Hi Pete, my husband toured the Kona facility and super impressed with their efforts and results. Because we’ve enjoyed fish keeing since 2005 we would love to know if our tank would make a suitable home for a pair? It may help you to know we are Bob Fenner followers so we’ve lived by his rules understanding it’s best to accept more NO’s than a YES in what we would like to have in our tank vs. what is really best to put in it. Our stock is limited to animals he has recommended to adapt well and we do feed the highest quality diet because it makes too much sense to work hard at keeping the animals healthy and alive. Oh duh!
TANK: The tank is 72 inches long, 18 inches wide & 32 inches deep. We’re using a proteien skimmer for filtration. I can’t recall the turnovr rate of our pump, but as you know you purchase based on tank size and what you’ll be keeping. It’s the one they make in it. Our goal was to have a darn good FOWLR system keeping peaceful reef safe type fish. We house two live rock stacks that we call our inner and outer reef towers. The remainder landscape is baracles, fake plants and corals that we rotate and sun for cleaning.
TANK RESIDENTS: A dozen or so Scarlet hermits & cleaner crabs (pinkie finger size), 2 cleaner shrimp, 2 low light corals, 1- 5 inch Foxface, 1- 3 inch Percula Clown, 1- 2 inch six line wrasse, 1- 3.5 inch diamond Goby and 2- Lyretail Anthia’s. The larger female Anthia is 2.5 inches and making the turn to male. The smaller is 1 inch. We would like to add another female Anthia to restore our harem of 3. So the seahorses would be a last add in if you think they would work out.
FEEDING SCHEDULE: We do feed twice a day and easy to add mysis to each feeding. Right now, our current a.m. cups include bio plankton, nori and we rotate mysis, crab or plankton as the meat of the day. Our p.m. cups include frozen formula II and dry formula 1, II and thera A soaked in a combination of marine plankton, zoo plankton and cromoplex. We haven’t seen baby shrimp with this pair of cleaner shrimp but if they mate that will be an added snack for everyone as they cycle. The food cups are dumped into a feeding tube we installed in the sump directing it to the intake which shoots it out our bulk heads. Food goes everywhere to assure needless competition during eating.
The tank is peaceful and except for getting checked out at first we expect our fish would be more inclined to ignore sea horses but figure you would know best. The observation at the farm that concerned us in putting sea horses in our tank was the feeding method. We would consider that diretional feeding. We do have a directional feeder that we use to stock the tank with pods but I’m putting a huge amount of work into the food cups so I don’t have to spend a lot of time on each individual feeding. Do these seahorses grab food floating by? All we saw was a glob of mysis right in front of their face fall to the tank bottom waiting for them. That would not work in our tank. We do have a dead area in the tank that would allow food to mimic what we saw but our tank is too large to assure the sea horses would always be there so still best to assume they could be out anywhere enjoying a fair amount of territitory when a feeding comes up.
Your feedback would be most appreciated.
Sincerely,
Debi Stanley-Viloria
Ocean Rider, Inc. is an Organic Hawaiian-Based Seahorse Aqua-Farm & Aquarium that Follows Strict Good Farming Practices in Raising Seahorses and Other Aquatic Life.
