Starting a New tank with prodibio startup

[ShivanshMehra]

Well that seems to be the case and i hope it is . I would love to keep posting you guys with pics and as you said , holding it for 10 days and lets see how tank reacts. Maybe together we can get this thing up and running in full cycle and beyond.

 

[brandon429]

I want to do a forecast run, the chances of this happening is about 80% within six months


imagine you wake up one day and there are red sores on the fish. or white dots, maybe even a loss...a fish you really like has passed on

what will you do

role play that scenario now + ahead of time

unless you get really lucky routinely, that 80% means you're likely to encounter a fish wipeout soon not due to cycling, due to disease imports.

even though it's not what you want to hear, Im only relaying things you can read in the fish disease forum here. when people post for disease help, click on their name

select find all threads, look at their first 1-2 posts, they usually give a start date where you can determine if their tanks are under or over eight months old, stocked in fish


you'll see the majority on a given page is under eight mos old, posting for disease wipeout help. we need to intercept that now, unless you want to play on the 20% likelihood.

you need to know there's a way to reverse the likelihood to 80% success rate, 20% loss likely. starting with all dry rocks requires a certain order of ops now, to avoid being in the 80% loss bucket. but not if you're inherently lucky; 20% of dry rock starters can stock fish skipping fallow and quality quarantine getting no losses.

 

[brandon429]

a neat way to see your tank under the lens of updated cycling science is that your cycle is done and good, can't be undone or fail, so we've moved on from it

we are square into fish disease management, it's nearly certain to be your true challenge even moreso than ugly algae. you just clean your sand and rocks, and permit none, then you don't have algae it's really not all that much of a challenge.

but for disease, everything you add to the reef now has a required order of ops, going off % we can see in the disease forum, that's your hidden predicted challenge am relaying ahead of time.

 

[brandon429]

can you get any chunks of rock from someone's running tank

your pet store has rocks that are matured, inside a reef tank there, and it's not illegal to sell you some of those

can you get some of those, to add here

 

[ShivanshMehra]

I am looking for the diseases and will fo the research as you said . Hope that doesnt happen though.

Stores are weird here in India, they keep fishes in bare bottom tanks with no rocks because they donot have large number of salt water fishes. Maybe south has it , i had a talk and they refused to provide anything here in terms of active or live rocks. About north , most fishes are bought on order so they donot keep rocks. Even these dry rocks i had to get from 1200km away from kolkata, they gave it a costly rate. So unfortunately i dont think i can find that.

but about the disease , i will set a tank in advance as a medical tank and make sure to keep posted. I know i dont have experienced eyes but maybe you can figure it out for me and then we can proceed with whatever i research then and now about the disease.

 

[brandon429]

hey that is helpful to know your design constraints/ really we can work with that. you're about to produce your own live rocks for sure, it'll just take some time

we need a seed source to make your rocks into helpful disease-rejecting ones, so that help against disease comes from within the system along with observational tank preparations, should that % disease risk decide to manifest.

next in priority down from aged rock within a tank/ contains a lot of amphipods and other beneficial animals/can you order online any refugium copepod or amphipod kits, and have them shipped to you? it's literally a jar or a bag of selected reef tank bugs, copepods and amphipods/ideal to attain

can you get those? if not we can still move forward working within the tools we have access to.

 

[ShivanshMehra]

I will surely ask the guy in kolkata about it. I have kept space for a refugium in my sump. I would love them to be there along with cheato algae. So if he can arrange both cheato algae, and amphipods. It will be great. As far as i know though. He orders one shipment a month of fishes from abroad . So that is exactly how we have to work. Maybe in april mid is what we can expect .

 

[brandon429]

ok very good. in the meantime there's not much to do but pretty much enjoy the tank and know that your cycle is set and can't retrograde, starve or undo.

the rule on ammonia is this: it can never rise uncontrollably given normal runnings provided a fish kill doesn't litter the tank with dead fish while you're gone, unable to intercept them before they degrade further.

only a group of dead fish left in, or half a can of feed someone accidentally puts in, or the power being out for days on end (all abnormal running conditions) can harm the ammonia control in that reef, and no ammonia meter is required to know if those conditions exist. it means if you know your pumps are running, heater is good, fish are not dead, there's no possible way you can have ammonia issues, so we'd never test for it again.


*ups and downs happen. you might have 3 large snails die one day due to natural causes. that's an ammonia spike, but again I'm accounting for that in the advice to not test: these tanks handle ammonia spikes just fine occasionally and will process it out just fine as long as its not multiple fish. anyone who knows three large snails are dead could remove them anyway, and never have the spike

we control ammonia by controlling the degree of death we leave in the tank to rot, pretty cool right/to see it that way. your ammonia control is the most set thing in that tank, never to be undone. you'll suffer oxygen loss deaths long before you'd suffer from ammonia noncontrol death in that tank, even though it's new. you've hyper cycled it by using quality prepackaged bacteria + the known time + fish and fish feed.

nitrite is simply chemically neutral in reef tank setups. its deadly in freshwater, but we get to ignore it fully.


nitrate is too variable in reef tanks for you to factor in a cycle: at this moment thousands of fully cycled reefs on this site are posting about 0 nitrate and it does not mean their cycle is broken at all, we don't need to know about nitrate in marine tank cycling. people use nitrate tuning to prevent forms of invasion, to change color in the inverts we keep etc it's not a poisonous form of nitrogen at all, ammonia is poisonous for us due to the pH level we keep/

 

[ShivanshMehra]

Thats great to know. Thank you for removing all the tensions and stress due to excess research brandon. As i said , the advise will be followed.
The observations are really intresting and wonderful. Most articles online donot include prodibio or cycling with fish. So not much information is there to review. That creates heaps of confusion.
The way you look at it is pretty interesting and something to look for. I do understand everything you said. Its perfect for beginners using prodibio startup to know.

so as advised no more testing , just enjoying the tank. I would though keep this thread open and post pics of tank everyday so that we can see day by day progress and work with your experience to make it better.