How to Set Up a Saltwater Aquarium - Adding CORALS & SHRIMP: Step by Step Beginner's Guide!

So around two months ago we set up the first saltwater aquarium on this channel and in that episode we went through everything from salinity to mixing saltwater, setting up all the equipment we needed and also getting our first inhabitants which were a few hermit crabs and a snail. But in this episode we are now ready to make some additions to the aquarium. We're going to do some maintenance on it and we're also going to just generally see how everything is going and hopefully by the end of this episode we should have some corals and some shrimp in here and if you think it looks a little bit dirty don't worry that is just algae. Trust the process, it's all part of the plan, it's all part of setting up a reef tank. Let me put this down, let's get into this. Now as I've mentioned the one thing you will notice from this tank is the algae that is in there. Now this level of algae is actually all the growth from when you last saw the tank in episode one. I have not cleaned the glass once, not that I can remember anyway, but this is really not that bad. Most saltwater aquariums or pretty much all saltwater aquariums will go through what they call like an ugly stage. You'll get different diatoms and different algaes and bits and pieces will appear and will disappear as time goes on and they almost sort of burn themselves out really. Now as I say there is nothing wrong with these algaes, it will come and it will go and it's nothing that an algae sponge can't sort out. We can give it a quick wipe over and it will disappear. The main thing with algaes in a saltwater aquarium is you don't want them to get to sort of plague proportions where they take over the aquarium and smother everything in a green film. As long as it's always these small amounts of algaes that are just kicking about the aquarium and you can quickly wipe them off it's absolutely fine. Another thing to bear in mind when cleaning algae from your aquarium, and this pretty much goes for freshwater and saltwater, is you always want to do it before you do a water change or before you remove any water from that aquarium. Because there's no point in doing a nice big water change, cleaning everything up, getting the water looking crystal clear and then cleaning all the algae off causing your water to go murky again. So always clean your algae before going in and doing a water change which, well we'll get to that in a minute. Let me clean this off first and then we'll get there. Now I don't want to go crazy and clean every bit of algae off of every surface because ultimately a lot of the creatures you want to keep in a reef aquarium are ones that will live off that algae. Hermit crabs, snails, shrimps, all of that sort of thing will graze off of this algae. So I don't want to make a completely sterile environment but I want to make it look clean so that I can see in there. So now we've done our little algae clean we can move on to stage two of our maintenance which is possibly doing a little water change. Now you need to be aware of some things with saltwater aquariums when doing a water change or topping up evaporation. It's one thing that quite a few people get wrong right at the start. Now I've been checking this aquarium regularly with my test kit and with the stocking being so low in here, to be honest I don't know why I'm putting that lid back on probably need to take it off in a minute, but with the stocking being so low in here things like our ammonia, nitrite and nitrate haven't spiked and haven't really done anything. There's, as I say, three hermit crabs and a snail in here. Very little waste, very little food going in. But I've been keeping an eye on that and really that's the only reason to do a water change at this early stage is if you are suffering from a spike of something or if your nitrate was really starting to peak and go mental then yeah do a water change. But at this point really all I'm going to be doing is just removing water that's decent and replacing it with new water that's decent once we get more animals in there. Then that's more of a case to do more water changes and keep the water refreshed because there's other things in that water that well I'll get to in a minute because that's later on in this episode, but there are more things in that water than just waste levels that we need to make sure are correct for things like corals and crabs and stuff like that. So nitrates are next to nothing in here, ammonia and nitrite are zero in here, so we're not going to be doing a water change today. We'll probably do that in episode three when we've got animals and we'll be putting our first fish in there. But I did want to talk to you about evaporation. Now when it comes to evaporation on a saltwater aquarium the salt doesn't evaporate, the salt stays in the aquarium. So if you were to top up every time that the water evaporated down and down with saltwater your tank would eventually get really really salty and that is going to be no good for anything living in there. Corals, shrimps, crabs, fish, they are not going to like your salinity getting higher and higher and higher. So when your tank evaporates through evaporation and hot and heat and all of that sort of thing, science, when your tank evaporates you only need to top up with fresh RO water. So that is unsalted reverse osmosis water and you will put that in there to make sure you're bringing your salinity back down. Now obviously in episode one we covered refractometers and testing for your salinity with everything like that and that is going to be your go-to item in making sure that the evaporation is evaporation and so on and so on. So if you're regularly checking your salinity you'll know what's going on in your tank because the water will evaporate, your salinity will go up, you know that you need to add RO water. So yeah that's one thing that lots of people in the shop didn't get their heads around when they first set up a saltwater aquarium. Evaporation you top up with RO, no salt in there at all. Water changes you use salt water but