Seahorse

[rthomas]

Interested in keeping a few seahorses (2-4) in my 75 gallon reef tank. A worker at my LFS said they are fine to keep with fish and coral is this true?

 

[WA coral]

I have kept them as well as pipe fish and I would not recomend keeping them in your reef tank with other fish etc. they do not do well with flow as they are not strong swimmwers and are easily sucked up into powerheads / overflows and intakes also they do not compete very well when it comes to feeding the best success I have had was in a nano tank 30 gallons or under with low flow and no competeing feeders madrins/wrasses and agressive feeders. I have done pipe fish in my reef and have been successful for 2 years in a previous tank. just my 2 cents

 

[joker577]

Sea horses are meant for a species tank and if you decide to get them should be the only fish you have in your tank. They have a hard time competing for food as they are slow swimmers and need alot of rock work to hang onto with their tails depending on what type they are

 

[Seacraze]

Seahorses are my favorite! The above comments are excellent ... here is some more info hope it is helpful

Seahorse .. best kept as a species only tank. No corals that stink and no agressive tankmates, clean up crews are fine as long as they are not aggressive. Tank temps are best kept 70-73 degrees for most species and easily develop bacterial infections above that ( most reef tanks are way too warm ) . I lost one of my favorites in the beggining to a filter that had the guard fall off - so powerheads if used need to be very well covered and protected. Heaters should have guards becuase they will wrap around them and yes - they are burned before they know it!! For average sized species I use 30 gallon per pair and for each pair after that I add a minimum of 15 gallons. Tanks need to be well established for they can create a big bio load.

I have a realy good list of seahorse safe tankmates that I am happy to share if you like!

 

[seawandrr]

As a data point, we keep our seahorses and pipe-horses in 40 gallon hex that is plumbed into our main reef system.

Our banded pipefish (or dragon-faced pipefish) do just fine in the big mixed reef (note - it's a pod making monster, they've never transitioned to frozen/dry food, and have been happy and growing for a long time)

There's no way the seahorses could make it in the main tank due to flow and competition for food.

If you're careful about species selection related to temps, you can run the seahorse-species tank plumbed into your reef, and gain all the benefits of your exising sump/skimmer and water volume, and thus water stability. A concept that in my opinion you don't see supported enough compared to the "they always require a completely seperate system" answer.

 

[returnofsid]

Actually the concept of keeping seahorses in a separate system for seahorses that's piped into a reef tank isn't at all compatible with seahorses. Apart from seahorses being incompatible with reef tanks due to flow issues, competition for food issues, the main reason that seahorses aren't compatible with a reef is a temperature issue. Seahorses need temperatures about 10 degrees cooler than our reef systems. With the high temps of our reef tanks, seahorses are VERY likely to get bacterial infections.

However, seawandrr did address this situation with the comment about careful species selection. Although there's very few seahorse species that can be kept healthy at those temps.

 

[Reefreak]

Here is a good article. Temp depends on the species of seahorse. some are tropical some are not. http://www.seahorse.org/library/articles/SeahorseFactsAndInfo.pdf