What kind of sand and rocks are in the large tank? It look like play sand.
That light looks like a chinese black box. They usually don't have good spread. you will need 2-3 of those light for that size tank.
-Your protein skimmer is too small for the tank.
- I do not see any pumps in the tank for water movement. Any dead zone (no flow) will have detritus settling onto the sand bed. Stagnant water is very bad for marine tank. It will have sulfur build up.
- Marine tank do not use canister filters or wet/dry filters. This two type of filtration are mainly used in freshwater tanks. Canister filter can be used in marine tank ONLY if it is cleaned regularly (weekly), otherwise the canister filter will be a nitrate factory.
Coraline do not grow out of thin air. You will need a coraline source to seed the tank. You can get this from a rock that is cover in corline. or glass scraping of coraline. LFS will able to give you a small coraline rock to seed the tank.
Most species of Gorgonian corals are not photosynthetic (white polyps) . They will require daily feeding.
Aqueon OptiBright are not good led. They are only good for fish only tanks. It don't have the PAR or spectrum for corals.
I will suggest keeping Green star polyps, pulsing Xenia and zoa. Pulsing xenia should create a lot of interest for the students as they will pulse. They are easy and very hardy. GSP and xenia are consider weeds of the sea.
We had purple Coraline on a few rocks. (I'm no expert but I do know life doesn't spontaneously occur.)
We feed our gorgorian ReefRoids every other day, we can definitely increase that to daily. We give it to our rock anemone too.
I'll get a new light for the biocube. Any Suggestions for a tank that size?
I already new we needed new lights for the big tank. I'm ordering three new ones.
Our nitrates haven't been an issue with our cannister. We monitor it frequently we will have an ammonia spike right after we add phytoplankton supplements or zooplankton supplements but they correct themselves by the end of the school day. We can clean it every other week, but we haven't been. Would every other week be ok? What else should we use if not a cannister?
We have two wave makers on either side of the aquarium. We do get build up in pockets though. One of those spots is where the flame scallop set up shop. There are two fake rock sculptures, the rest are live rock, they had purple coraline (it's all bleached), brown zoas, red algae, green algae (not much my clean up crew has eaten all of it!) Do we have too many rocks? Should I get rid of the fake rocks(they are the fishes favorite)? The rocks had spikey tube wormy things we crushed before putting back in the tank.
I am not sure about the sand. The tank was donated, it came with the light fake rocks, clownfish and velvet damsel. We got the live rich from someone else (they were so pretty purple, but have bleached out).
There are large shell chunks in the sand, so I'm not sure if it's play sand. I didn't want to rinse it when we transferred it to the classroom because we had to put the fish back in it and needed it to be fairly fish ready. We also kept 50% of the water so it would cycle pretty quickly (fish survived!) Should we get more substrate?
Pulsing Xenia sounds neat! I have caulerpa mexicana culturing in my at home tank I was going to bring over.
Thank you for all the advice!
Cheers,
Ellie