Tank Build! Orbit Cubic 20 Jellyfish Tank For Dwarf Seahorses

Hey all, after having an orbit 20 and keeping jellies with hatching BBS I was thinking this tank might be cool to try dwarfs in. The flow is adjustable, it's designed to keep food in suspension and not filter out food or suck livestock in the intake. The circular flow gives a nice holding pattern in the middle for small particles like bbs. Here is what I have done so far:



I really like how the spray bar goes over the intake. Sure that decrease efficiency, but a decent amount of water still enters the filter ring.

Orbit 20

I plan on attaching a eheim canister filter to the external ports. These are not directly connected to the display area, they are in the filter ring, but will give a ton more filtration capacity and oxygenation and the ecco eheim can also have flow adjusted.

Thoughts? It's my descent back into salt... I liked the jellies, but I snagged them when cleaning the bottom and tore them. It was then I thought about dwarf seahorses.

 

That is really really cool.

Seahorses is one fish I have never had, but thought about adding to my refugium some day.

It sounds like they are pretty easy to breed if you get that far.

 

Thanks, I got the eheim ecco hooked up and it can run full flow in the outer filter ring and not push water over to the middle, so that is a success. I will keep the eheim even if go back to jellies, I took all the floss out so it's just 3 trays of the substrat pro media which I think is good stuff. The tubing isn't quite right to the connections, but ACE had hose clamps that are working great.

Have so mysid shrimp coming. I hear they are great with dwarfs as they breed every few days and give supplemental nutrition. It would be nice if a store in DM had live mysis.

Dwarfs sound pretty easy if starting with no live rock and keep up with food. I had decapped brine eggs already, so that is a start. Seahorse.org has a ton of info.

 

mysis are really tough to keep and breed as they are so cannibalistic. BBS will do just fine for them.

A culture of tigger pods or tisbe pods is really easy to start and maintain and would be a good alternative.

 

Interesting. On the org site there is a 15 page thread or so about keep Mysis with dwarfs and they had phenomenal success spanning a several year period as did other who were following the thread. The adult Mysis are not to feed the dwarfs, only the largest can eat them, but the dwarfs eat the babies. Still have to feed BBS daily, but the mysis, in a larger tank, maintained a self sustaining population and encouraged the dwarfs to hunt, which with BBS they don't do.

I am not planning to do other cultures besides BBS and the Mysis in tank.

From my research keeping mysis shrimp with dwarfs is somewhat standard practice now.

 

I should of worded that better.

Culturing them in a separate container to harvest and feed/sell is hard. Keeping a population in a tank is not hard, but probably not enough to sustain them.

Sounds like you are on the right path, looking forward to following it.

 

Ah, we are on the same page! I just ordered 20 to put in the tank with them and just for extra nutrition. I have been hatching bbs so it's not a big deal to keep those going. From the sounds of it I can do 1 or 2 large hatches a week at a cooler temp and stagger enrichment and feedings. But I will have to get that all sorted as I go. I am pretty curious how they take to the cubic 20, it seems pretty well suited for them. I will keep updates. I just figured if need to hatch BBS I would rather go for dwarfs over jellies. My jellies didn't do great on the frozen or dry food, but many people seem to have luck with jellies and the dry foods.

 

Is that a hard coral skeleton in there? You may want to look for something softer/less sharp like a synthetic sponge for them to grab onto. They are pretty sensitive and you don't want them to get a cut or scrape from wrapping onto a sharp coral.

 

It's soft plastic. I would have liked to find a plastic sea fan, but that is all I could find locally. I trimmed the base to fit the curve a bit and I think overall it fits in there pretty well.