Me and my fiance will be purchasing a 55 gallon tank sometime in the upcoming months, and he has become very interested in salt water variety fish and crustaceans. What is involved in setting up a tank like this for the first time, and how hard is it to maintain?What is involved in setting up and maintaining a salt water tank?
when you just start, it might be hard to keep the fish alive but with some time things will get better. once you get the 55 gallon, you'll need to either mix the salt water or buy premixed saltwater. For your own mixed salt water, you will want to leave the water sitting for a wk or so, as it helps everything level out. You can then pour this water into the tank. You will also need a filter, and a protein skimmer to keep the fish alive. Once these are up and running you would want to buy the fish first and crustaceans later. The crustaceans do better in aquariums that are/have been occupied with fish than putting them in a new aquarium. For mantaining the fish, you will be guaranteed that some fish will die, so do not purchase very expensive ones at first. Start small and slowly you can progress to bigger and larger fish, and more varieties to put in your tank. If you need more resources, check out these books, i have used them for my saltwater tanks and they help a lot.
The Conscientious Marine Aquarist, Robert M Fenner
http://www.amazon.com/Conscientious-Mari
The New Marine Aquarium, Michael S. Paletta
http://www.amazon.com/New-Marine-Aquariu
These books are both pretty informative and if you are really serious about setting up a marine aquarium, you should consult one of these books.What is involved in setting up and maintaining a salt water tank?
Molly, it depends on what exactly you want to keep and how much time/money you are willing to spend. You could do a fish only tank pretty simply. A filter,heater,aquarium salt,waterconditioner,and light. You could decorate with artifical coral and plants. If you wanted something a little more realistic you could do a fish only with live rock (FOWLR) tank. Add a protein skimmer and live rock to your purchase items. With this setup you can have many species of fish and invertebrates. It requires a little more maintenance than fish only, but the live rock helps to biologically filter the water.
The FOWLR tanks are what I have always had. I spend only around 30 minutes per week on my 55 gallon tank doing maintenance. I have an automatic timer for the lights and feeder. So I only do a partial water change of about 5 gallons each week. You need a gravel siphon to vacuum up all the detrius from the bottom. Then replace that amount of water with freshly madeup saltwater (dechlorinated of course). I don't add any other supplements and my live rock has nice coralline algae growth and all my creatures seem fine.
