landscaping my tank

[ricksoundman]

Any one!

Is there any ryhme or reason to where you should put one thing over another.
how do you decide what needs what in the way of flow verses light verses who knows what???

 

[broskie]

What I would do and have done is setup a piece of cardboard the size of your tank and do a dry run. Setup rock the way you like them. Take a picture and rebulid them in your tank that way. Also I would try to make different ledges at diffrent depths for certain corals to rest on that need more light or less and diffrent flow.
The adjust the flow in the areas needed and so forth.

 

[Beckie]

I put the rock work in building it with caves and different hieghts. Every thing but acans and zoos went in the middle of the tank. SPS slowly moved to the top chalices seem happy in the middle. Watch what you have and if its not open & happy move it. Oh yea leave some room so they can't sting each other

Beckie

 

[lvsuckerfish]

it is all preference on what you want your tank to look like i know I am bad at aquascaping and will probly search on here for someone that is good at it and con them over to do my tanks. but it is a preference on what you want to grow and plan for how they will grow out IE tabling acros vers branching acro. zoas shrooms acans chalices and what not. research is key in planing on placing corals as to what corals will get along and what ones do not.

 

[returnofsid]

It doesn't really matter, no really, it doesn't....cuz you'll redo it 5 times before you're happy anyway...lol.

Seriously!!

Make sure there's space between rocks for fish to hide in, swim through etc, and for water to flow through. Having an idea of what types of corals you plan for your future helps too. If you're going to want lots of LPS, Zoanthids, Soft Corals, then building your rocks up high isn't as important, as if you'll have SPS. If you plan to have clams, make sure there's areas of low flow for them. This might mean building a "cove" of rocks, to protect the clam from flow.

 

[ac7av]

That’s it, don’t worry about it, just try to not pack the rocks together so tight that fish cant swim between them or get any water flow around them. Think out side the box but keep the rock inside the glass box. I really went pretty crazy with my tank but unfortunately it doesn’t translate onto a photo well or I would give you a look at some cool cave work the fish just love to zoom threw. I put my tank together dry and used the fish tank silicone at the connection points to make sure the rocks don’t fall over or move. I placed egg crate on the bottom of the tank and filled it in with substrate and then back filled the rest when the rocks were all in place. I think it looks sweet and none of the main towering pieces of rock are going to move or fall.

 

[Lakota]

+1 on doing the rock work first and adding sand second. I was lazy and put in a fairly deep sand bed before my rock, and now I will probably be redoing it this weekend. I thought it would be easier that way because my tank is a 55 gallon and not very wide. Unfortunately my tomato clownfish has made a full time job of digging sand out from under the rocks and I'm worried about them toppling over.

 

[TJL]

Aquascaping and coral placement

There are lots of good ideas in the 'Tank Design' And 'Member Showcase' forums for aquascaping your tank and IMO the best/easiest source of info for coral placement would be Julian Sprung's book "CORALS a Quick Reference Guide" it has an easy to understand placement chart that shows Lighting Needs, Water Flow, Aggressiveness and Hardiness for most corals you'll find at LFS. Then as Sid and others have stated once you redo everything 5-6 times it will all make sense. Here is a few pics of my DT, FTS is after many changes in coral placement.

Todd

 

[returnofsid]

As was mentioned, place rocks BEFORE sand. This way, rocks aren't sitting ON the sand bed. You'll find this very helpful, if you ever get any sand sifting or sand digging critters. This advice could even save your tank. You'll find stories of people who placed rocks on sand and then a pistol shrimp excavated and caused an avalanche of rocks. It happened to me, but I was lucky and glass didn't break.

 

[apollothesun]

+1 on changing 5 times. but also remember to leave room between the glass and the live rock so you can reach down with your hand and scrape that coraline algae off.

 

[SteelHead]

I love "landscaping" tanks!!!