Cheap saltwater

[Titans]

That's too bad your petco doesn't carry Catalina water. I wonder what they use for there salt water tanks when they carry live stock? Maybe you can order it online from petcos site but a gallon would probably be pricey to ship. I'm about to pick up 10 gallons of saltwater today from my local aquarium reef shop for about $5.00. They also have synthetic pre mixed saltwater for double the price...I wonder if I could just go to the ocean since it's 15 minutes away and bottle some up then run it through a UV and some filters myself?

Here's a picture of my saltwater aquarium

and some of my snails and hermits when I was acclimating them before placing them in my tank

[krabby_katie]

You have saltwater hermit crabs? That's so neat!

[Titans]

haha of course =) they are my clean up crew. They help balance out my eco system by cleaning algae and detritus in my tank. I have several kinds because each has a different function when it comes to cleaning. I have blue legged hermits with black and bright blue stripes, red leg hermits, halloween hermits that have orange and black stripes. They are fun to watch.

[krabby_katie]

That is so awsome. I want to get a saltwater tank just to get some of those!

[HermieLove19]

If I didn't already have a freshwater setup I would definetly do salt water. I got the fish when I was 17 and I just wanted fish. I never thought of all the posibilities there are with salt water tanks.

Titans, do you have a refugium on or in your salt water tank? I've heard they are growing in popularity and I wanted to see what one looked like if you had one

[Titans]

I personally don't have one but if you look on the right side of my tank I do have a big bundle of chaeto algae which is usually held in a refugium to keep it out of site.

Refugium's are popoular because you can add more water volume to any display tank and hide it out of site. You can place things like my chaeto, extra live rock and live sand which can be an eye sore to reef setups but help in bio filtering. It's like they say in the salt aquarium world, "If you pour a gallon of bleach in a bathtub whoever is in it will get pretty sick but if you poured the same bleach in lake michigan it will probably not effect anything (unless of course you poured it right on top of some living things =P) So if your limited like me to a 35 gallon tank and there's a really cool fish you want that requires atleast 50 gallons of volume (because they are more sensitive to parameter changes) you can throw a 15 gallon refugium under the stand and buy the fish =)

I'll try to find pictures later of some refugiums for you.

[HermieLove19]

Thanks! I get it now. I found this mud for refugiums on drsfostersmith.com and they had it for hermit crabs. i guess they meant marine hermies. I have red claw crabs in my fish tank.

[Jaci]

I've seen those blue striped ones, they look amazing!