Tank livestock limits

[mbeach66]

hey i've always been curious. Some ppl follow a simple rule about stocking an aqaurium like 1 inch / 10 gal of space, (or something like that). say you have a 100 gallon tank, that would equal out generally to 10 inchs of livestock. When you add Liverock in, it takes away from the volume of water available for swimming. Would that decrease the amount of livestock you can put in? kind of a weird question. How else do you follow about how much livestock can go into a tank?

[mbeach66]

i had to randomly put this in for my 100th post.

[Matthewdmueller]

Congrates!

[brody98]

There aren't too many of us posting anymore ... that's getting to be quite a milestone!! Keep them coming.

[mbeach66]

why isn't there many ppl posting here? does it need certain added keywords on search engines or something? i mean theres got to be millions of people out there with questions. :S i duno ?

[Matthewdmueller]

I think that reefcentral is sucking most folks up. I don't know why anyone would post there. I have tried but they get lost in a matter of hours just due to the amount of threads that are started and answered on an hourly basis. I like it here, everyone seems to have a good idea of what is going on and there isn't a lot of competition to get a thread in, people are friendly. Some of the folks on reefcentral seem like real you know whats.

[brody98]

Well at least the Russian chicks selling Viagra like us :- ) but then again I haven’t seen one of them in here for awhile, maybe they went to reefcentral.

[XeniaKiller]

yeah so about that 1in/10g question...i'm curious now too...i've never heard that...

[Matthewdmueller]

1" to 10 gal is what I use as a rule of thumb. I use that for total system volume though, not display tank volume. For example I have 120gal display, 40gal refugium, and 30gal sump, thats a total of 190gal so 19" worth of fish. I would probably go over that just a little though to maybe 22-24". I'm crazy though and if you read my other posts you will see why that might be a bad idea.

[brody98]

Some of that depends on the amount of live rock and live sand also.

[dave v]

There is basic problem with a simple rule like 1 inch per 5 gal or 10 gal. How many fish and their size can not be easily generalized. For example are 5 - one inch clown gobies going to produce the same bioload as a 5 inch puffer. You can certainly put more than 5 one inch gobies in 55 gal tank. The amount of fish per gallon really depend on the fish and the size. Even two fish of the same size will put differnt loads on the system depending on their eating habots and such. Some fish are just messy.

What some enterprising young marine biology grad student should do is assign some type of bioload index to different species of fish that depends on size, habit, food type, etc.

Dave

[Matthewdmueller]

Yes I concur, different types of fish but a different bioload on a tank. I also think that they should find some sort of lackey to figure that sort of thing out. I think that running tests like that might be kind of hard though because everyone feeds different, sets there tank up different, uses different stuff, yadda yadda yadda. Plus if there was an index like that it would take some of the fun out of figuring it out on your own. Well, I like to figure it out on my own anyway :). But yes overall I think that Dave is right and there are a lot of considerations to contend with when selecting the inhabitants of your tank.

[brody98]

Thats true you could have 20" of clown fish that wont make nearly the load as one 7" Lion.

[mbeach66]

So i guess it just depends on the "load" the fish has on the system. And which other fish are currently part of the system. What do you mean by "load" though? Feeding habits? size?

[brody98]

How messy of an eater it is and how much waste it produces, Loins for example are extremely messy eaters they scatter bitts of whatever they are eating all over. Then when it comes time to eliminate it's usually huge. You have to take everything into consideration I guess, whether you have a decent amount of clean up crew is also a big factor. I have pretty much always had more of a load than the standard 1' to 10 gal guide line, but I have a large amount of snails and hermits ect..and a lot of live rock for the size of the tank.