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SAVING MONEY -Get Sand, Saltwater & Live Coral for the Ocean


Oogalepbo

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I live in Wellington and would like to know if anyone knows where to get live coral, saltwater and Sand from instead of buying them from stores....Its to care for Cleaner Shrimp lysmata Amboinensis common name unknown...

Would i get in trouble from MAF lolz???? But if i do get some....

Would i need to do anything special to the saltwater, sand and coral before i put them in the tank and/or before i add the Shrimp???

If anyone can also help me with the coral...Name, info and Pics...What would i be looking for in Live Coral to know that it's ready?

Cheers to all who reply.

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The SW stuff you will find in the wild here are coldwater, so Cleaner Shrimp won't be particularly thrilled in cold water. from memory they prefer temps around the 25- 27deg C mark.

do you have a marine tank at the moment?

will need a lot more info about size of tank, lights, skimmer, pumps, filtration etc before live-stocking suggestions are made.

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Hey Pheonix 44

Thanks for the reply. Much appreciated

I havn't started a marine tank yet was wanting to do research first before i went ahead and started up anything. I was thinking of 45L glass tank for 2 cleaner Shrimp. 3-4kgs of Live Coral (coral acting as Filter). As for Lighting I don't know how much light i will need for the coral and Shrimp??? Air if a filter is good enough for airflow. Anything to recomend on Lighting? How many Watt light bulbs i will need for 45L tank? And Air Flow?

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I wouldn't do it. 45L tanks are a million times harder to look after than say 200L tanks. Especially with salt-water systems.

I had a 300 odd L reef ages ago, and in order to do less maintenance I added a 150 odd Litre sump.

also with 3-4 kg of live coral the amount of water in the tank will have reduced by another 3L or so, at the very least. and as a proportion of the total amount of water in the system 10% of huge!

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In Answer to your question,the only thing you can collect from the beach is seawater and there are some ricks involved in doing this. There are is no coral rock (live rock) naturally round NZ and the sand is also not coral based so not really suitable.

Regards the other questions that have come up,

Lighting isn't important for shrimps and live rock (coral rock), light only becomes a factor if you want to keep corals alive.

Air filter/air flow. Not needed. You don't use biological type filters in marine tanks like you do fresh water, the live rock takes care of this, plus a protein skimmer. If you are willing to do large regular water changes it is possible to get away with no skimmer. Particularly if you stay with only the shrimp and have no corals.

It is possible to do what you are looking at in a small (45l) tank but as others have said stability is the key to success and the smaller the tank the more difficult it is to get that stability.

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