Would vodka dosing help with this, feed the bacteria with a carbon source? It’ll be a balance, but I’ve ran fishless I just broadcast fed the tank twice a week with the pumps off the same food I feed to fish.
Has anyone done coral/inverts only and no fish at first?
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We need a new acronym for this:
IOWLR = Inverts Only with Live Rock
I went inverts and live rock for a long time,,, then fish,,, then corals so not exactly the same but,,, sorta/kinda
IOWLR = Inverts Only with Live Rock
I went inverts and live rock for a long time,,, then fish,,, then corals so not exactly the same but,,, sorta/kinda
mavv
New Member
I thought of doing this today. I started a tank, cycled it for a month, added a pair of ocellaris that lasted all of 2 weeks. I noticed they were sick in the afternoon (velvet or brook, I couldn't tell from pictures) and were dead by morning.
Tank is 10 gallon with 12-13 lbs of rock and 1 inch of sand. Surviving inverts are a blue leg hermit, a nassarius snail and a cerith snail.
My plan is adding some inverts to create an ecosystem while waiting a few months to add coral. Then fish only after I'm done with the reef and after waiting 80 days after the last addition.
How would I feed an invert only tank? I think I'm not too worried about top tier nutrition since these guys are scavengers.
When you have only corals, what would you do to substitute the fish waste's function in the system?
I feed my fish less system, very old, three different kinds of reef feed: tiny bit of reef roids a day or two before my common maintenance water changes, and reef nutrition artic pods plus their phyto
Fish aren't required for coral keeping my system has been running eighteen years w no fish, I only like corals at home they're far simpler. It's fun to work online with the thousands of fish setups though
What a perfect post for this thread. Many many new reefers see this thread I reference it a lot
Your statements will help shape ideal reefing approaches over time for sure
Forgot to add i add reef energy refrigerated feed occasionally too
Fish aren't required for coral keeping my system has been running eighteen years w no fish, I only like corals at home they're far simpler. It's fun to work online with the thousands of fish setups though
What a perfect post for this thread. Many many new reefers see this thread I reference it a lot
Your statements will help shape ideal reefing approaches over time for sure
Forgot to add i add reef energy refrigerated feed occasionally too
MartinM
Valuable Member
I do AB+, phyto, Selcon, and some powdered food in a custom liquid mix that doses continually. I have a complex ecosystem with multiple kinds of plankton and have mussels and shrimp breeding in the system. It's really neat!
CallMeChris
Active Member
I sort of fell into a version of this method by chance. Living in a temporary rental while waiting for my house to finish construction. Set up a 10g tank to house TBS live sand and rock, as well as hermit crabs and snails and of course hitchhikers. Thought was to have 20lbs of live rock ready to go once I moved into the new house and set up the new 90g.
Along the way I learned more and more about fish disease, running fallow and of course “undesirable “ hitchhikers. I am now treating my 10g tank as a QT/OT for live rock and inverts. Gives me a chance to catch and manage the wide variety of life that comes in on these rocks as well as minimize the risk of fish disease/pests from coming in on them.
Once my house is ready, I’ll transfer the rock and inverts over to the new 90g, keep the sand in the 10g and get more live rocks and inverts to put in the 10g till ready for the 90g.
My thought is that “undesirable” hitchhikers (crabs, isopods, whelks, etc) are a lot easier to deal with in a 10g QT/OT that I can take all the rock out of if needed, than a 90g tank that I wish to remain as stable as possible.
Now, I suppose I might be able to accomplish the exact same thing with just the 90g by putting all the gulf live rock (and sand) and inverts in there at once, not gluing any rocks down, not worrying about landscaping too much other than making it easy to catch stuff and move rocks around as needed. Perhaps after all rocks and inverts and coral are in place, raise the temp to a constant 81F and run a 6 week fallow period. Reduce temp to 78F, Then add QT fish. Might be an easier time frame for people to swallow. A little riskier, but trading off for a quicker turnaround. Would need to ensure inverts and corals in system would be OK with 81F.
