I am planning on building a very large saltwater aquarium, and I was wondering if this was a good idea for it…..
I want to have an almost fully independent ecosystem functioning in my tank. My first step is that I’m going to add a lot of saltwater plants, such as maiden’s hair plant, shaving brush plant, Halimeda plant, lettuce algae, chaetomorpha algae, and mermaid’s fan plant. I know most, if not all of these, are made primarily of algae, and some require lots of calcium to grow (will extra calcium harm fish?)
I then want to add copepods, brine shrimp, saltwater platies, shrimp, plankton, and tons of other live foods to the tank. The plan is to have the tank somewhat separated into several parts, with holes in the walls (made of live rock) that are only big enough for the feeder fish and shrimp etc. to swim through, but not large enough for the predator fish to swim through them. I am hoping that the live food will breed on the one side of the tank, then either swim to or be placed into the other side where the larger fish can eat them.
I know this probably wouldn’t sustain many fish with just the live foods, I do also plan on feeding all the fish I have occasionally…but I was just wondering if this is a good or even feasible idea for a saltwater aquarium.
This was also my idea for housing several different species of fish that aren’t compatible with each-other. I was going to divide the tank into several sections using live-rock, and maintain the larger carnivorous fish on one side, with holes in the live rock they can’t swim through to get to my smaller fish.
can this work?
I’m looking for like 1000 gallons at least. And I did mention that I was also planning on feeding the fish (with supplemented food or manual movement of the live food), on top of the natural live food in the tank.
I’m looking for like 1000 gallons at least. And I did mention that I was also planning on feeding the fish (with supplemented food or manual movement of the live food), on top of the natural live food in the tank.