Pygmy Seahorse Build

[Jvanpelt89]

Today is day 1 of a Pygmy Seahorse tank. I’ve stalked these forums and done a ton of research before pulling the trigger. My base is a Waterbox 10g Cube which is an all in one. My only upgrades to the tank is getting rid of the filter sock and adding an Intank media basket with Chemipure Blue. I’ve read all the stories about a wave maker so instead I’m removing the stock nozzle and adding a dual output random flow generator from Vivid Creative Aquatics. For a light I went with the AI Prime 16HD as I can have full control over the light spectrum. I plan on adding green star polyps, some mushrooms, macro algae and photosynthetic gorgonians. I was planning on adding approximately 10 Pygmy Seahorses to the tank. Thinking about also possibly adding a small goby and peppermint shrimp to control aiptasia as they seem to be synonymous with adding any sort of macro algae. Today was day one and added some live sand and water to get the tank cycling. (Rocks will be delivered tomorrow, normally I’d aquascape before water but I was anxious to get it started.)

 

[Katie M]

I've done those seahorses before and I think you'll find 10 gallons quite big to keep up with the food density that they require. I'm sure you can figure it out though, just be mindful of it! Also, a peppermint shrimp would not be a good plan as far as cleanup crew - I feel like it would be easy for it to make a meal even out of the adult horses if it wanted to.

Great idea on your coral choices as well as the RFG nozzle (one of the best tank upgrades).

Looking forward to seeing how things go!

 

[JoshO]

My other half who is quite against my reef is actually keen on her own seahorse set up so I'll be following along for this!

 

[rayjay]

First off, your term pygmy is erronious. The only successes in keeping pygmy seahorses is by public aquariums and those successes are recent. They need specific habitats to survive in captivity that replicate their natural one.
Soo, I'm assuming you are talking about H. zosterae, the dwarf seahorse.
As such, you WILL have problems maintaining dwarfs in a 10g tank.
First off, most of them prefer to stay hitched and snick up food passing by close enough so they don't have to leave their perch. That means the food density in the tank for each feeding has to be very dense requiring a large amount of enriched live brine nauplii and especially with only 10 dwarfs (that average around an inch in length at the adult stage) that is a tremendous waste of food. Before each feeding the nutritionally depleted brine should be removed so the dwarfs can ONLY feed on newly enriched food.
This feeding regimen involves hatching, enriching and sterilizing the brine nauplii before adding to the tank, and while you don't have to HATCH them every day, as you can do a hatch and store for a week, you do need to take out the daily needs and enrich them for at least 12 hours to gut load them, but two 12 hour stages (with new water and enrichment for each stage) is much better as by then the nauplii with have assimilated the nutrition into their flesh.
Also, as you are wanting to have a multiple species setup, VERY FEW have succeeded with this type of setup, and I personally have never known anyone to be successful long term.
Species only tank is the recommended way to have best chance of success.
Perhaps it would be better to proceed with this tank and do all you want with it but leave out the dwarf portion.
You could set up a separate 2.5-5g tank and have dwarfs in that. My dwarf tank started with a 1.5 and soon ended up with a 5g and would hold around 50 dwarfs at a time.
I personally eventually dropped dwarf keeping as it was too similar to raising all the fry from my standard seahorses.