CUC needed, maybe ?

[agueybana81]

Hi everyone. I've been wondering if you'd should be my next step with my tank. After it finished cycling I introduced 2 clowns which are still working it out but I'm ok with that. After some time the tank had a lot of diatoms and calcium buildup. The diatoms I was able to control by turning the lights off. Weeks later (yesterday) I added a wave maker. Come today, the sand bed is brown again, along with the dry rock. So now I am wondering if enough bioload is being generated by the 2 clowns and their food so that I can introduce a CUC.

I have done some reading and I learned that there are some that maintain the sand bed, others the rocks, and other the tank walls. What I am not sure is:

1. If I need a CUC (29 gallon tank)
2. If so, what should I start with
3. If perhaps I need to do a better control with the water parameters to help with this as well.

I attached is a picture of how the tank looks

 

[blaxsun]

1. Yes.
2. Some hermit crabs, trochus snails and maybe a conch or cerith snails for the substrate.
3. Hard to say without knowing the water parameters.

 

[agueybana81]

I forgot to attach that picture.
The calcium has been ranging 320 to 400 for the past 2 weeks and the KH 11-13. Oh and the pH looks more towards 8/8.2 in person than in the picture.

 

[davidcalgary29]

You can feed inverts supplementally with algae if there's not enough natural growth at this point.

Common marine aquarium snails are quite hardy and do just fine without fish. I have quite a few snails in a jar in my living room, and they subsist off the coralline and film algae in the jar. I have a maxi-mini anemone in the jar which gets a few pellets a week, but that's it for feeding.

You can certainly start a jar build as an invert and/or frag quarantine tank if you want to do that for all incoming inhabitants of your display. That's the primary reason that I still maintain my jarquarium.

 

[PatW]

1) You need a clean up crew.
2) What you get to get depends on what your style. You need grazers for eating algae. The next area is getting a scavenger and/or sand cleaner. Crabs can be great bit if they get hungry they will kill and eat snails or other critters. Snails don’t have this issue.

For grazers, I like to get the smallest turbo snails I can find. Trochus snails are good also. For scavengers, ceriths are good.

By the way, on CUC, the suggested packages give about 10X as many animals as I think is appropriate. You want just enough critters to handle your tank and maybe just a bit more. If you have bunches, animals can starve and die or if you have crabs, get hungry and murder other animals for food.

3) On some parameters, API tests are OK. But salifert tests are more accurate and precise and offer a good price point.

Your calcium is a bit low. But I wonder if it is testing. Your tank is probably pretty new so your calcium is probably pretty close to what your salt mix is. Of course, you did not mention your salinity. I would suggest getting a decent refractometer for measuring salinity and a bottle of calibration fluid. You can top off your tank manually but getting an inexpensive auto top off gives far more stability.

API is not really good for phosphorous. For phosphorous, the only test that is sensitive enough to be useful is Hanna ultra low range phosphorous or phosphate.

Nice looking tank and it looks as if you are off to a good start.

Your nitrate is OK. Your alkalinity is higher than I like but it is OK until you get into SPS corals (And you might never do this).