Live Rock with dwarf seahorses :S

[cynster]

Hi, I am new to the seahorse hobby - I have a 5 gallon and 1 gallon for dwarf seahorses (I plan to put the 4 new arrivals in the 1 gallon and when they have babies, move the adults to the 5 gallon and keep the 1 gallon as a safe place for the babies so I can keep fish that might eat fry but are compatible with adults in the 5 gallon).

Question is - live rock and seahorses and hydroids.. I will not be stocking my tanks for at least a month. What do you think the best way to cycle such small tanks would be? In my one gallon I have two small hermit crabs and a camel shrimp and a filter running (I'd move the crabs and shrimp to the 5 gallon when I got the seahorses though). What are the benefits of live rock in small setups and is it worth the risk of hydroids to get them, and how could I disinfect them? I didn't see any hydroids at the pet store where I saw the live rock, but I know that doesn't mean they aren't infected.

Thanks!

[rayjay]

Well, for my seahorse tanks, I boil the rock and then after a good cleaning I cycle the tank by adding an ammonia source, in my case, ammonium chloride.

[cynster]

Wonderful! Thank you That is what I will do.

[wdt2000]

If the seahorses are WC you will most likely be dosing panacur which will kill hydroids as well.

[cynster]

Hmm I am not sure if they will be or not. I hadn't thought about that. Well I bought panacur in preparation already lol. I believe the procedure is to treat the tank 2 days before the seahorses arrive then the third treatment is when the seahorses are acclimated. Does this sound right?

[wdt2000]

Originally Posted by cynster

Hmm I am not sure if they will be or not. I hadn't thought about that. Well I bought panacur in preparation already lol. I believe the procedure is to treat the tank 2 days before the seahorses arrive then the third treatment is when the seahorses are acclimated. Does this sound right?

This should help
http://forum.seahorse.org/index.php?showtopic=37207

[cynster]

Hmm I registered and took a look around and tried your link, but I'm getting an error.

[rayjay]

When I use Chrome, I often get an error message basically saying that the server sent no data or something like that. If I back up and keep clicking it usually gets through by the 6th time at the latest.
However, if I use Firefox, I don't remember having that problem.
Can't say for I.E. as I don't use it.
When I clicked the link on post #6, I got through on the second time just a few minutes ago.

[timinnl]

Originally Posted by cynster

Hmm I registered and took a look around and tried your link, but I'm getting an error.

Nothing wrong with the link Rayjay. You need to register to access that section.

+1, no live rocks please. Start off with everything dead and cycle your tank with the ammonia method. If you want to use live rock/rubble, please QT it and feed it wiht some newly hatched baby brine shrimp = NHBBS. Any pods or critter you want to add to the tank should be by your choice and not as a hitchhiker.

+2 Please look into True Captive Bred dwarfs. In the long run, it will save you a ton of money.

Kind Regards,

Tim

[timinnl]

Forgot to add. You have a lot of choices in the states in regards to their diet. Please look into Monia salina, Tisbe sp, A. tonsa, live mysis, peppermint shrimp and/or other shrimp larval and Dan's Feed to enrich your artemia with.

Tim

[timinnl]

I just saw your idea of keeping other fish with them. That is not a good idea. For dwarfs, you want a species tank only. What equipment do you plan on using?

[cynster]

Ooh thank you! I was looking for that info. What I had decided to do was go ahead an add the live rock and treat with panacur once the tank has cycled. I am adding a little ammonia to speed up the process to have a quickly cycled tank, and one of my tanks has already peaked with Nitrites (and it was set up on Friday!) So I am going to keep monitoring the levels until 8-24 hours the ammonia turns into Nitrate (once the levels of Ammonia and Nitrite keep going to 0).

I also have 2 peppermint shrimp so hopefully they will breed and create larva for the seahorses to eat! I have heard about the copepods to add, but I read that it can make the water very dirty - I am going to look into those food sources you mentioned - I really wanted to have a variety of foods available to them.

EDIT: I just realized I misread that lol - Still it'll be helpful because I plan on hatching brine shrimp every week if I can (rather than daily) so I'd like to be able to keep them alive with good food for them.

2nd EDIT: I plan on adding a firefish or two and keeping the peppermint shrimp and tiny hermit crabs all with the adults. The babies will have their own one gallon with no other lifeforms, no live rock or anything. Just the baby brine shrimp. And I might keep the father with them.. I haven't decided.

