1 gallon pico rebuild

its looking great!! i still think a randalls pistol shrimp/goby would be a great pair for such a tiny tank.. but at the moment that school of gobies are really funny! hopefully once they get established they will be all over the place.

what are your thoughts on a CuC? it's like one fighting conch or one emerald crab would make that tank it's kingdom, but fighting conchs can not climb but they are super aggressive detritus eaters and will keep your entire sand bed well stirred.

i would probably add two astrea's four ceriths and one fighting conch, if not the fighting conch then like 3 nassi's lol

i love my astrea's - their shells are totally purple and they basically eat everything that comes up through day to day algae blooms.

i like how ceriths lay eggs on my glass, eat film algae, and also bury themselves in the sand to mix things up a bit.

do not have much experience with nassi's but i have 4-5 in my 29g and they seem pretty aggressive for leftovers when i feed my fish lol

 

wow! your livestock is tiny.

 

as far as a clean up crew i already have the 3 tiny ceriths and 2 hermits and 5-6 of those astrina stars and i was thinking of adding one or two really small turbo (astrea) snails if i can find some that small and maybe some of those mini stars but i think an emerald or a fighting conch would be a little bit too big and besides i wouldnt want anything that would grab at my fish cause theyre so small and ive seen emeralds use their pinchers to grab at small stuff that floats by

and pho88 yea thats the only reason i can get away with having 3 in the tank lol

 

good points! IME I mostly see the asterina stars munching on my coraline, not much as far as a CuC and some species do munch on fleshy things.

with what you have now, if you do get any more blooms definitly look into one or two astrea's. they definitely carry their weight in algae eating

 

yea i agree they do a great job eating algae and although i haven't had another algae bloom i went ahead and picked up the smallest turbo snail i could find the funny thing is he's probably one of the smallest ones live ever seen for sale and yet he's still the largest creature in the tank even if you don't include his shell lol

one of my mini dartfish decided to take refuge in side of a barnacle and it looked like he could have used a few room mates cause there was sooooo much room left over inside i tried to get a good picture but i came out dark because of all the ambiant light coming from the rest of the tank but you can still just barely make out the little guy in the back left of the barnacle

and while i was on barnacle avenue trying to get pic of the fish i realized that my iphone can still take good focused pictures even when zoomed in so i decided to grab a pic of one of my zoanthid frags

oh and one last thing since that first algae bloom occured after the first water change i decided to use water right from the reactors in the second and third water changes and i havent had any algea problems since and the carbon pad probably helped out in that as well

 

i took another look at that pic of the fish in the barnacle and its really hard to make out on the computer (it wasnt as bad on my phone) so i went into picasa and used the fill light feature to the max and made it a lot easier to see him but the quality of the pic went way down

 

Thats an awesome little tank love the rockwork. How difficult is it to keep up with? Like topping off etc.

 

thanks im surprised at how many compliments that rock is getting lol. well its only been running for a little over a week so i havent learned all of its little quirks yet but what i do know is top offs are nonexistant because it is pretty close to sealed off and i do water changes every other day i had 1 algae bloom in the middle of last week after the first water change and i think it was because i used water directly out of my main tank so i switched to using water from my reactors and havent had anymore problems with that but im keeping the algae scraper in there just in case.

 

oh and i learned after that first water change that if i keep the water level where i cant see it (above the bottom of the trim) then its too high because when i try to scrape algae some of the water gets over the edge and spills out

 

bad news guys one of the gobys died but i have a feeling he starved himself in fact i think they all are because they have not been eating ive not seen them eat a single time ive fed them i just pulled a water sample and will test it tomorrow but his death will not have been in vain for his body will nourish this candy cane and help it to live and grow stronger