pecan2phat
Aquarium Advice Freak
About a month ago, I converted my 90g FO tank into a somewhat FOWLR tank by taking out all the dead coral decorations and adding 110 lbs of Live Rock. (50 lbs of cured Fiji & 60 lbs of fresh Key's rock from liverock.com)
So I spend a full day setting up this immense Live Rock wall spanning the length of the tank and going up just about 6" from the top of the water column. I tried to make the wall as solid as possible by placing heavy large pieces as the foundation while creating overhangs and such. Everything is nice, nice and as the LR ages, I decide to get some snails to clean the brown algae off the rocks a bit. Problem is that I have a Harlequin Tusk that likes invertebraes as appetizers so I purchased 5 Mexican Turbos that were quite large. They do a great job on algae and the Harlequin leaves them alone.
So three weeks and LR wall is solid, 6 days of having the bulldozer snails and last night I came home to see the LR wall "a come tumbling down"! The top half of the LR wall was actually on the front glass. Luckily the tank was custom built with thicker glass than say a Perfecto tank and this might have saved me from a cracked tank, $1000 + of fish and a huge mess to cleanup.
This time around, I took a little more precaution by rearranging the wall closer to the back of the tank, a little bit less tall, hopefully a stouter foundation. So at 3 in the morning, I'm admiring my handiwork and then slap myself cause it's 3 in the morning and I have to get up at 7 to go to work.
I've always read that Mexican turbos are fanatics when it comes to algae grazing and that they also "bulldoze" over loose rocks and corals. Well, I can vouch that they definitely do scrub your rocks well while also pushing over your 110 lb wall!
So I spend a full day setting up this immense Live Rock wall spanning the length of the tank and going up just about 6" from the top of the water column. I tried to make the wall as solid as possible by placing heavy large pieces as the foundation while creating overhangs and such. Everything is nice, nice and as the LR ages, I decide to get some snails to clean the brown algae off the rocks a bit. Problem is that I have a Harlequin Tusk that likes invertebraes as appetizers so I purchased 5 Mexican Turbos that were quite large. They do a great job on algae and the Harlequin leaves them alone.
So three weeks and LR wall is solid, 6 days of having the bulldozer snails and last night I came home to see the LR wall "a come tumbling down"! The top half of the LR wall was actually on the front glass. Luckily the tank was custom built with thicker glass than say a Perfecto tank and this might have saved me from a cracked tank, $1000 + of fish and a huge mess to cleanup.
This time around, I took a little more precaution by rearranging the wall closer to the back of the tank, a little bit less tall, hopefully a stouter foundation. So at 3 in the morning, I'm admiring my handiwork and then slap myself cause it's 3 in the morning and I have to get up at 7 to go to work.
I've always read that Mexican turbos are fanatics when it comes to algae grazing and that they also "bulldoze" over loose rocks and corals. Well, I can vouch that they definitely do scrub your rocks well while also pushing over your 110 lb wall!
