Hey - thank you a lot for that suggestion! I had a nice piece ready in my Fluval Evo, but it has aiptasia now that I just can not eradicate for the life of me (I have berghias in the tank, aiptasia F, etc.). I am going to scratch using anything from this system, and find a hobbyist with some nice live rock available and pick out a pretty 3-4 lb piece and a few small chunks for the bowl.@SauceyReef
hey I was hoping you can find real live rock in your new setup vs white dry rock
can you get real cured live rock from a pet store? it'll be cheap since its not so many pounds needed...it could change the direction of your reef markedly, in coral growth ability + invasion control and dinos suppression
starting with dry rocks will make it harder, can you ask your pet store if they sell this type of live rock that has coralline and pods and animals in it:
see how that's just straight up awesome pre cured, skip cycle live rock right out of the gate? that's the secret booster sauce
on the lower left side at the bottom they could lift out that purple coralline rock / sell it to you and you'd have a complete ecosystem immediately, ready to reef on day one with no cycle wait time. it would simply lift out of their tank, set into yours, and you'd be up and running. you could glue frags to it
find a rock like that or set of rocks, that's my LFS above in austin who sells cured rock.
I recommend wait to buy animals until after you get your airline, heating, lid if any and topoff all determined and charted. the rock can easily sit in your tank handling the new discovery mapping, it's very tough rock. nothing is going to crash or die in it. with that kind of rock you will not need to buy bottled cycling bacteria.
I was not going to add anything for quite a bit, and making sure the tank is very well established after I added a simple CUC. My plan is after waiting a month from tank completion to add some hermits and snails, maybe a simple soft coral, and than transfer over my Mangroves from my other system into the bowl. It gets complicated here: I have to set this up to make sure the mangroves can live. They are already doing quite well in my other system about a year now so I do not think it will be that hard to setup. The main problem is this tank they are in had a Caulerpa die off from going asexual. There were problems before this and I had not gotten a chance to run an ICP test. Pretty much nothing will live in the tank after the caulerpa die off, not even a bristle worm. But the Mangroves are happy as can be. I have tried full tank water changes, and running carbon extensively. Time to shut the tank down as this is not working.
I am planning on transferring over one of the mangroves into this established bowl system, and just hope for the best. My fear is some chemical could have possibly leached into the mangroves and can release into whatever tank I put them in. I have no other way of really knowing other than trial by error, and no way of "cleaning" the mangroves unless I setup ANOTHER tank to keep them in for a period of time (which is a possibility).
Lots of thoughts.. I have so much going on though in my life, not a ton of $, and I am definitely going to take as long as needed to do this. I just really want this dead tank taken down, but have some beautiful mangroves growing.