New member looking for advice

brunoboarder2444

Reefing newb
I have a 20 gallon s/w tank with LR and LS which has a Blue Damsel, an ocellaris clown fish, green bubble tip anemone, emerald crab, cleaner shrimp, turbo snail, and assorted hermit crabs.

I also have a 5 gallon s/w tank run on a 20 gallon filter which has a few things i have collected locally from the Long Island Sound. It contains some very small muscles, a few different kinds of small snails (about 15-20 or so), 6 small hermit crabs, a channeled whelk snail (a little under an inch long, i plan on releasing it once it matures a bit), some silversides (spearing, minnow or whatever it is called locally around you), a couple different seaweeds, and a recently hatched horseshoe crab about the size of my thumbnail (plans to release once it matures a bit). The container i have set up has a large surface area its about 7 inches tall and then 2 foot by 2 foot roughly, it is filled with stuff from the sound (which is just behind my house) including 3 inches of sand/mud i collected from the beach behind my house at low tide and have filled it with water from the sound (i strained it through a clothe to get the large particulate out of it to make it clearer) with one corner filled with some rock also collected from the water behind my house. The setup is room temperature which is roughly the same temperature as the water near me +/- a couple degrees depending on the day. I supplement the feeding by changing a little bit of the water straight from the sound each day to add some micro organisms (plankton etc) as well as feed them some chopped up muscles and shrimp. Everything is doing fairly well and look happy/healthy. The setup almost matches their exact environment behind my house. I joined to see if anyone has any advice on how to suplement the tank better and maybe supplement the diets of the aforementioned critters if I am not doing so already.
 
First of all, welcome!

I can't help you with the supplemental feeding, but please be aware that you should not release things back into the wild after they have been in your tank.
 
Welcome to the site!

BIG HUGE +1 erin...reintroducing things back to the wild is really bad for the ecosystem -- you could introduce diseases that don't belong there, and you can potentially wipe them out, so please do not reintroduce them. You're stuck with them, or give them to the nearest LFS.

As for supplemental, I guess you could toss in some frozen foods, but if they're doing fine, I'm not sure if they'll need supplemental. But someone else will chime in :)
 
Some would, but usually for in-store credit. That's how mine does it. But you can definitely also put it up for sale on craigslist or something :)
 
pictures soon, the horshoe crab seems to be doing well...he just wen through his first molt and i was able to grab his old shell, its out drying in the sun right now to hopefully keep as a decoration
 
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