[cynster]

This is where I will keep the babies - I had the hermits in there to help the ammonia part of the cycle, but they are in the 5 gallon now


This is my 5 gallon with live rock, plant, mushroom, shrimp, and tiny hermit crabs. This will house the adults. I plan to get 5 or 6 pairs for it.

Oh and to add - the filter in the 5 gallon is only there temporarily to provide enough flow for the good bacteria to have oxygen - I am going to replace it with a small sponge filter after the tank cycles. It belongs to my freshwater aquarium to speed up the cycling process. The 1 gallon's filter will have sponge covering it once the cycle is done too.

[timinnl]

Originally Posted by cynster

Ooh thank you! I was looking for that info. What I had decided to do was go ahead an add the live rock and treat with panacur once the tank has cycled. I am adding a little ammonia to speed up the process to have a quickly cycled tank, and one of my tanks has already peaked with Nitrites (and it was set up on Friday!) So I am going to keep monitoring the levels until 8-24 hours the ammonia turns into Nitrate (once the levels of Ammonia and Nitrite keep going to 0).

I also have 2 peppermint shrimp so hopefully they will breed and create larva for the seahorses to eat! I have heard about the copepods to add, but I read that it can make the water very dirty - I am going to look into those food sources you mentioned - I really wanted to have a variety of foods available to them.

The peppermint shrimp would work best in a breeder trap Post #41. They will eat all of the mysis and copepods you put in the tank. If it is possible, I would like to talk you out of using live rock. There are too many other critter that will cause problems for the dwarfs. Gammarus is one of them. While small, they make a very good diet of the dwarfs. However at the adult size, they can go after your fry and young dwarfs. Speaking as someone who saw one take down a young dwarf.

The copepods is part CUC and part diet for the dwarfs.

If you want tank mates with them, look into and research:

H. rubra: Red Lava Shrimp.

Thor amboinensis: Sexy shrimp.

Mysis

Stomatella snails.

Mini stars.

Mini brittle stars.

Very small bristle worms.

Peppermint shrimp in trap.

You could use nassarius snail & mini hermit crabs. You just need to know the level of risk you are willingto take.

Tim

[cynster]

Since I am keeping the fry and young dwarfs in a tank without the live rock -will moving the father to the baby tank bring over those creatures? And can they be killed with panacur? Thanks for the info about the breeding trap. It makes sense that they would go after the brine shrimp and copepods.

These links are not working for me for some reason - I'm using firefox, and I am registered there. Just putting the link location in my browser gives me an error too.

Also - I heard that bristle worms can kill the dwarfs - wouldn't they grow to the size dangerous to dwarfs?

I'll look into the mini stars - originally I was told to stay away from them because they catch and eat fish (the bigger ones) - but if they stay tiny I don't think it'd be a problem

[timinnl]

It is your risk level that you are willing to take. I like the bristle worms up to about an inch to an inch and a half. Anything over that I remove.

It is comes to error message and all thing computer, I wear a dunce hat.

You can only get the gammarus in the fry tank if you transfer them when you remove the male into it.

One thing you need to take into account, using panacur in your main tank will kill a lot you the critters you want in the tank for up to two years. IE: certian snails species, mini stars, mini brittle stars and so on.

[cynster]

If I added the panacur first before I got any snails/stars - would the bad critters be gone for good and then I can just keep the ones I want?

I may just not get stars or snails - everything else is fine with panacur (the shrimp and crabs and horses).

[timinnl]

Some snails will make it and other wouldn't. The problem with panacur is it will limit your choices for up to two years. What you might not want now, you might want it later. Murphy's Law. There is a whole sticky on the subjest of what will work and not work after a treatment. have a look through it on the org.

Tim

[jeff@zina.com]

Keep in mind that adult dwarfs are still only a inch in size, there really isn't much that they are truly safe with. You will also need baby brine daily, the horses can't eat much at a time and may not take much else in food.

Jeff


Text mangled by iPhone spell check...

[cynster]

Worst case, I can move the shrimp and hermit crabs into the 1.5 gallon and just keep all the seahorses together in the 5 gallon.

I have ordered a brine shrimp hatchery disk to avoid the soda bottle method - because honestly, I hate brine shrimp. I had fish fry that ate them and it was cool for about 3 days until the nasty bottle had to be cleaned and there were problems with leakage and it was just a mess. Also why I'm reluctant to get into culturing copepods. If I could do it in a neat way like the brine shrimp hatchery disk, I'd be all for it, but so far it seems like a lot of work and a lot of mess. But I've hatched brine shrimp before and I am willing to hatch them to have small seahorses. I simply don't have room for another 50 gallon tank in my apartment. And I have a lot of time on my hands lol.

