Need your advice

[Lespaulguy]

Hi All,

Thanks alot for the great forum...Im learning tons!
Here are a few questions that I would appreciate if the gurus could help me with.

1. I get alot of evaporation from my 40 gal tank. I have to put 5Gallons a week. Is that normal? How are you guys set up? Right now I have been buying water from a local wine store which does RO/DI filtration, but at 5$ a week, I find its starting to be a pain.

2. I lost a yellow tang and Blue damsell a few months ago, and I was told that could have been due to tank size. DOes that make sense? What other species could be a good fit for me then?


Thanks for any advise you could give me.

 

[TheTodd]

I will hit the second question...the loss of those fish was probably not directly due to tank size, but the Tang could be indirectly. The Damsel should have been fine in that tank and those are usually pretty tough fish, which leads me to believe that maybe something else is going on. How old is the setup? Did it cycle? What were your water parameters when those fish died and did they show signs of disease?

Back to the Tang, and just some advice moving forward...check out sites like liveaquaria.com for tank size suggestions for any fish you plan to purchase. Look at compatibility and care levels too. Use those and you should not have as many problems in the long run. Tangs like lots of room to swim and many people agree that a six foot tank is a good starting point. Any fish, but especially Tangs, get stressed in smaller tanks. Stress lowers their immune system, which opens them up to a lot of bad things. The size of the fish does not matter as much as what the minimum tank size suggestion is. I look at it as the minimum tank is for the smallest possible fish size. There are lots of people out there not listening to those suggestions and they swear their fish are fine. I see those as exceptions to the rule. There are many more that end up in the Sick Fish section on this site with health issues. If you look over there, most problems with fish health end up being a fish in a "too small" tank.

 

[Minkota]

5 gallons a week could be normal depending on tank set-up and environmental conditions. What type of lights are you running, do you have a canopy or is it a floating canopy/light, is the tank near a window that gets alot of heat/sun. As for the fish loss, as mentioned before depending on the size of the Tang I don't think Tank size would cause the death, what other fish are in the tank? And as mentioned how old is the tank?

 

[Lespaulguy]

Thanks for the feedback guys. Awesome.

The tank is about 10 months old. The clown fish in there have been there since the beginning without issues. Ill admit that I did rookie mistakes along the way, but overall, things have gone pretty well considering its my frist SW tank.

I cant answer the exact parameters of the water when I had the fish die. Which leads me to another question. Do you all use refractometers?
How do you keep your water salinity constant given 5 gal evaporation per week?

 

[TheTodd]

I use a hydrometer, but am going to get a refractometer. They are much more accurate. Salt does not evaporate, so your salinity should stay relatively the same if you are just adding pure water back into the tank as it evaporates. Salt creep will make you lose some, but I usually just check that when I do water changes and adjust at that point by adding a little more salt. I was more concerned about ammonia, nitrites and nitrates for parameters.

 

[Minkota]

I use a hydrometer and take a sample to LFS and compare the reading so I have an idea how off my reading is.