Thoughts? I am a newbie, please do not take this post as a recommendation for other newbies to try, I am simply asking for thoughts on this method, not advocating.
Along the way I learned more and more about fish disease, running fallow and of course “undesirable “ hitchhikers. I am now treating my 10g tank as a QT/OT for live rock and inverts. Gives me a chance to catch and manage the wide variety of life that comes in on these rocks as well as minimize the risk of fish disease/pests from coming in on them.
Once my house is ready, I’ll transfer the rock and inverts over to the new 90g, keep the sand in the 10g and get more live rocks and inverts to put in the 10g till ready for the 90g.
My thought is that “undesirable” hitchhikers (crabs, isopods, whelks, etc) are a lot easier to deal with in a 10g QT/OT that I can take all the rock out of if needed, than a 90g tank that I wish to remain as stable as possible.
Now, I suppose I might be able to accomplish the exact same thing with just the 90g by putting all the gulf live rock (and sand) and inverts in there at once, not gluing any rocks down, not worrying about landscaping too much other than making it easy to catch stuff and move rocks around as needed. Perhaps after all rocks and inverts and coral are in place, raise the temp to a constant 81F and run a 6 week fallow period. Reduce temp to 78F, Then add QT fish. Might be an easier time frame for people to swallow. A little riskier, but trading off for a quicker turnaround. Would need to ensure inverts and corals in system would be OK with 81F.
Thoughts? I am a newbie, please do not take this post as a recommendation for other newbies to try, I am simply asking for thoughts on this method, not advocating.
about seventeen hundred people I've referred to this thread might be wondering why
I think today's best summary is this: simply opting out of disease preps doesn't work, the disease forum is so active nowadays it's scary. action is required. that's what this thread brings: the realization you can't skip preps anymore.
so of the options left to begin them...
you can either build your whole reef without fish, then fallow a 99% built tank, then add quarantined fish and maintain the disease protocol or you can add fish at the start, then fallow out each new entrant group of items you will ever add to the tank. I bet my own reef has had corals added in 140 different times over it's life... that means I'm setting up a new fallow tank 140 times to prevent breaking my disease prevention chain. following this thread means you don't do that part.
if someone is willing to have a dual reef tank setup going, one is the display and the other is a fallow display that is routinely sterilized and cycled after each new group that passes through to the display, you can opt out of the steps in this thread.
**to spend money on quarantined fish, and then input corals and clean up crews and macroalgae or anything wet from a pet store imports disease and wastes that money. the intention of this thread is showing you the easiest path to not breaking your disease protocol, you have to have wet things from the pet store fallowed before they go into your tank. simply don't stock fish first, stock them last / requires patience. everybody wants fish first, and they're not willing to maintain disease protocols...that's killing fish in droves.
I think today's best summary is this: simply opting out of disease preps doesn't work, the disease forum is so active nowadays it's scary. action is required. that's what this thread brings: the realization you can't skip preps anymore.
so of the options left to begin them...
you can either build your whole reef without fish, then fallow a 99% built tank, then add quarantined fish and maintain the disease protocol or you can add fish at the start, then fallow out each new entrant group of items you will ever add to the tank. I bet my own reef has had corals added in 140 different times over it's life... that means I'm setting up a new fallow tank 140 times to prevent breaking my disease prevention chain. following this thread means you don't do that part.
if someone is willing to have a dual reef tank setup going, one is the display and the other is a fallow display that is routinely sterilized and cycled after each new group that passes through to the display, you can opt out of the steps in this thread.
**to spend money on quarantined fish, and then input corals and clean up crews and macroalgae or anything wet from a pet store imports disease and wastes that money. the intention of this thread is showing you the easiest path to not breaking your disease protocol, you have to have wet things from the pet store fallowed before they go into your tank. simply don't stock fish first, stock them last / requires patience. everybody wants fish first, and they're not willing to maintain disease protocols...that's killing fish in droves.