One experiment I would like to try is training them to eat frozen baby brine shrimp. I know there hasn't been much success at all, but there are a few methods out there that claim to work for even dwarf seahorses, and if they actually did that would be awesome.

Method 1: Feeding frozen and live brine shrimp at the same time with a tiny pinch of garlic powder and feeding from a small net, so the brine are corralled in the net and the horses gather at the net.

Not sure if this would work, because the seahorses usually wait until brine shrimp swim by them and vibrate, from what I've read - and it triggers the seahorses to snap up the food.

Method 2: Feeding frozen to the shrimp then live to the horses, gradually increasing the time between both feedings until a seahorse tries the frozen, then slowly wean them off of the live.

Regardless I'd like to provide live - but having frozen as an option too, would be so cool - and so interesting! Don't think it'll work, but it's worth a try at least

[rayjay]

Anyone who in the past able to get dwarfs to eat frozen found out that it didn't last for long and if they didn't get the dwarfs back onto live again in time, they lost the dwarfs.

[timinnl]

Short term on a mono diet of NHBBS your dwarfs will do ok. But long term a mono diet is not a balanced diet and you will see a downturn in the numbers of births and health related issues. If you do not want to do a daily hatch, you can always set some aside and enrich them with live microalgae, paste or freeze dry. Rayjay can really help you on the subject of feeding & artemia care.

DanU wrote this and I find that it is right on the money.

It is very difficult to keep H. zosterae long term. Nutrition is important but it is the contaminants in the nutrition that most folks don't take into consideration.

For a very long time, most folks fed newly hatched artemia and most folks that use that have difficulty getting past 3 months. Some would but it was a minority. Now that folks are enriching, that particular issue is resolved. Folks need to make sure that what ever enrichment they are using is high in DHA and has a decent vitamin C component to it. Artemia retroconverts DHA to EPA rather rapidly so unless the enrichment is very high in DHA, that component is essentially missing from the diet. Vitamin C is needed for reproduction and the immune system.

Reduction of bacterial loads is often overlooked or ignored. Artemia hatching can be a source and lack of nutrient removal only promotes bacterial growth in the tank. It is in essence like a perpetual fry tank. The issues that apply to raising fry apply to managing a H. zosterae system.

I am coming up on the 2 year anniversary of my Live Mysids with Dwarfs experiment. Hugely successful. So much so I have to wholesale out 100 to 200 each month as production is well above the retail demand. I still have some of the original zosterae I started with which were adults when I added them. I attribute the success to the application of the techniques to handle what is mentioned above.


If you look at restaurant supply companies. It might give you some ideas in culture containers. (Thanks for the info Cheryl.)

Kind Regards,

Tim

[cynster]

RayJay - if I were feeding both, like frozen in the mornings, live in the evenings, do you think that they may still eventually reject live food - I certainly don't want to stop providing live food, but be able to provide frozen in addition.

Tim - Thank you for the information - so I need to be sure I am enriching the brine shrimp in high levels of DHA and vitamin C?

Do you all have any recommended sources of these enrichment products? I definitely want to be sure the seahorses are getting the nutrition they need.

EDIT: Just out of interest and curiosity about the frozen food, by the way. If I can enrich and keep the brine shrimp longer, then I don't need frozen, but I'd still like to know if I tried some experiments with frozen foods that as long as I fed live alongside they wouldn't reject the live.

EDIT: I wonder if that is the same Dan from Seahorse Source - they had some products with high DHA and vitamins and proteins called "Dan's Feed". I don't have a lot of success keeping brine shrimp alive for a long time, but it said best results are 12 hours - and that's not a problem for me. It's just growing them to adult size.. but I've only tried once. Maybe with practice I can get better.

[rayjay]

I've never heard of dwarfs rejecting live food unless there is something wrong with them and they just don't eat anything.
Feeding frozen will likely be a failure anyway, and, it leads to other problems as in water quality because any uneaten food that gets trapped and unseen can be a bad bacteria factory.
While there are many forms of DHA enrichment, as in DHA Selco or Algamac 3050, my preferred method is via Dan's Feed which includes the 3050 but has many other enhancements as well. Dan has designed this specifically for seahorses but I know of at least one person using it for clownfish fry.
Indeed, the "BOLD" in Tim's last post was written by Dan Underwood of seahorsesource.com, creator of Dans Feed.

[wdt2000]

Would copepods not be another healthier option? Some are much simpler to raise than brine in some respects.