4th attempt!

[el batty]

My very last salt water tank was a 4' mixed reef. I dismantled it and sold everything except the tank. The reason i sold everything except the tank because i had plans!
But its hard for a person who tasted saltwater tanks to be completely cut off.
I eventually bought a moulded tank (RS 580A) its approx 19G. Its totally against my principle to buy smaller tanks for marine when i suggest people to start with a 35-40G minimum. But, i thought, why not...lets do it and see what happens. What's the worst that could have happened? Total tank crashing? Keeping that in mind, i bought seachem stability to kick start the cycling and for managing delicate situations. Now, this being a small tank and lack of light and filtration, my options were very limited. So, i started doing research on fishes that can do well in 10G too. To them a 20G would be sufficient. I started collecting the necessary stuffs - livesand, liverocks and salt! Started them mix and let the tank cycle for 3-4 days with the help of biobacteria and introduced 4 fishes in 1 go. (Do not repeat this at home, school or anywhere else) The reason i did this was because i have over 7-8 years of marine experience and i could identify the signs of discomfort and take actions accordingly which a newbie couldn't. I took a risk. It paid off. Another reason for this was the extremely low prices of the fishes we bought from a reputed seller in Kolkata. I bought 2 azure damsel, 1 juvenile tomato clown and 1 fire goby. I previously planned to setup a goby tank only but then i thought of the closed environment of the setup and thought of testing with fire goby for starters.
I fed them NLS and hikari and it was going perfectly fine...i used to topup water and maintain salinity since in a small setup, the fluctuations can be deadly. I regularly cleaned the media and did 30L water change twice a month.(still do). It went on for around 1.5 months when suddenly things started to go wrong. The firegoby had a stroke and died outta nowhere(heat issue) and with the balance gone, the damsels started being aggressive and one started to bully the other. The only solution i felt was to minimize visual contact, so reduced lighting from 6 hours a day to 2 hours a day distributed between 3-4 times a day. This solved the aggression issue, but the coraline didn't get to spread from the LR and its barely sustaining.

Presently, i intend to continue this tank and then maybe restart the rest in my 4' tank. I will upload pictures and videos later on. And give weekly updates on behaviour and setup changes as time goes on.


P.S: My other projects are a 4' planted and a 4' annual tank which will be uploaded here in distinctive threads soon!

Happy fishkeeping and learn from my mistakes and don't repeat them. That's the whole point of it!