always check it with your refractometer because that will make sure you know where your salinity is and everything is correct and yeah I hope that made sense. Now it would be bad form of me to tell you all to check your salinity regularly and actually for me to go through this video and not check my salinity because you know it was probably three or four days ago that I'd done it and it's better that while I'm working on it and talking to you about it we know what's going on in there. So we are a little bit higher than normal we're 1.027. I tried to do this last time and it didn't really work I can't really get it to do. Let me show you the chart it's all covered in episode one but so this is your chart that you get with your refractometer and you can see this when looking at down through the lens of the refractometer we are probably at 1.027 something like that so it's slightly higher than what a reef tank should be but by like minuscule amounts. So a quick addition of some RO water in here today will get our salinity back to where we want it so let's go find a barrel of RO. Now it doesn't need a great deal because I can see in the filter chamber that it's only down by maybe I don't know half an inch something like that so it need a great deal of water adding to it but when adding RO you obviously don't want to dump a lot in at one time because it can change your salinity obviously if it isn't mixed into the water it can stress fish out and corals out if you were to dump all of that straight on to the top of a coral it probably wouldn't go well so always make sure you're doing it gently over the course of a few minutes hours depending on how much you're adding but for this small amount we should be fine to chuck it in the back chamber let it mix and away we go. So I'll just add this fresh RO water into the back chamber here now you can get auto top-up systems for these tanks which well there's many different versions of it some of them work on a little float valve some of them work on like a laser I suppose you would call it but that will keep your water level then at the correct level and obviously the correct salinity then so yeah you might be worth investing in an auto top-up but for the minute obviously I'm out here every day all day messing around with the tanks I really don't need one but I do quite like gadgets so maybe I will get one at some point. Now you shouldn't ever be leaving your saltwater aquarium long enough for the evaporation to cause the salinity to go into the dangerous levels you should always be monitoring it and making sure that your salinity is staying in those safe zones because for a simple simple thing as salinity and how easy it is to rectify it could cause a massive issue if you don't pay attention to it. I'm not trying to scare you off but with saltwater keeping it's one of those things I always try and explain it to people but it's not that it's any more difficult there's just more things to a saltwater tank there's more things to test there's more things to check none of it is any more different to a freshwater aquarium there's just more of it but with that done onto the next thing which is showing you all the protein skimmer because there was quite a few questions on that. Now protein skimmers are something you pretty much see exclusively used in saltwater aquariums they're very rarely if ever used in the freshwater side of the hobby now down inside of this unit here there's a bigger body to this skimmer and water and air is driven up through here and you can see this little row of air bubbles this sort of foamy collection there now what that is doing is all of those bubbles are coated in waste and muck and hermit crab poop and everything like that and when they're popping up at the surface here you can see they're leaving this like orangey brown residue just above them and when you clean that out you are removing that waste from your aquarium once i get more animals in here you'll probably find this cup will actually start filling up with a brown liquid rather than just a slight sort of almost film of brown on the cup itself but at the moment because there's only three hermit crabs and because the protein skimmer is still really really clean i'm gonna leave it like that because well i could take it out i could clean it but there's so little waste in there i'm not overly bothered once we get some corals and some fish then we'll start seeing that skimmer actually working and doing its job now another thing i mentioned in episode one was flow rates around the aquarium now saltwater aquariums do require a fair amount of flow to keep everything moving to keep corals happy to keep waste dislodged from all of the rock work you're going to have in there and generally there's a few numbers thrown around online but the one that seems to stick is about 10 times turnover an hour now with this tank being a 48 litre roughly you're looking at about 480 litres of flow per hour if you're being spot on the money which this little pump that's in here actually does but i want to make some more additions to this tank in the way of a box of rock that i've got down below me so having an extra power head in there is going to help me make sure all of that waste is dislodged any muck that gets caught in there is pulled out and also the corals that are going to be turning up by the end of this episode hopefully will be happy in there because there'll be enough flow rate going around them to keep any waste away from them and also to pass food over them and so on so on so this pump here is a little thousand litre i think we're gonna stick it somewhere in the back now the other cool thing with these wave making pumps like these is you can actually put them onto like a pulse mode so that it creates waves so if you've got any corals and i plan to have some that are a bit more flowy and a bit more you know moving in the water rather than being battered by one pump and just all pointing one way in the flow this one can actually pulse and hopefully give us that sort of ocean wave movement that everyone likes to see now in theory i don't need the instructions