tell me what you think!!!!

hey dudes and duddets,

right so as some of you may know im upgrading to a 450 l saltwater tank. initially i had thought of completely bringing down my 180 l tank and turning it into a fresh water discus tank. after several hours of research i have decided that its not worth all the work just to keep a couple discus (literally would not be able to keep more than 2)

so here is what im going for and this is where ill need the maximum amount of advice from those of you who have experience with this. I will keep my 180 l (roughly 48 g) saltwater and put a single lionfish in there, here is the list of my questions.

1) i have read that minimum tank size for a common lion fish is 55 g, you guys confirm this?
2) if i cant find a dwarf (who can apparently live happily in 30 g) can i get by with a common lionfish in a 48 if its the only fish in there?
3)any feeding tips are welcome. i was wondering if feeding it fresh water tetras would be a mistake. iv read that sea fish need to be feed sea animals and vice versa. what other live bait could i feed it?

anyway let me know what you think

thx in advance
-jeff-

 

if i can get my hands on one ill probably go for a Pterois radiata

 

Morning Jeff, could you give me the dimensions of your tank? It's really more about size/shape of tank than the volume within.

What is a common lionfish over there? If it's a volitions, your tank will not be big enough and neither would a 55g for that fish. That's our "common lionfish".

Don't feed your lion tetras. You're right, on a continuous basis, they must be fed SW fish. Freshwater has components in them that will harm your lion long term. FW fish are also missing components that will also eventually harm your fish. Training is a different ballgame. I use guppies, mollies or ghostshrimp. Guppies and mollies don't have any thiaminase in them, which will strip your lion of thiamine, vitamin B1. Enriched freshwater shrimp are fine.

After me saying you have to feed SW food items, I'm now going to tell you to be super careful with SW live food items. They can contain cooties your fish can actually catch. When I was using Damsels, I FW dipped them for 30 minutes! Tough little buggers.

There's a link in my siggy that is a Lionfish Care Guide. See if it's of any use to you. (there's also a link in there to another guide that contains tips for weaning to frozen foods).

 

thx for the links and tips, yea volitions are indeed the common one here too. the tank size is about 1 m long 40 cm wide and 60 cm deep

 

Do you ever see dwarf lions over there? Here they are pretty common. With that size tank, that's pretty much what you are limited to. But you could put more than one dwarf.... and other smaller scorp friends

 

actually came across your link before and is a good site to get basic information from. i really like the Pterois radiata though other sources seem to state that 30gallons is not enough and they need at least 55 gallons. i might settle for a fuzzy or zebra if the rediata cant fit in my tank.

 

Oh gosh, that's embarrassing. That's a typo. You'll see in our quick guide we listed 50g. I'll fix that immediately and check the others. Thanks for pointing that out!

Radiata Quick Stats

I'm going to list scientific names just in case our common names don't match. The lions that would fit in your tank would be the Dendrochirus barberi, D. biocellatus, D. brachypterus and the D. zebra.

 

Fixed.

 

cool, guess zebra it is. any problems with a blue spotted puffer as a tank mate? ooooo but i realllly like the radiata URGH! 48 g would really not be enough water volume to guarantee a stable environment? there would only be the lion and the puffer in the tank.

 

There wouldn't be enough room for the radiata. The filaments on their fins are long. Once you but rock in there, there really wouldn't be much room for swimming.

A puffer doesn't really fit into the scenario well, I'm afraid. Is there anything else that you are particularly found of?