I'm a newcomer to marine tanks, but I am much more comfortable and experienced building worlds in the freshwater environment. This is my 'big' tank, a 55 gallon that is about a year old.







This was/is an experimental tank in some ways, simple to the point of sillyness. The tank was completely unfiltered for most of it's life, but as they loaches grew up, their digging led to clarity problems that were solved recently by adding a little Fluval 205. The canister has been a blessing and a curse, clearing the water but leading to some strange algae outbreaks as the system adjusts itself. For now, it's running a half unit of Chemi-Pure Elite and the shrimp and livebearers are cleaning up the mess. There is no biomedia in the canister, it's basically a mechanical scrubber. The plant mass is what is mainly filtering the tank. I don't bother with fertilizers, co2 or any of that. No worry about water changes either. I collect about a pound or so of trimmings every few weeks for nutrient export, and cull baby plants for friends/other tanks.

There is a massive amount of livestock in this tank. Something on the order of 200+ fish and shrimp. The numbers on the stock list are estimates and guesses with the big groups. It isn't easy to line them up and count them.

30-40 Neon Tetras
15-20 Black Neon Tetras
10-15 Rasboras (don't remember which flavor)
10 Variatus Platies
5 Tinwini Danios
5 Yo Yo Loaches
1 King Betta
3 Bamboo Shrimp
20-30 ghost shrimp
1 billion or so Malaysian Shrimp (prolific breeders, algae eaters, tasty babies, dense foliage. Their numbers rise and fall)

All and all it is massively overstocked, and I feed lots of food but the tank successfully processes all of it. Having a foot in each at the moment, I can say that all of you keeping these reef tanks can master something like this pretty quickly. It's like reef-lite in terms of knowledge and budget.