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Honestly, as much as I agree with this I also disagree. I think what plays a huge factor is where you are in the world;
The US seems to get much worse fish than the UK, we have issues yes but our LFSs generally are the main ones to have them - rarely are these diseases passed onto the customers.
No, I won’t say never passed on - Take a guess why I have this guy;
But it is rare. These fish I have are at tops 4 years of age, do they never get disease? No, do they often overcome it without implementing complex ideologies such as quarantine and fallows? Yes.
Not maintaining disease protocols isn’t what kills fish, I’d honestly say most of what people do to handle the disease is what kills them - I mean, think of it;
Your fish is stressed and has a disease/parasite.
Then you move it into not just any tank but likely a tank that’s only 3’ long from say a 5-6’ tank. This will stress them out further due to minimal swimming room (Look at most fish from a tank breakdown into an LFS and they will likely be stressing out).
Then, to top it off you dose potentially harmful chemicals - yes there’s things like copper safe but at the end of the day is this not just copper.
Also my journey with ich has been easy;
If you catch signs quickly then 7 times out of 10 you’ll likely be able to cure it. I mean, I’ve been curing it through just feeding more and running a steriliser. I have added fish whilst having ich and it’s not proven to have any issues… but of course what works for one won’t work for everyone
it is wholly different to run a reef board, such as the disease forum, and get the public to have a controlled response while skipping common preps or relying on animals/things other than the stickies in the disease forum. is your method part of Jay's stickies
www.reef2reef.com
= in that whole forum, hundreds of jobs, no posts about Jay's tank and pics + outcome
it's all other people's tanks, they report the outcomes, for five years.
working a claimed best practices method through the public scope is required, plus a forum of the claimant responding to issues live time in the method...guiding it live time for others. for sure a better or more efficient method must exist, but for new tankers/the target of this thread/there aren't any written other than a bunch of first-person evals using setups not common for new tankers
these mass startup reefs want to have a way to make their initial bioloads not die in the first six months, I think the best way is to convince them to not start that dry rock reef with fish, even though we got it ready for fish in the original cycle.
this thread from Max93 directly uses the advice from the stickies in the disease forum, it arranges them in an efficient way.
Fish Disease Treatment and Diagnosis
A forum for discussing treatment and diagnosing saltwater reef fish.
www.reef2reef.com
= in that whole forum, hundreds of jobs, no posts about Jay's tank and pics + outcome
it's all other people's tanks, they report the outcomes, for five years.
working a claimed best practices method through the public scope is required, plus a forum of the claimant responding to issues live time in the method...guiding it live time for others. for sure a better or more efficient method must exist, but for new tankers/the target of this thread/there aren't any written other than a bunch of first-person evals using setups not common for new tankers
these mass startup reefs want to have a way to make their initial bioloads not die in the first six months, I think the best way is to convince them to not start that dry rock reef with fish, even though we got it ready for fish in the original cycle.
this thread from Max93 directly uses the advice from the stickies in the disease forum, it arranges them in an efficient way.
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Love the thread being kept alive.
There’s more than one way to reef, I’m just always trying to minimize the amount of cost and steps.. just in my nature to look at everything (once I failed a hundred times) efficiently.
There’s more than one way to reef, I’m just always trying to minimize the amount of cost and steps.. just in my nature to look at everything (once I failed a hundred times) efficiently.
Gabbone
Active Member
Very interesting thread for a newbie like me!
@brandon429 If I understand correctly, for us cycling with dry rocks, live sand and a good Nitrobac.
After the cycle is done: First add inverts and feed them since there's nothing to eat in the tank. After a couple of months(?) we can add corals and then 90 days after the last coral has been added can we introduce store-quarantined fish?
(Of course, we need to check compatibility between species we are mixing)*
@brandon429 If I understand correctly, for us cycling with dry rocks, live sand and a good Nitrobac.