because i've used these before a long time ago in the shop albeit bigger ones now you get a little controller with them so that will control our mode so like if it pulses if it's like slowly ramping up and down and so on and our speed or intensity and this is the little pump look at that it's so tiny that will push out a thousand litres an hour that's crazy now the good thing with these pumps is with the way that they're designed they push out a sort of wall of water rather than a nozzle so you don't end up being sort of hit by a hose pipe it's like being hit with a sprinkler jet it's a lot more spread out a lot gentler but it pushes flow all the way around the aquarium and i think it works on a little usb plug perfect now the plan is to add this little pump into well somewhere back there so we can have it behind the rock work and that will dislodge any waste that may get caught behind the rock work that's the plan anyway hopefully somewhere back there now that pump is so small that i'm not even sure you can see it back there but i'm going to flick it on and see what difference it makes and see if it picks up some waste from behind that rock oh wow well you can already see bits and pieces floating around the aquarium from where and what looks like a little bit of sand that i've probably dropped on the rock but that's ideal that's going to keep everything moving a lot better now even though that has made the tank look a little bit cloudier and a little bit muckier actually that's a really good thing because now that all those particles are in suspension and actually in the water column it will give chance for the filter to actually catch them and remove them if they're just sat on a rock behind well eventually algae will start growing and detritus will start catching in there and it will cause a horrible spot in the aquarium for the nasty stuff to grow so that is doing an absolute perfect job and you can put this into freshwater aquariums as well if you wanted to add more flow to make sure that the water and stuff behind your bog word or behind your rock is not stagnant and building up fish waste then chucking in one of these little pumps works an absolute treat so these are a reef flow pump the other thing that i didn't mention actually is they come with different grills to go on the fronts and the different shapes of those grills mean that the water flow sort of is a different angle and it sort of moves in different ways i've got the widest one on there so it gives off a big gentle flow throughout the whole aquarium and i think that'll work quite well but i might swap them in the future we'll see how it goes now as i say the reason i wanted the extra pump as well is because i want to add some extra rock into this aquarium now the rock that i've got in there would be absolutely fine you don't necessarily need to add any more to it than that obviously when you start buying corals and things they may come on little bits of rock or even big bits of rock if you buy bigger corals and you will soon build up a sort of collection of extra rock work as you're adding corals to your aquarium but i do plan to buy some smaller frags and things of coral so the smaller ones on the little plugs i haven't got any plugs here but they're little sort of ceramic plugs that you put in with a coral growing on top and that isn't obviously going to add to my rock work collection so this mix of eco reef rock from tmc is going to add to that rock it's exactly the same style of rock that's already in there it's just this is sort of lots of smaller pieces that you can build your own aquascape well not an aquascape do you aquascape a saltwater aquarium let's call it an aquascape but this is how you would aquascape your own aquarium and make the sort of rock structure your own with the one i've already got in there that's a set piece that just stays well how it is it comes you pop it in it is done whereas these there's a little bit more personality to it i guess you would say now i haven't actually looked at all of the pieces of rock i did open it when i first got it and pulled a couple of pieces out but i'm actually not sure what route we are going with the design of the rest of the rock work i've probably got too much to put in this aquarium so we'll have a few spare bits maybe for a future project now in these big boxes you do get loads of different shapes and sizes so you get everything from little plateauy sort of bits all the way to the arch that i've already pulled out so it does give you a nice scope for lots of different style setups oh that's an even bigger arch in that one so i ended up going with getting them all out of the box and actually seeing what pieces and what shapes we've got because even though i've got a picture of all the bits it's hard to visualize what we are going to do with them now we do come with two arches so i think i'm going to use one arch and keep the other arch for a future aquarium that i've got plans for um yeah let's get in the aquarium and just see where this goes now even though it looks a little bit odd this donut piece that i've got here is actually going to make a really really good cave for something like a pistol shrimp and goby pair or well who knows what i get in the future but it will make a really good cave system for animals that want to sort of get away from the bright lights and maybe other inhabitants so i think this is going to be our base piece it will go down over in this corner and then we can build up from there i've also just realized i'm probably going to have to remove some water to be able to put the amount of rock work in but i want to now obviously this is all just personal opinion on how you want your tank to look but just have fun with it play around with it get the rocks to match up and sort of lock into each other and go from there one thing you've got to think of when putting rock work in for a saltwater aquarium is you want places to be able to glue corals and you're almost looking for platforms or shelves so that when you buy corals or macro algaes and things like that you can just place them straight onto the shelves and