Stocking help 30g

blakki73 · Dec 4, 2023

Hello everyone!

It's my first post on the forum, although I have been reading it avidly for the last 4 months, while planning my first reef tank; I come from the freshwater hobby, where I did mostly planted with community fishes, but I've always wanted to go salt, and taking advantage of moving countries I decided to convert my Juwel Lido 120 (30g).

The tank is now up and running for 1 month and a half, going through heavy diatoms but doing great. I cycled with the bacteria and ammonia method, fishless, and started stocking slowly after that.

Currently I have the following: 2 A. Ocellaris, 3 Chromis Viridis, 1 Salarias Fasciatus, 3 mexican turbo, 4 nassarius, 4 clibanarius digueti. I also do have some softies and LPS, showing great coloration, polip extension, and some growth already. I dosed pods and zooplankton to seed my dry rock scape, purchased from an Italian company, since we don't have access to Algae barn around here, but it cointained a great variety of species, and I've been feeding it Phyto since then to stimulate reproduction.

I feed quite heavily because I've been reading that it's what the Chromis need, not big quantities but 5+ times a day, an I have seen no aggression within the fish, a lot of activity and personality.

I test my values daily at the moment, since I've been trying to figure out the correct dosing of alk and ca, and I'm making sure they stay stable.

Now to my question, regarding the remaining stocking I have in mind: I really would like to have a Gramma, but I also would love to have a wrasse of some kind. The ideal, and my favorite, would be the Pink Streaked wrasse.

Do you guys think that would work, or am I going to have too much? It's going to be really though to source the pink streaked here in Italy, it's not a common fish sadly, LFS says that a SLW would be fine, but I've been reading horror stories about that; what do you think?

I'll attach graphs of my readings, and some pics of my setup. Thanks a lot for your help in advance!

mtraylor · Dec 4, 2023

First. Welcome to reef2reef.

I like the rock stack

Mr. Mojo Rising · Dec 4, 2023

IMO, 6 fish in a 30 gallon is a full tank, adding more will risk aggression and/or disease. There are not really any caves and hiding spots in the aquascape (although its a very nice scape). But if you really want one, royal gramma and pink streak are usually peaceful fish.

6 fish in 6 weeks is also going kind of fast IMO, I add fishes 3 or 4 weeks apart. Its a lot of stock in a short time, and feeding 5 times a day will catch up.

blakki73 · Dec 4, 2023

Thanks for the feedback! There are plenty of cave systems in the scape, it's not really visible in the pictures sadly. The rocks were mostly all broken up with a scalpel and epoxied back together, so I could leave gaps between them. There's 17kg of rocks.

One of the problems I have at the moment is that I purchased an AC skimmer, probably too oversized for my setup (Bubble Magus C5, used for 100 euros), and it just cannot skim anything, just white foam coming from it, even if it's running for almost the entire time.

Currently the Nitrate/Phosphate readings seem to be stable, but I do have a lot of diatoms eating them up, so I should probably expect a substantial algae bloom once the silicates run out.

Would you guys recommend just waiting until the tank matures a bit more, before adding other fishes? I am totally fine with waiting, but I'm not sure what I should look for before knowing when it's ready.

The only one I would really want to add is the Gramma, I can skip the wrasse, but I did want something to take care of potential pests introduced.

kevgib67 · Dec 4, 2023

I think 5 fish is max for a 30 gallon. Perhaps with really good husbandry and a lot of export you might get away with 6 but it require more effort.

cdemoss01 · Dec 4, 2023

blakki73 said:
Hello everyone!

It's my first post on the forum, although I have been reading it avidly for the last 4 months, while planning my first reef tank; I come from the freshwater hobby, where I did mostly planted with community fishes, but I've always wanted to go salt, and taking advantage of moving countries I decided to convert my Juwel Lido 120 (30g).

The tank is now up and running for 1 month and a half, going through heavy diatoms but doing great. I cycled with the bacteria and ammonia method, fishless, and started stocking slowly after that.

Currently I have the following: 2 A. Ocellaris, 3 Chromis Viridis, 1 Salarias Fasciatus, 3 mexican turbo, 4 nassarius, 4 clibanarius digueti. I also do have some softies and LPS, showing great coloration, polip extension, and some growth already. I dosed pods and zooplankton to seed my dry rock scape, purchased from an Italian company, since we don't have access to Algae barn around here, but it cointained a great variety of species, and I've been feeding it Phyto since then to stimulate reproduction.

I feed quite heavily because I've been reading that it's what the Chromis need, not big quantities but 5+ times a day, an I have seen no aggression within the fish, a lot of activity and personality.

I test my values daily at the moment, since I've been trying to figure out the correct dosing of alk and ca, and I'm making sure they stay stable.

Now to my question, regarding the remaining stocking I have in mind: I really would like to have a Gramma, but I also would love to have a wrasse of some kind. The ideal, and my favorite, would be the Pink Streaked wrasse.

Do you guys think that would work, or am I going to have too much? It's going to be really though to source the pink streaked here in Italy, it's not a common fish sadly, LFS says that a SLW would be fine, but I've been reading horror stories about that; what do you think?

I'll attach graphs of my readings, and some pics of my setup. Thanks a lot for your help in advance!