After the cycle is done: First add inverts and feed them since there's nothing to eat in the tank. After a couple of months(?) we can add corals and then 90 days after the last coral has been added can we introduce store-quarantined fish?
(Of course, we need to check compatibility between species we are mixing)*
the reason I like to link that thread is because it's a mode among options
it represents in my opinion the lowest-cost way a new reefer can enjoy reefing and get the most mileage from a disease plan without extreme precision like they're doing in tank transfer prep work with quarantined fish, complicated stuff.
simply building the reef and fallowing it, then adding in quarantined fish at the end circumvents a lot of the stress we see in disease forum daily post trends.
*the method isn't without failure, it's just an option among options if decent fish delay time doesn't matter. that's a deal breaker to some, but the point would be this was a dedicated trial run at reducing the loss % rate zero preps brings us. it's a dang good effort any way you choose to manage disease.
any new items added after the fish stocking still must be fallowed to keep up this chain of command; that usually requires a two-tank system and the whole point of the thread above was preventing need for a two tank setup. you'd really have to build a full reef and then add fish, that's a lot of coral time and buildup for sure. 99.99% of keepers want a method that allows quick fish stocking.
that's the science everybody wants, it's currently in-honing in the disease forum and other places that do disease tank turnaround on live work threads.
observational quarantine is a big deal in reefing, having two systems has its benefits.
in that scenario above, its possible to import any number of hitchhikers. valonia. bryopsis, invasive dinos etc so this method above isn't perfect. and, if material from another reef tank like frags or CUC encountered fish with uronema, then fallowing doesn't help in that case I'm reading in the disease forum: we still have to source inputs carefully. if observational quarantine was underway, those popups could have been seen and culled
fish disease is one big hullaballoo I just keep coral-only setups and avoid the whole thing
but the truth is, today's dry start tanks are the ripest disease producers out there, the data is free for analysis in the disease forum/am open to alternate takes if anyone has any regarding dry start setup disease care.
we have to do something differently now, the loss rates are too high by month 8 we see in pattern. I see this in pattern in my cycling threads/reporting it back here too.
take any step you can in the direction of at least disease planning and it'll be an improvement in % fish success for sure.
it represents in my opinion the lowest-cost way a new reefer can enjoy reefing and get the most mileage from a disease plan without extreme precision like they're doing in tank transfer prep work with quarantined fish, complicated stuff.
simply building the reef and fallowing it, then adding in quarantined fish at the end circumvents a lot of the stress we see in disease forum daily post trends.
*the method isn't without failure, it's just an option among options if decent fish delay time doesn't matter. that's a deal breaker to some, but the point would be this was a dedicated trial run at reducing the loss % rate zero preps brings us. it's a dang good effort any way you choose to manage disease.
any new items added after the fish stocking still must be fallowed to keep up this chain of command; that usually requires a two-tank system and the whole point of the thread above was preventing need for a two tank setup. you'd really have to build a full reef and then add fish, that's a lot of coral time and buildup for sure. 99.99% of keepers want a method that allows quick fish stocking.
that's the science everybody wants, it's currently in-honing in the disease forum and other places that do disease tank turnaround on live work threads.
observational quarantine is a big deal in reefing, having two systems has its benefits.
in that scenario above, its possible to import any number of hitchhikers. valonia. bryopsis, invasive dinos etc so this method above isn't perfect. and, if material from another reef tank like frags or CUC encountered fish with uronema, then fallowing doesn't help in that case I'm reading in the disease forum: we still have to source inputs carefully. if observational quarantine was underway, those popups could have been seen and culled
fish disease is one big hullaballoo I just keep coral-only setups and avoid the whole thing
but the truth is, today's dry start tanks are the ripest disease producers out there, the data is free for analysis in the disease forum/am open to alternate takes if anyone has any regarding dry start setup disease care.
we have to do something differently now, the loss rates are too high by month 8 we see in pattern. I see this in pattern in my cycling threads/reporting it back here too.
take any step you can in the direction of at least disease planning and it'll be an improvement in % fish success for sure.