away you go it's actually quite surprising how much of a color that old piece of rock has already taken on in the short period of time that it's been in here it's already got some algaes and some bits and pieces growing on it which is really nice to see because even though these rocks look really natural when they first go in actually having a little bit of algae growth and a few bits and pieces growing on it adds even more depth and sort of interest to the tank i ultimately want this to look like a rock pool i think last but not least i think we're just going to try and join up the two islands by placing one last little bit down in there somewhere there we go ideal so with that extra rock work in there it's going to give places for all of the inhabitants that are going to be turning up soon more places to hide and more places to sort of explore it's also going to give me loads more places for corals now the good thing with adding more rock as well is that it's going to give a bigger home to bacteria the more rock you've got in there and the more surface area you've got in there the more bacteria you've got in there that's going to be breaking down waste and just really sort of helping you to keep that aquarium clean in a roundabout way now one thing i can do to help that process along is by adding some satus in there now this is empty labs bacterial supplement it really does work very very quickly and you know what there's too much going on in my head and i never remember the dosages five mil per 50 liters on the first day five mil per 100 liters thereafter so with that in mind i only need to put like two and a half mil of this in there to help me just colonize all of that new rock work for two and a half mil for the sake of the pennies that that will cost me it's just a nice safety net to have adding extra bacteria into an aquarium like this now another question that came up when setting this aquarium up in episode one was lighting and certainly lighting is very very important in a reef aquarium but if you are just looking at hermit crabs and snails and shrimp and some marine fish lighting isn't that important you know you're just wanting to see them but when it comes down to your animals that live in a reef aquarium that require lighting things like corals things like anemones macro algaes then lighting can be quite important and it's not necessarily like the brightness of the lighting it's the spectrum and the colors and how it's designed now the good thing is with this aquarium is it is designed with salt water in mind tmc have spent time making sure the lighting has the right spectrum when it comes to corals the good thing is well it's got a timer built into it so you press it once it's off press it on that's on whether you leave it on for 24 hours or whatever make sure you turn it off you've got a blue setting and if i press it once more it'll have messed up my timing completely but this will go through a slow ramp up and we'll go through a reef lighting cycle so over the next five minutes of filming this will turn back on and you can sort of see it starting to ramp up already but there are tons and tons of different options out there for lighting it is just reading reviews looking at different ones which ones are going to fit you if you're building your own aquarium from step one then really it's just looking at what corals you want and what you want to achieve and what lighting is going to go with that with this like i say i just want it super super simple super easy nothing really that hard to keep and i want to show people that it can be done well easily and that's lighting is going to be perfect for that that being said when i was up at tmc i saw this lighting running some fairly cool corals and i was impressed that they were doing well under it so uh you never know what the future holds for this tank we might try to make a little bit more difficult later down the line so now it's pretty much just a waiting game for my new animals to turn up there is some exciting things and a few mystery things turning up i've essentially left it in the hands of someone else to pick for this tank so we will see i've told them what i sort of thought i was gonna get and they're gonna go off so we'll see how that goes you'll find out how that goes in the next part of the video which will be in the next few minutes now we have been testing this tank obviously with our standard marine test kits so we have been testing for ammonia nitrite nitrate and ph making sure those are all stable all level and where we want them to be but because i've got corals turning up hopefully on this delivery we are going to have to start looking at some other things down the line so it's not going to be an instant thing but we are going to start testing for other things and namely those are magnesium no they're not that was good wasn't it they are carbonate hardness magnesium calcium and phosphate phosphate's not so much of a worry because phosphate is a waste level that builds up over time blah blah blah blah that'll be a future thing that we'll be testing for but certainly if you want your corals to thrive then your carbonate hardness your magnesium and your calcium are all things you're going to want to check it's not going to be a problem right away because the salt mix that we've used in here has got all of those in it at the right levels super duper no worries but as soon as our animals get in there when they're building their skeletons or when they're building their shells or whatever they're doing they're going to be using up those elements out of the water to do that so eventually they will slowly start to deplete and you do want to keep these in those safe levels which i will go through this in probably episode three because then the corals will have been in this tank long enough to have sort of well settled and probably use it up but the nt labs test kit comes with all of the different safe zones all marked out so it's really simple really easy and as i keep saying it's not more complicated there's just more things to learn so yeah episode three will probably do that but it's just