Fishy friends in the front room.

As I am in the process of setting up a native marine tank at home for my youngest, I thought I would detail the process in case any one on here fancied doing the same. There is also plenty of info available if you do a quick google!

This is something which I have done before, but not since I was a teenager. I kept a Corkwing Wrasse for over 12 months in a 24 inch tank in my bedroom. Also in the tank were some small masked crabs, hermit crabs, winkles, a small common starfish and a beadlet anemone.

The beauty of this set up is that it is relatively easy to set up and maintain, with plenty of water available for water changes and lots of places to go looking for new inhabitants in the local area. When you fancy a change, it is easy to return your stock to where they came from and find something different.

Rhys was given a 48 inch tank by his Uncle, so the first step was to clean it up and find a suitable piece of furniture to keep it on. This was easy enough, with an old sideboard which incorporated storage underneath bought for £25 off Gumtree.





Consideration has to be given to what kind of set up you fancy, whether it should be a sandy environment, with flatfish or a rocky set up with some sort of Goby or Wrasse species? After consideration, and as Rhys wanted to collect the stock for the tank, we decided on a rocky set up. This would enable us to go and have some fun rock pooling and would be more aesthetically pleasing than a plain sand tank in which the fish would spend a lot of time buried under the substrate.

The cheapest and easiest filtration system is an under gravel filter, which pulls solids to the bottom of the tank, which will then be eaten by the small crabs which are collected for this purpose. Any excess is removed with a grave hoover. Snails will keep algae off the inside of the tank but will need help if algae becomes a problem.

The plan for this week is to get the tank into the house, set the filter system up. Put in the substrate and then the water now that the may rot has gone. I also need to get new tubes for the lighting so a trip to the aquarium shop is planned for this afternoon.

To be continued......

Sounds a great idea I look forward to seeing and hearing about the rest of this project.

Nice1 kev a big screen without a joypad RESULT

Let me know when your taking orders for live eel

Nice one kev can't wait to see it all up and running

We can all come and fish in your front room when it's raining
(Chuck a Bass in for Tim would you )

Thanks for the replies.

I was hoping to have the filter fitted, substrate in and to have the tank in the house by tonight, but the aquarium shop has had to order the filter and it wont arrive until Monday. Bummer!

This has put a spanner in the works as i was hoping to get some rock pooling done on the big tides at the weekend, but looks like ill have to wait a while.

Fun and games!

To be continued.......

I'll be round yours to have a fish for gobies,pout,scorpions and smelt before long then! Just give me the nod when it's all set up 

Looking forward to seeing this project progress!

Good one Kev and Rhys, I have kept a tank the same size for about 15 years, it does not always have much in it, but is there if I come across something interesting.
I have found that coarse sand is the easiest to keep clean, though I do put a couple of rocks in perched on 3 pebbles for hiding places. You will find the rocks get green algae on them quite quickly especially if the tank is in a warm place. Try to keep it out of direct sunshine, it looks nice but helps the algae grow. You will find it takes something like 70 litres of water, and that is about 2/3 full, which is enough for me.
Some of the most interesting things are shrimps and prawns, plus hermit and other types of crabs. with fish it is a learning curve as to what will eat its companions. try not to put too many or too big fish in as the oxygen exchange in the tank can be quite slow, An aerator that gets plenty of bubbles in the water is good especially in the warmer weather.
For cleaning the algae from the glass, I use a hard plastic kitchen scourer.
When putting water in and out put a drop cloth or plastic down to protect the floor / carpet, as salt water will never dry up properly and I cannot do it without some mess. More with some photos later

Some years ago a house move forced me to transfer a common carp of about two pounds from my pond to a tank. Even in the pond I had before he would feed from my hand so getting him in the landing net was easy. I felt a bit sorry for him in the tank and decided to treat him to a boilie. He took it and seemed to enjoy it so every day I fed him another.
A week later the tank was due a clean and behind a rock in the corner I found his stash, all the boilies were neatly squirrelled away together.

Cheers for that Rhod.

Its all about having a play and creating a happy tank where nothing tries to eat anything else!

When i had the Corkwing, i netted some shrimps and small flatfish off Rhyl beach. I thought the flatties would be fine, but the Corkwing nailed them and ate them before it ate the shrimps!!! Must have been a terratorial thing, as they cant be a natural food.

It left the hermit crabs and masked crabs alone!

This week I have picked up the under gravel filter from Rhyl Aquaria in Abbey Street. I had a chat with the owner of the shop and he suggested trying to find a cheap protein skimmer off E-Bay which will help prevent any blooms of algae in the tank. This is something which I had considered, but with trying to keep the cost down and keep things as easy as possible, I have decided not to bother at this point. It wasn’t an issue last time I had a tank set up, so hopefully, it wont be this time either. I will keep a lookout though, in case on comes up nice and cheap.

I brought the filter bed home and tried it in the tank. It was slightly too long, I think due to the tank being measured and sold in metric and the filter in imperial, so I had to trim the edges to make it sit flat. As you will see from the photo, the filter bed doesn’t cover the whole of the bottom of the tank. This is not vital, but it needs to cover a significant amount to work effectively.



Due to the size of the tank, I will use airstones in both lift tubes to aerate the tank and create plenty of suction. The airstones are positioned at around 10mm off the bottom of the tank. The flow of air, draws water up the tubes which comes from under the filter bed. This creates a cycle where water is drawn through the gravel to replace it and any bits are drawn to the bottom of the tank, where they are eaten by bacteria in the substrate, or beasties such as crabs and shrimps in the tank. Any excess is removed with a net or using a gravel hoover.



