User ReviewedHow to Set up a Marine Reef Aquarium Setting up a marine reef aquarium may seem like a daunting task, but is fairly easily achievable provided you follow a few steps. Select the area of the house where you want the tank to be. Buy the largest aquarium that will fit in your space, or the largest aquarium your budget will allow. Choose between acrylic or glass. Other types of lights to consider are fluorescent lighting, specifically high intensity fluorescents. Set up the filtration: On a smaller tank (less than 40 gallons) regular weekly water changes can be used in place of a skimmer. If you have chosen to buy a larger tank (40+ gallons) a protein skimmer is a very important piece of equipment to purchase. Get a good quality protein skimmer and place it in your sump or on the back of your tank if it is designed for it. Do not skimp on this. Often protein skimmers are under-rated for the size of tank, so in practice a skimmer rated for a 100 gallon (378.5 L) tank is barely adequate for a 50 gallon (189.3 L) reef tank (especially one with many fish that get fed a lot).

Needle wheel skimmers are a popular choice, and can be very effective for their size/cost. Don't rely on 'venturi' skimmers, unless they are high end models with very strong pumps. Don't bother buying 'canister' filters, often used on freshwater aquariums. top cover for fish tankNot only are they fairly useless in a marine aquarium environment, they can cause a buildup of Nitrates on their internal media that can negatively effect the aquarium. small fish tanks pinterestThat being said, a canister filter can be used for carbon or other chemical media, provided it is cleaned on a regular basis.cheapest nano reef tank A skimmer quickly becomes cheaper than salt-water changes.used imported fish tanks for sale in bangalore

If the aquarium is not heavily stocked and does not have delicate (or very valuable) fish, try putting the skimmer and even the filter on a timer--though there must always be some circulation such as from powerheads--to allow everything to filter-feed during the day and have its water cleaned thoroughly at night.aquarium fish encyclopedia online Place a heater(s) in your sump, or the rear chambers of your tank.fish tank on pergo Consider using an aquarium chiller. Fill the tank with tap water partially to test for leaks. Prepare enough artificial seawater for the volume needed. Once you mix your saltwater and fill your aquarium, turn on all your pumps and let the water 'rest' for a day. Another way to go is not to add sand at all. Add 'live rock' and arrange to your liking, approximately 20% of your volume.

Let the tank "cycle": Add cleaning creatures such as snails and small hermit crabs, and finally reef fish. If this is your first reef aquarium, get just one to three inexpensive fish that will be compatible with a variety of other fish including any specific exotic kinds you may want later. Being inexpensive means not only that they will not be a big monetary loss if they die, but that they are strong (thus plentiful) and less likely to die. Being few (and small, which tends to go along with inexpensive) means they are unlikely to overload the biological filtration as you start out. Many aquarists feel its not proper to add corals and anemones until the tank is a few months old. 18 Join a saltwater aquarium community like REEF2REEF and ask a ton of questions and read, read, read! Read books, join online reef keeper boards and ask lots of questions. Buying a refractometer and quality test kits is a good investment. Pump volumes vary per the amount of head space (vertical distance) a pump has to overcome.

Check the pump specifications for what the pressure is for the amount of vertical lift will be required. Horizontal distance is not factored as it has minimal impact unless your going a long distance (10' or more). Invest in a refractometer for measuring your salinity accurately. It is a minimal expense around $30.00 and is much easier and more accurate than liquid tests or old school hydrometers. Long term commitment required. Some fish will live more than 20 years with good care. Many corals will outlive their owners.Beautiful TailsBeautiful BettasBeautiful FishBetta StuffFish StuffTank FishFish FishWater BoogieBetta SpForwardsBetta fish are well known for their beautiful tails but do you know all the different betta fish tail types out there? Do you know what type of tail your betta fish has? This infographic shows them all. an Elephant Nose for sale in our online store. This fish is a member of the group of fish called Mormyrids. This fish's long probe is quite flexible and controlled by the fish.

Pictures: above 4" Elephant Noses and below a 5" Elephant Nose, swimming in one of our aquariums, when one of us took this picture. Click on each picture to see a bigger Look for the name and picture of the item you want to buy. Then move your mouse cursor across the page to the button that looks like ... and click on thatThe Shopping Bag will open on the screen. The item you just clicked will be in the Shopping Bag. adjust the quantity that you want to buy in the bag. You can remove an item from the bag by clicking on  Remove you're done shopping, click on the button labeled "Checkout", and follow the There is a text box to add a Special Request on one of the check payment will be secured by PayPal. here to learn more about PayPal. page are all for one item, which is usually one fish, but may be one plant, one crab, or one fish bowl. for one shipment, containing any number of items, sent to one