giving you an idea that as time goes on there are more things to a saltwater aquarium that you need to start thinking about now i know you will all start asking the question of well if i test my magnesium and it's lower what do i do and again i will cover this in future episodes as this tank matures that's why i wanted to do this series in this way because we can sort of grow and learn together and hopefully by the time we reach episode i don't know four five we'll probably be pretty much finished and we'll just be waiting for the tank to grow in but if you do test your magnesium or calcium or whatever and it is low then you can get liquids and powders and different things to add to your aquarium to bring it back up but the salt mixes as i was saying that we use in these aquariums as long as you're using a good quality salt it's all in there the magnesium the calcium everything's in there so if you're doing little and often small little water changes you probably won't need to worry and it will just keep bringing that magnesium calcium up as the corals use it but there is no one rule for everyone because everyone's corals will be different if you've got 20 heads of one coral that uses up calcium really really quickly you're gonna have to add more calcium in there if you've got all soft corals which is pretty much what i'm planning to do well they don't use up stuff as quickly as hard corals and i won't need to be dosing it and i won't need to be worrying and my water changes will pretty much keep me going so yeah it's a little bit more in depth and we'll go through it as time goes on there's different types of corals there's different species of corals and we will go through all of that in the next few episodes but i'm hoping to go somewhere very very very very exciting and show you all some behind the scenes stuff probably in episode three or four and we someone sent me a message uh probably in episode three or four but that will then be talking about different species of corals different types of corals what they do what they need blah blah blah but anyway what we've got to do now is pretty much wait for the delivery man um the tank's ready there's a little bit of algae left in there for my new inhabitants to feed off of the new rocks in there ready for some corals to be put on just a waiting game now so uh i'll see you in a few seconds which is a few days in the future and hopefully in these hands will be a box of cool cool aquarium inhabitants it has been a few days and uh as i promised in the last bit of the video we have a box of livestock now when getting any type of livestock for your aquariums whether it be fish coral shrimp whatever you want to make sure that they have had the best possible looking after up until the point that you get them now when i was in the shop fair few years ago and we used to do salt water in the shop we used to buy 95 99 of our stock from a place in the uk called tropical marine center now me and alex from practical fish keeping magazine were actually there with a load of other youtubers and content creators a few weeks or months ago now and we were having a look around their facility in london and honestly it is next level the amount of care and attention to detail that those guys and girls take up at tmc now the other really cool thing with tropical marine center is you can go onto their website look through all the fish and corals and shrimps and inverts and things that they've got in stock and you can request your local shop to give you a quote on buying that fish so it's really clever because you're getting access to essentially a wholesaler you can't see the prices obviously but you can ask your local shop for a price and you can see what they've got in stock at any given time which is a really really cool innovative sort of process that they're trying to bring into the market it means that a lot of shops don't have to hold tons and tons of different fish you can have a look see what you want make sure it's compatible with your tank and request a quote from your local shop so it's very very cool but we better get on and get this box unpacked because in theory we've got shrimps in theory we've got snails and in theory we've got some corals and i super excited to get them in here now obviously i have tested the water again for our little top up and the salinity now is sat at the exact right level and our ammonias nitrites nitrates are still showing zero so all of these little animals in here should have a perfect time going into this tank now i shout out to chris for packing my box and leaving me a little happy reefing message inside the poly box but i am super super excited to be getting in there now that's just a bag to stop them all bumbling around when they were being delivered and we've got our first coral amazing now i'm not going to spend too much time talking you through what is in these bags but that looks like a little watermelon style mushroom so it will be like a greeny color with some sort of minty green stripes we've got a little patch of button polyps or zoas as people will know them what else have we got in here like i said i sort of told them what i wanted and they've just given me a mixture oh that's a little kenya tree i think yeah a little green tree coral by the looks of things it'll be easier to see once it's actually out and in the tank a sand sifting snail oh a black-footed turbo snail and last but not least my two little shrimp oh they are so cool now i will need to make sure that the animals are all at the right temperature and equalize to the temperature in my aquarium because they will have been in the poly box for a little bit of time and may have lost a little bit of the warmth that they would normally have now i'm probably looking at how much water is in these bags gonna need to actually remove some water from this tank before i actually add all the bags in to warm up we've got two in oh i should turn off the lights as well shouldn't i only another four or five bags to go i don't think we're getting all these in without removing some water nope definite tried and failed you didn't see me do