TimRush
New Member
Ok guys I just got hit with velvet. Wiped basically my whole tank. The only thing I got is inverts. What I would like to know is can I add coral to my tank even though I've got velvet. In there no fish. I've never had coral. But I need to leave my tank empty for basically 3 months and was wondering if this would work at least I'd have something to look at. In stead of hermit crabs and snails
Adding them in the presence of velvet won’t hurt inverts, you can
*the hidden risk is that every addition to your tank that isn’t fallow prepped, quarantined, before you add it may bring in velvet or other worse diseases as a vector risk. anything that transfers water from an infected system into yours could be a risk although in the hierarchy of risk actual fish added are the worst risk and corals are the lowest, but not zero risk.
Source for this info: the totality of info from Jays fish disease forum here on the site plus this article on biosecurity
*the hidden risk is that every addition to your tank that isn’t fallow prepped, quarantined, before you add it may bring in velvet or other worse diseases as a vector risk. anything that transfers water from an infected system into yours could be a risk although in the hierarchy of risk actual fish added are the worst risk and corals are the lowest, but not zero risk.
Source for this info: the totality of info from Jays fish disease forum here on the site plus this article on biosecurity
TimRush
New Member
Thank you great info.Adding them in the presence of velvet won’t hurt inverts, you can
*the hidden risk is that every addition to your tank that isn’t fallow prepped, quarantined, before you add it may bring in velvet or other worse diseases as a vector risk. anything that transfers water from an infected system into yours could be a risk although in the hierarchy of risk actual fish added are the worst risk and corals are the lowest, but not zero risk.
Source for this info: the totality of info from Jays fish disease forum here on the site plus this article on biosecurity
Keep it going, this is the way to reef. As said above, any % increase in success due to this method is WAY better for a new reefer than quick starting things. I don’t get it, don’t rush it, eventually your tank will be so crowded you’d wish it would have been slower.
It's good to have ways and means that do not follow the common path in all science ventures
This thread differs from all others in that there's no instant gratification for fish. There's delayed gratification for fish.
I'm positive it's easier to build up a reef without them.
Fish are one of the #1 killers of whole reefs, for people on vacation. I'm not anti fish lol, just pointing out supporting facts for a nonconforming thread.
Insults that happen to reef tanks when people are gone/ vacation / Murphys law/ come in gradients of impact
It takes a more profound impact to kill the whole reef, corals and all, when fish aren't present in the design
When fish are present, the loss of just a few from a disease or a small hardware malfunction set off a massive chain of events that cascade into you coming home to a fully gray tank.
But a fishless reef might just bleach, and you can drop the light level and up the feed rates to bring it back.
There are benefits to being fishless. My reefs always have been. They've taken insults fully stocked reefs wouldn't.
Because this thread is for delayed gratification of fish its a valuable thread, it doesn't matter what % of people like the method or do just fine with fish right up front.
This way is experimenting with different timing from the masses, to see if lower disease rates can be found
This thread differs from all others in that there's no instant gratification for fish. There's delayed gratification for fish.
I'm positive it's easier to build up a reef without them.
Fish are one of the #1 killers of whole reefs, for people on vacation. I'm not anti fish lol, just pointing out supporting facts for a nonconforming thread.
Insults that happen to reef tanks when people are gone/ vacation / Murphys law/ come in gradients of impact
It takes a more profound impact to kill the whole reef, corals and all, when fish aren't present in the design
When fish are present, the loss of just a few from a disease or a small hardware malfunction set off a massive chain of events that cascade into you coming home to a fully gray tank.
But a fishless reef might just bleach, and you can drop the light level and up the feed rates to bring it back.
There are benefits to being fishless. My reefs always have been. They've taken insults fully stocked reefs wouldn't.
Because this thread is for delayed gratification of fish its a valuable thread, it doesn't matter what % of people like the method or do just fine with fish right up front.
This way is experimenting with different timing from the masses, to see if lower disease rates can be found
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