too much to add all at once?

I'm almost at 1 month of being fallow after my ich outbreak and have decided on a new stock list for the 125. Currently I only have a 4" yellow tang in quarantine and would like to add a 3-4" powder blue tang, 2.5" flame angel, 2.5" coral beauty, a 1.5" red mandarin, and three to five 1" blue green chromis.

What I would like to do is add everything at once, and have my trusted LFS quarantine everything for me together for 2 weeks. They have everything I want on hand, and are willing to cut me a decent deal if I pay for everything up front. At the 6 week fallow mark, the tank will have been established for 3.5 months and all my levels are right where I want them.

Would this be too much of a bio load to introduce all at once? I could hold off on the mandarin, but would like to introduce both tangs and dwarf angels at the same time and the chromis are basically to disperse any potential aggression between the tangs and angels.

~Will.

 

the powder blue is going to be aggressive no matter what. I would hold off and add that last if anything. This is the way I did with my 3 tangs and they did just fine. My yellow really is the least aggressive of all of them. By the way, good luck with the angels. I am yet to have any sort of angel(even a bellus angel) that didn't try to snack on coral or clams.

 

Im not 100% sure on this, but here is my opinion

if your tank has been fishless for 6 weeks, then your bacteria levels will have decreased in relation to the lack of available nutrients , bacteria always parallels waste - you cant have bacteria in excess of the nurtrients able to support it.

what Im not sure about is how quickly the bacteria could re establish itself in order to process this amount of waste added in 1 go?

I would follow Daniels advice on adding fish periodically just in case

S*ds law states - if it does go wrong, the chromis survive and the expensive tangs dont

Steve

 

With the angels, I was going to grab some brown polyps from a friends tank and put them in "my" quarantine tank at the LFS and see if they get eaten or not. The last PBT(and the reason I got ich) got bullied like crazy by my yellow that had been in there for around 2 weeks. It was just the 2 tangs and a small lion and nobody messed with the lion. I figured with a complete re-working of the rock work the yellow tang wont remember his turf and everyone will start on equal ground. That and the shear number of fish would keep aggression levels to a minimum.

I have sun polyps that I feed 4-5 times a week 1 cube of frozen krill, only about half of what I feed actually gets into them . . . could the waste from these feedings possibly be keeping my bacteria happy? Also, I have an oversized skimmer thats been skimming VERY dry these past few weeks, would bumping it up to wetter skim after all the new fish are added (if I go through with this) help?

~Will.

 

Yes, to say the least. You need to give your bacteria time to adjust to the new bio-load. Thats a receipe for disaster. One fish every 2-3 weeks, adding the least aggresive first.


Luna

 

Sounds like an ill fated plan Will,sorry,just had to say that.As the others said,might be better to go slow,starting with the chromises.After just getting over some problems and being patient during the fallow waitihg period another big loss would be real hard to take.Best of luck,Dave

 

nyuck nyuck nyuck

Maybe i'll just add the 2 smallish tangs and 5 chromis to start, then add in the 2 dwarf angels a couple weeks after that. I just hope the tangs get along with only the chromis in there to keep them busy.

~Will.

 

I hate posting posts like these because I don't want to make people mad but...... chances are, your powder blue got ich because it's a powder blue. Bro they just do that. They are some of the worst. We have been battleing ich in the store where I work on an achilles tang for the past month. I mean copper, hypo, cleaner shrimp(not all at once) but it's just one of those things. With that being said, trust me, they are aggressive little guys and I can tell you that if you put all of those fish in at the same time, ammonia is gonna spike and powder blue is going to get ich again.

 

I think this is still a bad idea, tangs produce a lot of waste and although you have a larger sized tank, the bacteria population would have plummeted from lack of waste. I would add one fish at a time, the least aggressive first. Also keep in mind that angels really should not be put in with other angel fish in all but the largest tanks. You may get lucky and they may not kill each other, but that's long shot. People here have done it in smaller tanks too, but it a rare case.

 

Here's my problem with adding only 1 at a time. I already have a yellow tang in a 20L QT I dont want to keep him in there a minute longer than I have too. Last time he was the first in the tank, he killed my old powder blue 2 days after acclimation.

I'm not talking about 8" fish here, the yellow is 4" max, and the new PBT I want is around 3.5 . . . how much of a bio load could this put on an established 150 gallons of water + over 150# or LR and an over sized skimmer? I do not want the yellow to claim the entire 125 as his and his alone again, so I feel the need to add multiple fish at the same time to prevent this from happening a second time. With the dwarf angels its the same thing, the majority of the success stories I have read about involve adding them both at the same time so there wont be any turf wars between them.

If I was convinced my last PBT got ich just because it is a PBT I would not be looking to get another one. I was an idiot to buy that skinny sickly fish in an attempt to "rescue" him from the crappy LFS he was at, and an even bigger idiot for not quarantining him properly. Every time I get a picture up of a powder blue on my monitor and the fiancee is around I always catch a comment on how much she misses that fish, I gotta give it another try.

~Will.