that um let's get some water out i can replace this water back in once i've actually got the animals warmed up right so that should give us enough water room now to let the last few bits and pieces in i might even have to take the lid fully off to get all these in i didn't think they'd pack so much water with them but i guess it is better to be safe than sorry it's better to have more water than not enough you go in there oh we're nearly there just one more to go um yeah that's not that's not gonna happen uh i think i'll do this off camera because i feel like i'm gonna drop the lid or do something bad it actually wasn't that bad i just had to tip the lid backwards and now we've got space for all our bags so we'll give them maybe 20 minutes half an hour i can check them with my thermometer to see if the temperature is equalized between the bag and the aquarium but once they're up to temperature then we can start the acclimation process so the bags have had about 25 minutes roughly to come up to temperature and i have just checked and they all seem to be running at the same temperature as the tank so we are now ready to start the acclimation or acclimatization or whatever you want to call it we are ready to acclimate them to the aquarium now we're going to be drip acclimatizing all of these animals into this tank and one thing to make sure when you are acclimatizing them is that all of the animals have come from the same water supply obviously what you don't want to do is you don't want to put your corals and your shrimps and your crabs or whatever you've bought into one container to acclimatize if they've actually come from different systems and may have slightly different water parameters now the good thing is i know that all of these have come off of the same system and can all go into the same bucket so there's really not a great deal of difference between acclimatizing saltwater animals and acclimatizing freshwater animals it just depends on how you want to do it i have got a full video on the channel of all the different ways that i acclimatize and with saltwater stock i always find it's better to be well a little bit more thorough take your time as with everything in a saltwater aquarium patience is key so the longer you take to an extent and make sure that the temperature is right and make sure that everything is acclimatized and the salinities are the same the more success you will have now i've already got a full bucket of water pretty much i don't need much more water i'm gonna have to strain these last few things through a net to make sure that i don't overflow the bucket but it's not the end of the world again gently does it make sure everyone's happy and safe and just go as slow as possible so we've got everyone out into the bucket ready to acclimatize so we've got our couple of snails we've got some little shrimpies that you can possibly see there we'll be able to see them better once they're in the aquarium and we've got a few of our corals so next we have to drip acclimatize these and i need to find my new acclimatization kit now normally i would use a piece of airline with a knot tied in it to just drip water into the bucket which if you watch my acclimatization video you will have seen it in that but i was made aware of these acclimatization kits now i have ripped it open and it's quite hard to get it back in the box but these are essentially designed so that you can check the amount of drops going in and slow them down but yeah this is quite a clever little piece of kit so now in theory all i need to do this looks very very scientific doesn't it i know look at that so it comes with a little u-bend with a little sponge on the end so you don't suck anything up you've got that which is guessing is a drop checker and then down here you've got this which is essentially to slow the amount of water coming out and what looks like a non-return valve as well what a clever little bit of kit oh and a suction cup i guess that's to go in the bucket so it's actually even smarter than i thought it was originally this that i thought was a drop checker is actually a way to get the siphon started on the tube so you don't have to suck on the end of the pipe you just press this a few times and it starts the siphon off genius now i've currently just closed that off so i can get this in there drop my suction cup to the side of my bucket and then all we need to do is this little thing here we roll this back to open it up and that lets the water through there you go you can see the water dropping in there and if i use this to move it down we can slow down the drips to like nothing it's so much easier to control this from this little dial than it is to control it we're trying to tie a knot in a piece of airline you know those pieces of kit that you're actually this is very very good anyway let's leave these guys to acclimatize for a bit and then we'll come back and see how they're getting on we'll probably do this a few times over the next hour so we've given all of our creatures about an hour now to acclimatize salinity in the tank is testing up the same as the bucket so we are ready to get some of them in now we'll be getting some of them in at first and then there's one more step to do with the corals that are in here before they go in so to start off with we'll grab the two easy animals out of this bucket which is our two snails so we've got i think this is a black-footed turbo snail and this little guy which is a nasuria snail or a sand sifting snail now i know there's lots of reflections but i'm going to keep the lights off because the next animals going in there are going to be the shrimp and i don't want to stress them out so i'm going to place our little black-footed turbo snail up on there and then we will place our little sand sifting snail down on the sand there now it is good practice to make sure the snails are the right way up so they don't have to waste any energy flipping themselves over because that can cause the end of a snail i just wanted to show that our sand sifting snail is already on the move and he's already starting to bury himself down and