Habitat - Indoor :: Tank Stand Substitute?

[Muirner]

reef tanks are sweet things though steve. Any idea how hard it'd be to set up a 10 gal reef tank?

[steve]

10 gallons might be too small for a reef, but I might be wrong. The lighting and temperatures are very important in those setups as well and probably more expensive than turtle keeping (excluding vet bills!)

[SpotsMama]

I think most people with reefs have a reef-maintenance service that comes in periodically - every month or every few weeks - to clean it up and fine tune it. Kind of like a pool cleaning service or a maid. An on-going expense.

If you're going to get a coral reef - and they can be really beautiful - why don't you see if you can get a piece of reef that was grown on a man-made base - like concrete. I hear they can be just a beautiful as the wild ones. These types of reefs are sustainable - nothing wild is removed from the environment. The problem with the wild reefs is that they are very very stressed right now. Global warming has taken a terrible toll, the reefs are dying all over the world, and also they have been over-harvested recently because of the popularity of reef aquariums.

[Hoooneylynn]

Can't you turn any tank into a reef tank? I dunno... I really dont know anything about them, I just thought they had those colorful reegs in there. Are those reefs alive??

[SpotsMama]

Yes - what makes those reefs pretty is living corals! They are quite beautiful, aren't they. The corals are very delicate - hence their suseptibility to water that's too warm - and need certain light and certain salt water.

Of course, you can always get cheap fake corals for any tank. I think they're pretty too - I've got a couple!

[Andrew7769]

lets put it this way...ppl with reef tanks use 30gallon tanks as SUMP tanks so a 10gallon is to small to mantain the proper water chemistry not to mention that fish run up to the hundreds of dollors for a single fish! there are cheaper fish but its a risk you run that you put a 50$ fish in a tank and it turns up dead....

[Hoooneylynn]

what do the corals eat and how much do they cost? Would an REs eat the corals?

[SpotsMama]

Corals live in salt water, so you couldn't put them in a tank with a RES. Why don't you look in on an aquarium shop - they could tell you all about them. I'm sure there are places that specialize in large aquariums and salt water setups in Chicago. There are number of them in Dallas. I don't know how much a setup costs but they are reputed to be very expensive to both to set up and maintain - thousands of dollars anyway.