One Mistake, Every Tank Personality Has Made (and how to avoid making it again)
There’s one mistake that no matter your tank personality, you make at some point in your saltwater tank career. And, you’ve probably made it several times.
The mistake: feeding too much food to your fish.
When you feed too much food, not all of it gets eaten, so this uneaten food has to go somewhere. It usually gets trapped under or around rocks in your tank and ends up decaying causing issues such as high nitrates and nuissance algae outbreaks. These issues take time to deal with and last time I checked, no one was walking around saying they had excess time on their hands. On top of that, nuissance algae is ugly and no one wants an ugly tank.
By feeding only enough food for your fish to eat before it gets swept away by your pumps or before any hits your sand bed, you’ll be making sure that your fish are eating all that is served to them. And here’s another way to make sure your fish eat everything you give them: feed less amounts more frequently. Feeding small poritions in the morning and again at night is better than one massive serving once a day.
Follow these tips and you’ll save yourself a lot of time and headache dealing with nitrates and algae and you’ll have a beautiful tank to show for it.
Browse the Store! Questions?
Mark – I have a 150 gallon tall marine land, about 9 month old. The nitrates are sky high +160 and the corals are going south. We had a marine land skimmer, which wasn’t working too well. Now we have a eshoppes 120 and it is fantastic; however weekly water changes have not helped at all. We have the following fish (1 each): clown, achiles tang, unicorn tang, clown tang, yellow tang, royal tang, tomini tang, flame angel, hawk fish, horned blenny, diamondback goby, (2) bangi cardinals, checkerboard wrasse, harlequin wrasse. Is this too many fish? I have heard 1 inch of fish per 3 gallons of water. If that is true, we are under 50 inches. Please help as those Nitrate contraptions are looking pretty good!