eventually what you'll do is at feeding time you'll just see that little tube come up out of the sand like he's smelling for food right possibly never see that snail again and also our turbo is already on the move hopefully he'll clear up a little bit of that algae that's growing on the rock so next up we are going to catch our two shrimp out of here now these shrimp have a few common names we are going to be referring to them as squat anemone shrimp as i have used their other name in the past and youtube took offense to it so i'll let you google that i'll put their latin name down in the description there they are look right let's get these guys in obviously it's always good practice to keep the lights off so that the animals can sort of find their bearings and not be as stressed out these two little chaps though sort of want to stay in the net do you want to go on the rocks guys no you're just going to stay in the net feel they're quite happy in the net oh look there's a lovely rock there for you to go on to there we go one two we'll get some better shots of our little shrimps in a minute but they're already quite happy down in that cave right now for the corals now before putting the corals into this aquarium there are quite a few things to think about and like i say none of them are more complicated than a freshwater aquarium it's just that there's more things to think about so the first thing is most corals will have not requirements necessarily but they will prefer maybe high flow areas or low flow areas high light areas low light areas so on and so on and it is really just reading up on the corals or the sort of tank you've got and picking the corals around that it sounds way more complicated than it is most soft corals which are the ones we're going to be going for in here or we have gone for are relatively hardy and actually really easy to keep so it's not a great deal to worry about the other thing that you can find is as i mentioned we're going all soft corals which means they don't grow a skeleton they are just fleshy as gross as that sounds but you can get what they call hard corals or stony corals now those corals will grow a skeleton that's what builds the reefs that's the main structure now with those types of corals stony corals send out essentially like sweeper tentacles and they'll sting each other and they'll fight for position in the aquarium it's like having a plant that wants to attack another plant it's very very strange but that's stony corals with soft corals they will actually release like chemicals sort of or toxins into the water and try and poison one another to try and gain space because out on the reef it is everyone for themselves and everyone's got to try and find a position to live and everyone wants more space so when you're putting your corals into your aquarium it's worth making sure they're a little bit split up if they're similar species sometimes you can get away with putting them closer together but this is all the things we're going to go over in the future episodes on this channel so make sure you follow along make sure you subscribe and obviously mentioning and talking about tropical marine center a little bit earlier on we are going to be visiting there again in the next when this video is released probably month or so and i'm hoping to do some videos on different corals and different fish and compatibility and so on and so on we'll see how that goes because it's going to be a very busy it's a long way away from me but i've got some cool plans when we go and visit there i've already visited there once and there may be a video coming out of that but definitely this next time we visit we should be able to get more footage but anyway on to showing you what i need to do with these soft corals before they go in there so unless you're buying big colonies of corals they will generally come on frag plugs that you can see all of these funny shaped discs in the bottom here now this is a frag plug here sort of like a mushroom this is another frag plug here generally the coral will be glued onto the top of that and the coral will settle and grow and well yeah that's it you can place that into your aquarium now some people if the coral hasn't already grown onto the frag plug like this mushroom here some people will trim this piece of rock off and just place the rock in the aquarium and not put the frag plug in now the reason for that is the frag plugs don't sort of tend to blend in with the aquarium very easily they're quite yeah sort of shaped and tricky to blend in but it's not the end of the world if you do want to just place the frag plug in away you go but some people will remove them now some corals like this zoa here have actually started growing on the frag plug already so you can see they've actually sealed themselves to the edge of the frag plug so i can't really remove them from that i could you definitely could do it you could use a scalpel and you could take them all off but what's the point if i'm going to damage the coral i am going to leave it on there because they are already growing on there and the last one is our little tree coral and again that has been glued to one of those little frag plugs i could break it off but i'm probably just going to wedge that frag plug into a rock somewhere and let it grow and let it sort of cover over the frag plug over the next few months now something else to bear in mind before chucking your corals in and hoping for the best is marine tanks and saltwater tanks are a bit more ecosystem-y i would say ecosystem-y that's not really a word but they're a little bit more like a rock pool i guess than your freshwater aquariums you end up with a lot of different life in there when you're adding corals there are all sorts of weird bugs and pests that can come in with your corals it's not normally a major issue but there are things like bristle worms and there's nudibranchs which are like funny little sea slugs that can eat coral some eat algae but most of the ones you get in the hobby are the ones that eat coral and yeah there's lots of different bugs not all of them are pests but they