Opinions Wanted

[New2Salt]

We are new to the salt, hence the handle, anyways, we'd like to get opinions on what kind of fish/coral we should get, being that we are beginners would like easy coral. We have books and have been reading on the net a lot, we'd like to get some easy yet colorful corals but don't want anything that is going to spread for example the mushrooms. We don't have a big tank even though we'd love to get one but it's already expensive just for the size we have.

Here's what we have in our tank right now: For lighting we have: 20W Actinic & a 25 W 10K coralife.
40 pounds of live sand
31 pounds of live fiji rock


2 scooter blenny (male and female we believe)
2 cleaner shrimp
3 turbo snails (should have just went all these but live and learn)
6 Astrea snails
5 tiger snails (they are little snails move really SLLLLOOOOW)
1 Green Serpent Star
15 small blue legged hermit crabs

Is this too much already? Have we not enough room for anything else?
Everything is at 0 except the Nitrate with is at 2.5 ppm, it's slowly going down. We had a peak which was weird, but then when cleaning the skimmer my husband accidently broke one of the tubes and so the skimmer isn't running until the part comes in and the Nitrate has gone down a lot, is that normal?

Also I have read that some corals help with the Nitrate level, soft corals,
Opinions?

Look forward to the replies.

Thanks!

 

[michealprater]

You might be able to do some leather corals, green star polyps and zooanthids. Mushrooms dont always spread quickly. I really like mushrooms because IMO they are the easiest to keep and have a awesome variety of colors available. Everything from blue to green to red to purple. Also, all corals are going to spread somewhat, because they are a animal and they do grow. I dont know about corals absorbing nitrates buy I do know that macro algae does.

I cant tell you if you have to much in your tank seeings how you did not mention what size your tank is. However nothing you have in your tank seems to impact fish load that much.

Julian Sprung has a great book on corals, and another on inverts. I highly recommend them because they have great information and have helped me greatly in my coral and invert selection.

 

[New2Salt]

Why do I always forget that part, it's a 29 gallon. Sorry