tank, I believe I need to re-house at least one of the dragon eel gobies, mainly for bioload reasons. I'll also be moving some of the live rocks from the display tank to another tank, because it's basically packed on the back wall, from side to side. Moving off the side pieces will allow me to add another dual wavemaker in the system and give it a bit more flow.

I still have to buy a tight fitting cover for the 21g and lighting for the 10g system and maybe in a couple months have everything ready, including a good cleanup crew.

 

[xxlbreed]

Def post pictures when ur setting this up it sounds insane!!