New Setup - Questions

let it all cycle out tim. and youll be all good. more than likely you wont see whats dieing off. but you will be getting different new life forms growing. mostly good hopefully. be on the look out for aiptasia tho. dont want that. and your tank looks very good. nice job on it all.

 

Thanks for the compliment. Unfortunately, it looks like i have an aiptasia (at least one, probablymore) I read that they can reproduce pretty rapidly and are hard to get rid of.

I read that hermit crabs eat them, once my tank balances out - do you think that would be a good idea to clean them out?

 

Get them now if you you can. I use Joe's juice which you can find on line and maybe at a LFS. If you try to pull them out by hand or scrub them they will spread the seeds and spread like crazy.

 

So I wouldn't worry about the die off on your rocks. My rocks were exposed to air for 1.5 seconds and since the sponges touched air, I had MASSIVE die off, let alone the fact that I un-earthed the rocks that were marinating in dirty substrate and dead spots.

If I knew back a month ago what I know now, I would have washed off all of my rocks. But I was a newbie and merely transported them in water, not even aerated water.

My point is, you will be fine, especially with great powerhead flow and a new turbo skimmer. I have this annoying aiptasia in my tank too and I bought a cleaner shrimp for it, but he still hasn't found the small anemone yet. I might need to go get Joe's Juice.

I don't think crabs will eat it, maybe...but I have tons of crabs AND a large hermit crab but they haven't found it yet. Your best bet is the peppermint shrimp like mine or Joe's Juice.

So as for your concerns, don't worry about anything. Even if you had die off let your cycle do it's thing. Let your good bacterias fight the bad ones, lol.

 

You did the right thing to leave the dead stuff on the rock. Your tank needs a source of ammonia to start the cycle. Dead stuff causes ammonia and thus started your cycle and the rebuild of your new water cleaning bacteria. IMO the more dead stuff that hits the water at the beginning of your cycle the stronger your tank will turn out.

No crab Iv heard of will eat aptasia. The only things I have heard that will eat it are:

Copper banded butterfly fish (extremely hard to keep in a tank and hit and miss with eating aptasia)
Peppermint shrimp (Iv had good experience with them wiping my tank clean of the aptasia but Iv also heard a lot of storys of them not working at all)
Racoon butterfly fish (I think this ones total bull)

Given those options I would go with some joes juice or aptasia x. Your LFS should have one or you can get joes juice on ebay for less than $10 shipped.

Good job on the aquascaping. Looks like your tank is coming along really well. Keep the pics coming.