Newbie in Canada

midwifehellie · Apr 28, 2019

Hi there - I'm new to the hobby. My son and I decided to start a mixed reef tank after years of running tropical tanks. Our tank is a 90G on a stand with a refugium (no cheato yet) sump underneath. It took us a while to get it up and running - we bought the tank, stand and basic equipment on Dec 26th. Finally got it plumbed (Herbie overflow) and filled in mid March with RODI and a combo of dry and live rock, cycled it and added our first livestock on April 2. Now we have some baby pieces of coral and have gotten into the weekly water change routine etc. Right now we have for livestock 2 ocellaris clowns, 2 yellow tail damsels, 2 hermit crabs, 10 trochus snails, a long spined black urchin, a hairy pincushion urchin, a linckia blue star and a stunning marine betta. We have about 10 baby pieces of easy/hardy coral and so far things are going well. The blue star is elusive but we've seen him, I suspect the LFS should not have sold him to us given it's a new tank, I hope he'll do OK. Future goals include a yellow tang and a mandarin goby (will wait a while on that one but we do already have copepods), probably a dosing pump. We just started a QT for any new livestock. Our aquascape design is light on rock because we like negative space and want room for corals to grow. Looking forward to growing with this hobby and learning from the collective wisdom of you all :)