# Upper Wisconsin beginner to SW



## minocqua (Oct 30, 2005)

I just ran into fishfirst in central WI and had a nice talk with him...anyway, I am interested in starting a SW tank and need sugestions on equiptment needed (lights,skimmer, powerheads, filters, live sand? etc). I want to start with a 55 gal setup. At this point I'm not going to get into live rock or corals (until I get the hang of things), I would like to have a few small clowns and yellow tang etc. Please when giving suggestions, let me know what brands of equiptment would work best. BTW, how many fish would work with this size tank? TIA :fish:


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## TheOldSalt (Jan 28, 2005)

Welcome to FishForums! You definitely came to the right place.

The "rule" of saltwater is 5 gallons of water per inch of fish. It's not really a rule, though, and it doesn't work in many applications. An 11 inch long wrasse or angelfish certainly won't live in your 55 gallon tank, for example. On the other hand, 5 or 6 little 2-inch fish will do just fine. It's just a rough guideline at best, but handy enough when dealing with small fishes.

At any rate, you should have already noticed that that is a LOT fewer fish than could live in a freshwater tank of the same size. There are many reasons for this.
1- Saltwater doesn't hold as much oxygen in it as freshwater does, having a lot of it's available solution space taken up by salts & minerals.
2- The fishes we keep in saltwater tanks come from the reef areas, which are characterized by pounding surf which saturates the water with as much oxygen as it can possibly hold.
3- The fish have evolved under these conditions for a very long time, and aren't good at dealing with inferior conditions because they've never HAD to.
4- The sea is an amazingly stable place. Again, the fish aren't good at dealing with big changes because they've never had to.
5- An aquarium is not the sea. Things change comparatively very quickly in them. Change kills. The fewer fish, the less they impact their environment.

So, a marine aquarium is a glass box of salty water in which an assemblage of fish needing all the oxygen they can get are trying to get it out of water which can't hold very much. These fish also need the cleanest water they can get, but are forced to live in such a small amount of it that it can't help but get very dirty, very quickly.
This is a recipie for disaster, of course, and for many decades it was considered very difficult to keep marine aquariums. However, today we have figured out how to get around these problems, and the first thing we do is acknowledge that they exist and cannot be ignored. Then we play by nature's rules instead of our own.

Sorry about the sappy narrative, but these are the very first things that you must know and understand before having any hope of success as a marine aquarist. We can tell you "what" & "how" all day long, and we will, but until you know the "why" of it you don't stand a chance, so I felt it best to get that covered from the very start. Now that you know these things, the rest is just details.

If you just want fish, then you can get by with a lot less initial expense. You can use ordinary flourescent lights instead of the fancy high-output ones. You can use a wider variety of filters. You don't need live sand. Finally, if your fish get sick ( and they will ) you can use medicines right in the main tank.

I would suggest the use of two big external filters ( only one of which is cleaned at a time ), a skimmer, and maybe an ultraviolet sterilizer unit. I'm sure that Fishfirst will be along shortly to go over these in detail with you as well as offer his own ideas. 
With a fish-only tank you'll have to contend with things like the nitrogen cycle a bit more & nitrate, but on the other hand they're easy to deal with by making simple water changes. As your tank gets more high-tech it gets more maintenance-free, but a lot more complex & expensive as well. Everyone, in my own opinion, should start with a simple fish-only tank in order to learn the things that will make more advanced systems easier for them to maintain in the future. I'm glad you're doing things this way, and I'm glad you decided to learn about saltwater tanks before starting one.


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## Fishfirst (Jan 24, 2005)

WELCOME! And I'm glad you stopped by! I remember my first salt tank, 55 gallon, 3" crushed coral, Hang on the back filter, a little knowledge, and some mistakes. It was fish only, but I did get some inverts as that tank matured and I understood things a little bit more. I would first, get a book...
The Conscientious Marine Aquarist by Bob Fenner, that book is a good guide when taking on this hobby. Also check out the posts at the top of this section and in the profile workshop about saltwater.
I would also check out www.liveaquaria.com and look at all the fish there, write down the fish that are the "must haves," the ones that "secondary" and the ones that are "last choices" Then I'd post them here and we could come up with a bunch of combinations for you that would work!


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