Thanks for your help.
What is the best way to tell the difference between Peppermint shrimp and camel back shrimp? Seems like the LF stores here are not very knowledgable, none of them
so I can see us ending up with the wrong species. There are only 5 stores that sell a good amount of marine critters, and only 2 of them are specifically for saltwater. Most of the time when I ask a question I know more about the answer than the owner or employee does, which is frustrating. If I can learn from a book and the web he should too.
Anyone else have any advise about the algae? We went out and bought 4 more snails (2 turbo and 2 something with an A), and a blue legged hermit crab. The snails went fast to work and are moving all over the tank cleaning up. Any other good cleaners for algae? The hermit we bought was pretty big (shell maybe 1 1/2") maybe we should by several very tiny hermits to clean better? Or more snails? Which kind of snails is best?
Anything else for cleaning the sand? We actually have a fairly deep sand bed which was unintentional (2-3" in places, much less under and around the rocks), as we added more sand when we bought the tank (it only had 1/4-1/2") and ended up dumping way more in than we thought, and didn't notice till after the water was in.
Turns out the phosphates are between 0 and .5 which is high, how can we lower those? We only have a tap mounted filter for the water, can't afford a RO filter yet. On the plus side I topped up evaporatioon last night and did a 10-12 gallon water change today and the nitrates were between zero and 5. Not sure how they lowered so fast, I hope that's a good thing though (they were last tested 3 or 4 days ago)
Thanks again