~75g owners..

[SpringleRing]

What stock do you have?
I'm setting up a 75g with a 30g sump, and I'm planning on taking advantage of Drs. Foster & Smith's "build your own" cleanup crew deal. There's not a ton of selection, but they do have astreas, turbos, scarlet hermits, ceriths, cucumbers, red footed conchs and various sand-sifting stars. I doubt I'll include cucumbers because I'm paranoid about the toxin potential if they meet up with an unhappy end.. same with the stars, because I'm planning on some small fish and I don't want them getting eaten, though I'm not sure how likely that is. What kind of cleanup crew do you guys have, and what would you suggest in terms of amounts of critters? Or if anyone knows of better options, I'd love to hear about them.

As far as fish go, my family would get very angry if I didn't have at least one clown, lol. Most likely your standard perc or false perc. Aside from that, I really like anthias but I know they're supposed to be kept in groups and I'm not sure how feasible that is for a 75g. I'm also under strict orders to get active, colourful fish. In my old tank (a 70) I had 2 percs, a yellow coris wrasse, a lawnmower blenny, an orangespotted goby and 2 pajama cardinals.. there were complaints from certain quarters that everything except the wrasse and the percs stayed hidden all the time. Hippo tangs are another fish everybody likes, but I don't have a lot of experience with sick/less hardy fish and I'm worried about their ich susceptability. What do you guys keep, and how much care does your stock require?

Thanks for reading!

 

[Joel A]

My 75 gallon tank does not have much stock at the moment, but when i'm done it will probably look like..

2 clowns
3 anthias
1 tang or butterfly fish
1 mandarin/blenny

 

[alpha0r]

Check this out.
http://www.bostonreefers.org/forums/showthread.php?t=64296

Here is a good post by another member.

Mixing fire shrimp and cleaner shrimp in the same tank is fine. But you'll want to get ones that are similar in size. All shrimp are cannibalistic to an extent (peppermints more so than others) and if there's not enough food, they'll eat each other.

I currently keep two pairs of fire shrimp and one pair of cleaners as well as half a dozen peppermints in a 65. All of the fire shrimp and cleaners are very large - about 3" long. The fire shrimp look like little lobsters.

Shrimp are somewhat territorial, but they only really need enough space so that their antennae are not touching any other shrimp - about 8"x8" or so. CBS shrimp are much more aggressive about their territories than others.

In my experience starfish are not very efficient cleaners. Serpent and Brittle stars are good scavengers, but shrimp are better and if you have a tank with lots of shrimp, you'll need to supplement the food for the stars. The other starfish that I have (Fromia/Linckia/Protoreaster..etc.) tend to be very slow moving and you have to actually put food under them...

Sandsifting stars will keep your sand bed clean - too clean, in my opinion, unless you have a really large tank.

For detritus and scavenging, I find a fairly high concentration of peppermints (1-3/square foot of tank bottom, or 6-18 in a 75) and nassarius snails (4-8/square foot of tank bottom, or 24-48) to be very effective.

Most of the snails that you have are algae eaters - if you don't have sufficient algae, I would not add anymore snails. Ceriths will eat detritus, but they're not very efficient. I actually find emerald crabs, in fairly high concentration (2-3/square foot of tank bottom) to be much more effective at non-film algae reduction than anything else. However, as they get larger they can become fairly aggressive scavengers and stop eating as much algae.

For sea cucumbers, the ugly brown/black cucumbers are not very toxic and are very good at cleaning the sandbed and keeping it turned over.

Urchins are very effective scavengers/omnivores but they tend to be knock everything over, so you need to mount all your coral to large rocks instead of frag plugs. Also, they may eat coralline algae, which may be a bonue or a detraction depending on your point of view.

 

[Joel A]

Stealing things from my thread now eh?

But yeah that is a very good post as far as clean up crews go. =).

For the same size tank too.

 

[Scott]

In my 75, I've got...
a pair of false perc clowns
a pair of zebra (bar) gobies
a watchman goby and pistol shrimp
a 6-line wrasse
2 or 3 peppermint shrimp
bubble tip anemone
conch
2 emerald crabs

many (maybe 24?) turbo, cerith, nassarius snails, though I don't have really have idea how many at this point.

I've also got maybe a dozen hermits, again, not sure how many.

I do feel like I could use more snails and hermits at this point, though things are in pretty good shape.