10 gallon reef container accepted wisdom?
i've been tooling around in my 10 gallon SW tank
im newly looking for ideas to get it recharged.. i have a ywllow watchman goby and a crystal pistol shrimp contained by there right now with in the order of 12 pound of LR and 10 of LS
i was thinking of either putting my blue damsel in in that (from my 29 ith a dwarf lionfish and 2 other damsels), a royal gramma, some kind of dottyback or a kaudern's cardinal fish
or just scrapping that, getting an all-in-one dice tank and reefing it out...
any suggestions?
im open to anything reasonable
Answers: Well, as a broad rule larger systems are more stable than smaller ones, and while they may not like to stray far from home for great length of time, most fish do enjoy a slightly larger environment than a ten gallon tank really offers.
Plus, the biomass threshold on a ten gallon cistern is pretty small. That makes it difficult to make the tank really interesting since you with the sole purpose have a couple of things you can drop in there to construct it something besides just another pool of water. Gobies... not the most outgoing and adventurous fish in the the deep, and neither are the shrimp they like to take up with.
"Your tank's useless."
"No, there are fish there. You just can't see them right very soon because they're all hiding."
"Well, get them to come out," tap stroke tap, "come out, little fishies!" Tap tap tap, "they're not coming out of their holes," touch tap tap, "how come they won't come out of their holes?" Tap tap touch.
You might consider dedicating that to either a quarantine tank whether you don't have one, or a small "focus" tank, where whatever's living contained by the tank is out there looking pretty even if it's not really doing much of anything. Perhaps something similar to a small coral display with an anemone in the middle, a pair of clownfish that resembling living in it, and a glass shrimp if you've get an anemone large enough. Of course, you'd have to hold on to the tank really clean with an anemone living surrounded by it, but it's not that hard to manage with something the size of a ten gallon container if you're consistent about it.
If you're going to go for a reef container, the larger cube tank would probably be the way to progress. It allows you to create a wider three dimensional scale that would better mimic a reef, build in a variety of hiding places instead of merely one or two so your more timid fish can find a place they feel comfortable, gives everyone a chance to obtain away from one another in case they don't grain like getting along, and it gives you more space to put in satisfactory sand for your goby to make itself a good burrow.
That's just bad the top of my head, though. There are tons of ways to put systems together, so you've got a lot of option open to you.
I would get the all-in-one cube reservoir but again that is just me I do believe damsels should be in a larger cistern due to aggression but it should be ok in a 10 gallon due to ita small size o you may alos royal gramma, bicolor dottyback, or a starwberry dottyback well anyway well-mannered luck