One item or one-hundred items the Shipping Charges are usually the same and shown in the shopping bag. complete information about shipping. website has lots of pictures of the fish that we offer for sale. Will the fish you get look like the fish in our pictures? This is like buying a kitten or a puppy, that will change as it more about our fish. We stock and ship fish that are the ideal size to ship. small that they will not do well when shipped. Yet not so big that they will have trouble adjusting to a new home. The fish in almost all of our pictures were young fish like the ones we ship that we raised up, and you can too! interested in buying an item that's marked "Out of Stock", we recommend that you add this page to your favorites or bookmarks and check back on this page from time to time. Generally, we do not know when an item will be back in stock. might be a few days, or it might be much longer. We usually do not get advance notice, so we can't supply you

with any more information, and it will do no good to email us and ask us, when we'll have it back in stock. Click here to read all some customers would like to make a special request withFor example, "the largest Oscar", or "the smallest Oscar", or "2 male and 4 female Platies", "the reddest Red Betta Male", etc. If you send us a Special Request with your order, we'll try to send you what you request. here for more about how to send us a Special Request If you need Assistance here to contact us by email, by phone, by fax, or by mail. A group of Elephant Noses, like the ones shown in the picture below with twenty or more young fish, can live in a bare aquarium. We recommend you keep one Elephant Nose or several but not a few. If you keep 2, 3, or 4 Elephant Noses together in the same aquarium, the strongest one will often make the others miserable. In a group with 6 or more the stronger Elephant Noses become less aggressive.

Elephant Noses will do better, if each one has a cave or a piece of plastic pipe for a home. Be sure the rocks, pieces of pipe, and everything else you put in your aquarium are not contaminated. Click here for more about avoiding contamination. Elephant Noses are very peaceful and interesting fish. The probe below their mouth is not really a nose but is a very sensitive electric organ that is very good at finding small worms in dark or murky water. If you put a small ball of tinfoil in the aquarium, the Elephant Noses will play with it. This may be due to the electrical properties of the tinfoil. Elephant Noses are members of a group of fishes called Mormyrids. Click here to read a brief article from the Encyclopedia Britannica about this group of fish. The article has links on it to other interesting articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Here is a group of Elephant Noses for sale in our facility. Click here for more about buying Elephant Noses from us. These are very interesting fish.

The picture above shows a group of about twenty Elephant Noses in a bare glass aquarium in our facility with no gravel and a few box filters. These Elephant Noses were eating well, complete acclimated, and ready to be shipped to customers. Live Black Worms and other live or frozen foods. Click here for more about Black Worms. Click here for more about feeding fish. Keep one or several Elephant Noses but not just a few as discussed above on this page. African Black Knifefish, Synodontis Catfish, and Baby Whales are good tank mates for Elephant Noses, which are also often kept in aquariums with Clown Loaches, Gouramis, and Angels. Click here to read more about several other groups of compatible fish. Size and Life Span Elephant Noses can grow to be 14" long, but they rarely grow bigger than 9" in an aquarium. They can live for 6 to 10 years, and sometimes longer. Just above, a nice Elephant Nose, measuring about 5" long, when one of us took this picture of one of our fish, swimming in one of our aquariums.

Links to Other Web Sites Click here to go to another website where you can hear an Elephant Nose emitting electrical pulses, and get information about how to buy inexpensive equipment to listen to your Elephant Nose. Click here for more information about electrical discharges from another Mormyrid fish, where it says, "The electric organ discharges of the Mormyrid electric fish may be described as having two parts: a relatively fixed Electric Organ Discharge (EOD) waveform, and a variable sequence of pulse intervals (SPI). The fixed EOD waveform is controlled by the anatomy and physiology of the electric organ; the variable sequence of intervals is controlled by the pacemaker in the brain." Click here for information about the interesting Electrical Fishes of North-Eastern Gabon, where it says, "The EODs of the Mormyrid fishes shown here are all from the Ivindo River and surrounding streams of North-Eastern Gabon. Each species has a species-typical EOD waveform which is illustrated by one or two example traces."

>I have a few questions regarding the elephant nose.  On your web site you said they like to have a pipe as a home.  I was just wondering what kind of pipe you mean.  How big should the pipe be? Should I have more than one pipe if I were to get more than one elephant nose?  Should I have more than one pipe if I just have one elephant nose? Should the pipe just be like a PVC pipe or something else? I appreciate your help.For many years we put pieces of PVC pipe in the aquariums in our facility with Elephant Noses. We bought the pipe with a 2" or 3" diameter in 10 foot lengths at Home Depot, and this pipe was very inexpensive. Then we took a saw and cut the pipe into pieces about 10" long. So the pieces would be long enough for the Elephant Noses to get completely inside the pieces of pipe. Next we took medium grit sandpaper and sanded the rough cut ends of the pieces of pipe to prevent the Elephant Noses from getting cut or scratched by the rough ends left by the saw.