My Wareham Brackist Nano Tank build

[luu78]

Hi everyone, so I took my family blue crabbing in Wareham, Ma. I came home with this tank that I recently acquired from TomD.
I will tinker with the scape in a few days. Its too crowded. Waiting for the water to clear up. Im not running any filtration on this system. Its all filter feeders and scavengers in there so I think they will cycle the waste on their own.

Day 1:
I dilute premixed new saltwater to 1.05SG to match water brought back from Wareham. I made use of light equipment from my previous freshwater planted tank since I like the grass thats growing within the mussle clump.

Visible tank critters:
1. Several baby crabs and a 4" blue crab. I might take the big guy out though. But he already made himself at home under the mussle clump
2. Gigantic amphipods, some with egg sacks. These will be cultured and fed to my fish in the future
3. Several cerith snails. Wonders if I can acclimate them slowly to full saltwater to move them to my reef tanks later
4. Oysters, visually there might be 2 different species of them based on their shells. One wavy and the other is just a typical smooth round. Im hoping to learn something about their behaviour as this tank progress if I can manage to keep all the tank mates alive and thriving.
5. Copepods, must be different than my tigger pod that I culture. Hard to ID the species by eyes but I can tell they swim differently than the tigger pods that I have. According to my reading, the specie of copepod that is dominant in Massachusetts water is the Arcadia Tonsa. Lets hope thats the case, then I will culture them as well.

Upcoming tasks to do:
1. Monitor dKH/calcium consumption to begin dosing regiment. I assume this will consume quite a bit since there are shellfish mainly in the tank. But, only time will tell.
2. Figure out duration for light cycle, I might fill this tank with large amount of different species of live microalgae and run a minimum of 16 hr photo period to try to match the consumption rate by the shellfish. Then decrease photo period as needed to maintain microalgae culture using visual cues and microscope as necessary.
3. Will perform the basic water parameter tests as if this is a reef tank. Perform the whole nine yard. This will keep me busy and take a bit focus from my reef tanks so I dont keep on feeding the tanks and/or screw things up in the reef tanks....



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[CAPSLOCK]

Really cool, can't wait to see how this progresses.

 

[Chris A.]

Looking good. Only thing you'll need is a chiller to keep those temps down.

 

[s_kelley]

Nice! cool experiment

 

[AlbertG]

Ben Really ?
now you add one in the bathroom ?
i dont want to be there when your flood that house and your landlord lady come in and smack you with the broom
just kidding buddy !
keep going you teach me a lot ! do experiment and them come teach us all

 

[luu78]

Hi guys, the oysters and mussle clump are doing well. There are about 5 baby crabs. Of which, one is carrying a belly full of eggs. Here are a couple pictures of the brackish beadlet anemones in the tank which I didnt know how they look when I picked them out of the water last week since they were closed up. Today I had some time to maintain the tank and during maintenance I realized their polyps are open. Unfortunately, they are not flourescent under blue lights. Still wicked cool, never knew what I'd find in the water around here. This is the beauty of this hobby. It always keep me on the edge and I never get bored. Something new always come up for me to learn. Gonna make it a habit to take the kids scavenging for sea creatures on Sundays now. They learn a lot and at the same time enjoyed every moment of it. We didnt go today due to weather. I've been feeding the tank live green and brown algae that I culture at home. So far, the culture is doing good. I harvest every week or so. As soon as the next culture is ready, some will be bottled up and in the frig they go as back up cultures. Never know when they crash. I keep a log of my cultures so I can understand and improve its process and efficiency as I go. For now, I recycle my DT water after the WCs and run them thru the UV filter 3X to sterilize it, and this water is used to culture my copepods and phytoplanktons. I believe this will prevent culture crashes because the water is aged and has some nitrates/phosphates on it which will assist with phyto grow and at the same time allows me to use less F/2. I still add F/2 but do so less than typical. I will keep this culturing process and improve on it with the data I log weekly. On a side note, I loss my pair of leopard wrasse that ate anything I put in the tank, a pair of hi-fin gobies, a couple of rock anemones and maybe a couple other critters in my tanks due to a 12 hr power outage from Sat 2am til Sat 2pm. I have a generator but cannot use since Im up in the attic. I had a few car batteries but never maintain them so they are dead when I need them. I had to stay up the whole night moving my battery operated air pump from one tank to another then went to work at 7am. The bottom dwellers are most likely first to go during power outages. Thats why only my wrasses and my gobies succumbed to this. So please remove these bottom dwellers if you ever run into power outage like me. Thinking back, I rather move a few rocks to locate them and put them into a container than not doing so. My leopard wrasse in the display is ok but hes been there a couple years already so hes super healthy and could go thru this. Anyways, a battery maintener system and cable routing is on the way, no way I let this happen again. No way!

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