are a problem now because i want to make this series as in-depth and as informational as physically possible so that all of you can succeed and have the best start in keeping a saltwater aquarium i wanted to show you this which is coral dip now coral dip is essentially like a medication it's all natural ingredients as far as i understand but it makes use of natural ingredients and it helps get rid of any of those pests and bugs on the coral you could take your chances and just chuck them in and these corals being straight from tmc and not touching anywhere else i probably would be absolutely fine but like i say in the grand scheme of things i want to show everyone what you can do what's the best practices so this is going to be something we're going to do before getting our corals in now this stuff is really really simple to use obviously inside the main box you get this little bottle now it is two pipettes that's right per litre of water now because my corals are small i'm only going to be doing 500 ml of water so i only need one of these pipettes dropped into there we'll mix that in and then i can show you what we do with the corals so we'll give that a little mix like so and then we grab our corals and we just place them in the solution to get rid of any of those pests that might be hitchhiking on the corals oh last one now roughly you want to be leaving these corals in this solution for about 10 to 15 minutes every few minutes you do want to go in there and just give the coral a quick sort of swill around and move that will just mean that anything that might be hiding in amongst the pollets or in amongst the rock work gets dislodged and put out into the water like i say we're just trying to cover our backsides and make sure there's no pests in there now once we've given them their 10 to 15 minutes sat in that solution we just get some fresh tank water so that's clean with no treatments in it we take corals out and then we clean them off in there just to make sure none of that liquid solution is still on them then we should be ready to get them in the aquarium now as i said i could trim those frag plugs off for the minute because these are the first corals in and i don't exactly know where they are going long term yet i'm going to keep all the frag plugs in place because it just gives me opportunities to mess around with them a later date so i think our little tree coral hopefully can wedge into that gap there something like that now you can use putties and glues to stick these in this is our nice little mushroom i think i'm going to turn this rock around on the back is a little bit of a section i think we could sit that on yeah something like that maybe and then lastly we've got our little patch of zoas which this shelf up here is screaming to have those sat there i think or at least for the minute and that'll be ideal right corals in shrimp in everything's done now i'm going to give everything in here a few hours before i even contemplate turning the lights back on it may even be tomorrow before i turn everything back on but what i'll do is there's a few other little bits and pieces i want to talk about let you know go through and hopefully then the corals will be a little bit more out and i can show you what they're doing and i could also maybe feed the shrimps and the snail but yeah let's have a few hours let them settle down and i'll bring you all back in a minute just to discuss those final important points so there we go we have corals and shrimp happily living in our little reef tank now it has been a couple of days since the last time you saw this tank because to be honest i didn't want to rush and i just left the corals settle in and they are all doing really well the tree coral's been out and is polyping up really really nicely the zoanthids are doing really well and are opening up looking really good the mushroom was looking good until today when my hermit crab decided to climb over the top of it and cause it to sort of shrink up and shrivel but that's nothing to worry about once he settles back down that mushroom coral will come back out and there'll be no worries at all it is one thing to sort of think about really is corals can get irritated by things so if a shrimp or a crab or a fish sort of goes over them or maybe swims in amongst them it can cause them to close up for 20 minutes half an hour an hour depends how irritated they are you've only got to worry when your corals aren't opening up for a long period of time then you've got to start questioning why they're not opening up but i'm sure that mushroom will be absolutely fine once the hermit crab leaves it alone but i do think the two shrimp that are in here are my favorite at the moment they are just awesome obviously we're calling them squat and enemy shrimp i'll drop the scientific name down into the description so that you can go and search what their other common name is i am not calling them that they wiggle their little butts they're a little bit yeah the name will make sense once you see it but they are doing so so well so make sure you follow along for episode three make sure you subscribe because in episode three we are hopefully going to be going and getting our first fish for this tank now obviously we do need to make sure that they're compatible we need to make sure that they're not going to eat the corals they're not going to eat the shrimps they're not going to eat the crabs but to be honest something as small as what would fit in here isn't really going to do any of those things so i don't think we'll have too much of an issue finding something really cool there's some little yellow gobies that i've got my eye on so if i can find some of them they might be the ones to go in here but i'm sure it goes without saying that patience and not rushing things and just being sensible with a reef aquarium is key to its success so uh yeah follow along for episode three where we're going to be doing water changes and hopefully some fish and uh yeah this is exciting i'll keep you all updated as this tank grows in i am so so happy with this it's great oh i'll see you all in the next one