Coral Only Tank - How to maintain Nitrogen Cycle

[RaymondL]

I might just very well not pursue adding fish in my new tank setup, which by the way has cycled, but instead might just have and all corals set up. Is there any special treatment, or things I need to do if this is the case?

 

[Lavey29]

Obviously it is possible because some coral vendors keep no fish in their frag tanks. You would still need a cleaner crew. Corals just get fed by broadcast or direct feeding more often since no fish poop present to create nutrients.

 

[brandon429]

no need to maintain it. you'd have to dry the tank out to kill them.

 

[brandon429]

Cycles can't be starved in home reef tanks if the tank isn't sealed off from the home or drained. You don't need to worry about the nitrogen cycle as long as the tank has water in it.

 

[brandon429]

You need to commit all worry, research and concern to the fish disease forum and its strict preps for the fish you're about to add. Any refusal there gets you a disease wipeout within the first year if the patterns in the help threads mean anything.

Cycling is of no concern, quarantine and fallow are the full concern.

How to use the disease forum to discern loss rate % likelihood for new tanks: go into the forum and click the avatar name of the first 20 help threads on the front page one at a time

Select 'find all threads'

Go to their first thread, it's usually a dated descriptor of when their tank started vs when disease issues developed

After sorting the whole first page, take note of how many of the tanks are under one year old and what disease controls they implemented at the start. Do more pages for a bigger picture

 

[Propane]

If you are not putting fish in and only adding corals I would recommend reading through the thread on dosing ammonium chloride.

 

[brandon429]

Raymond, read this

Has anyone done coral/inverts only and no fish at first?

Fish seem to be the main cause of disruption in a display tank, given the current circumstances in the hobby with pests (ich, velvet, parasites, etc.). I have been in this hobby for 18 years, and the amount of pests that are showing up lately is much more (could also be the fact that we have...

www.reef2reef.com

that saves you two hours work in the disease forum for a 5 minute read

what you are planning to do is backwards from that thread.