The next step was to find some small gravel or coarse sand, preferably already with bacteria living in it, so off a local beach below the high water mark. A couple of half buckets were borrowed and put in the tank, ensuring the filter bed is covered to a depth of a couple of inches at most.



I went with small gravel for a few reasons. With the light on in the tank, sand will look a lot lighter in colour than what I am using and the beasties are less likely to be able to bury themselves in the gravel. More importantly, the water will be pulled through the gravel more effectively, ensuring a good flow through the filter so it doesn’t become blocked with fine particles of sand.

The next step is to fill the tank with water, which will take a few days at least. The water has to be left to settle in the buckets it is carried from the beach. The sediment settles and then the clean water can be siphoned from the top.

All through the process of setting it up, i am keeping an eye out for interesting things in shops to use as decorations in the tank and thinking about what things i am likely to come across and on which beaches to use in the tank.

Terrific read Kev,

Looking forward to the next instalment.

Nice one Kev
If your thinking of using a piece of drift wood at all then be careful as the wood can leach tannins and possibly pollute the water if I remember correctly going back to my aquarium days

Logger wrote:

Nice one Kev
If your thinking of using a piece of drift wood at all then be careful as the wood can leach tannins and possibly pollute the water if I remember correctly going back to my aquarium days

How did you escape Dave

Nice one kev

longranger wrote:

Logger wrote:

Nice one Kev
If your thinking of using a piece of drift wood at all then be careful as the wood can leach tannins and possibly pollute the water if I remember correctly going back to my aquarium days

How did you escape Dave

I stood on your shoulders if you remember
Very good

When I first started an aquarium, I used the same set up as you have, but used a fine slightly muddy sand from low tide at a sheltered beach. Adding the water to the tank resulted in muddy water any way I put it in, but this only took a few hours to clear and gave me some interesting strange worms that lived in a sand tube under the plastic filter, and gathered their food from the sand surface with long white tentacles from up to 6 inches away, fish did not seem to eat them.
The hard part of using this sand was when doing a major clean of the tank as the sand had solidified and had to be dug out with a trowel until Judy and I could carry the tank outside and finish it with the garden hose. Now I am using the coarse shell sand, I have stopped using a filter under it, and have a "Fluval" interior filter, (made in Italy) aerator filter combo that hangs inside the tank from suction cups, and has an electric motor that drives a small propeller. This pulls water through the base of the unit in which are 2 foam plastic pads which filter out any algae in the water. The water exits through an adjustable direction nozzle with an adjustable air venturi at the surface which gives the tank a current, and heaps of aeration if you want to put more or larger fish than my old system could cope with, especially in summer, the warmer the water the less oxygen it can hold.
With the filter and sand system, if I did not change all or about half the water every 6 months or so I would get an orange algae bloom in the water, but since using this sand and filter I have not had any problems. It does pay to change about half the water every 6 months or so to keep the water fresh and clean.
Another reason I had for going to gravel was we have mantis shrimps here, only a couple of inches long which are like mini snow blowers and can shift and stir up the sand usually to make a lair under a stone. They are the ones that have a snapping claw, and when they snap against the glass, it is a wonder it does not crack it. They use it as a defence against anything that annoys them.
I mostly feed the fish etc. small bits of fish, or chopped small worms (not for the squeamish) you can put a larger chunk of fish for them to fight over, but do not leave it in too long or the fish and water will go OFF. If you can find tiny shrimps the fish will gobble them up with pleasure. Looking foreword to more Kev. Thanks Rhod

This is getting really interesting

Cracking post kev can't wait to see it all up and running

Glad some of you are finding it interesting.

Speaking to the guy in Rhyl Aquaria, and he was asking what substrate i was using. He agreed that gravel or crushed shell would be best as fine sand may compact and prevent water flow through the filter. Also, different bacteria live deeper down in the sand we have on Rhyl beach, where the high levels of silt and mud provide an anaerobic environment which could cause problems with maintaining the tank and affect the inhabitants.

With regards to water changes, that is roughly what i was thinking, a third to half every 4 - 6 months, keeping the water in the house for a couple of days to settle and so that the temperature acclimatizes to the level of that in the tank.

The first time i tried setting up the 24" tank i had, we lost a few fish within hours before we realised that the water you bring them home in, has to be left near the tank and allowed to heat up slowly so that the fish dont suffer temperature shock and die.

The plan is, to get the water in over the next few days, and then we will be able to go and have a mooch around somewhere next Thursday at low water on a 30ft tide. Thats when the real fun begins!!!

Many rock pool critters are quite used to sudden temperature changes, try a rock pool on a hot summers day, then the tide comes in!
When you start a tank with fresh water or when you have changed some of the water, take the occasional close look in the tank, larvae of sea life that are in the plankton may settle, and though they may not survive long, are interesting. I had the glass on one end of my tank grow a number of tiny hydra, like small anemones. They are something else that look good in the tank, and if carefully removed from the rock or where they are attached, with a bit of gentle handling will re attach in the tank, and some will move around to somewhere that suits them, again they will eat tiny bits of fish. Yet another excuse to go fishing. (I have used that jokingly to Judy, though the 2 cats are usually a more persuasive reason)
Anyway, happy hunting!

Have you thought of adding a few Limpets
They eat algie so may help to keep the tank clean also

As I have said before, "does he ever sleep?' Good one Dave, yes any snails will help. but they are a bit random like the vacuum and pool cleaners that wander around.

Winkles, Hermit Crabs and Masked crabs, and possibly a star fish are all on the shopping list, along with rocks with plenty of barnacles and a Beadlet anemone or 2 on.

I had a Beadlet anemone in my last set up, which thrived, and began producing offspring!

Great report again Kev it is coming along very nicely look forward to the next instalment.