Detritus is it as bad as some make out?

[Scott Campbell]

We are testing how well others replicate the advice that storing detritus is rarely harmful and in fact fosters biodiversity and alt feeding sources... those are the pro claims for detritus as I read them

Detritus is a source of carbon. I carbon dose heavily. Many people have good results carbon dosing. Why would I spend time and effort removing a source of carbon from my tank to later add more carbon back into my tank? Why not just leave the detritus in the tank and supplement with less vinegar?

I recognize detritus can be a less accessible source of carbon. But assuming that issue is addressed, how is not removing detritus fundamentally different from adding vinegar?

 

[brandon429]

I had not viewed detritus as a source of handy carbon, sounds reasonable as its a bunch of matrices and castings and partially degraded proteins from recent life cycles. Seems too slow to yield any helpful carbon tho for the purposes of bio export, as it compounds it supports non filtration waste-producing bacteria communities (oxygen competing communities) associated with benthic stores of waste vs tumbling in the water where a skimmer could grab it. carbon dosers are wanting water table mass to assemble for skim export, and they use concentrations in the water well above steady state carbon to cause the aggregation which is why the vodka must be added regularly. we all stored detritus in the 90s, makes me wonder why vsv ever came about if detritus was enough.

Id have to peruse Randy's threads to know anything about detritus as a carbon helper, he uses both alcohol dosing and favors storing detritus in his sump as well. he does not meticulously clean detritus at all, Ive watched his posts years to garner that.

 

[Scrubber_steve]

Why would I spend time and effort removing a source of carbon from my tank to later add more carbon back into my tank?

Hi Scott; just purely out of inquisitiveness, can i assume you neither use GAC or a skimmer?
That would be interesting, though not totally unheard of.

 

[Scott Campbell]

Hi Scott; just purely out of inquisitiveness, can i assume you neither use GAC or a skimmer?
That would be interesting, though not totally unheard of.

I do use a skimmer. But I carbon dose at the back of my sump and have my skimmer in the front of the sump. So that the bacteria from carbon dosing travels throughout the tank before being skimmed out. I skim out a lot of bacteria. Don't really bother with GAC any more. Never noticed any effect from the small amount I used.

 

[tiggs]

The reason I have to disagree about detritus causing old tank syndrome is that’s how pico reefers beat ots. Nobody else has designed an equal test

The reason pico reefs live uninvaded and long past their expiry date (someone set up a dense stocked pico, dsb, don’t touch the sandbed, don’t change the water more than 20% etw, and by month 36 you now have a cyano, not coral reef) is due to detritus management


All the tanks I fix, that nobody else will fix and make links to, detritus caused issues.



Someone is going to have to make and post a counter test using other peoples work to show me. That’s the standard I used to make my claim.



Until then, we (thousands of pico reefers) have the only proof... the rest is large diluted tankers with tanks that take three decades to register what a one gallon with a dsb will register by year five, that’s what I mean by the proof.

Paul has already saved large tankers that work in wondering about pent up detritus since he mass exports his tank... it’s not been hands off at all for 40 yrs. it’s been hands on, or it would be dead, due to detritus.
Even with his mud flat animal exchange... the natural sea water, if he wasn’t doing that vacuuming even the rugf wouldn’t offset what he knows detritus causes or he wouldn’t expend the effort.


The pro dsb/no rinse crowd needs to advise a few pico reefs to be set up for others, guided through early stages and final stages of aging, then show me them links.

Let me start off by saying I completely agree with your methods for pico reefs. In a pico reef, there's simply not enough total system volume or real estate to have everything in place that would equate to the natural processing of detritus. This is one area where I feel you method is the absolute best way to go.

Now onto the part we disagree on. Rinsing an established sand bed in a any tank larger than 10 gallons is nothing more than a bandaid, IMO. Sure, this will reset things and make it look pretty again quickly, but you're not actually correcting the problem. Any tank that that finds itself in this predicament is either over fed, doesn't have sufficient random flow through all areas of the tank (this is the biggest culprit with the nano crowd), is over stocked, doesn't have sufficient CUC, and/or simply lacks the biological diversity at the microfauna level to properly process detritus. Every single tank over 10G that is a candidate for sand bed rinsing has at least one of these issues and instead of correcting it, folks are manually cleaning it out and hurting the tank's natural detritus processing abilities in the process.

I'm not sure when this started, but at a certain point, people forgot all about the microscopic biodiversity that plays a huge role in our tanks. We're actually considering dry rock soaked with bottled bacteria to be the same as live rock these days, which honestly isn't the case at all. Factor in that we dip everything that goes into our tanks and all of a sudden, the slow addition of microfauna to a dry rock based tank isn't happening at all in many cases. This biodiversity that many tanks are lacking is one of the biggest reasons people are having detritus issues.

Now I'm not saying your method doesn't work, because it definitely will make the tank look better and get rid of the excess detritus. It's not actually fixing the problem though and is replacing one of the natural functions that makes our tanks so special with a manual maintenance step and taking it back a few steps in the biodiversity realm with each rinse. In picos, it's your best move, hands down. On anything larger, it's just masking a problem and essentially turning an ecosystem into a fish only system with rock, coral, and inverts.

Being that you've been asking for links to case studies, I'll point you to Sanjay, Mike Paletta, David Saxby, and every other tank thread on R2R that contains a successful SPS system over 10G without algae growing all over the place. Literally zero of these tanks rinse their established sand beds and there's no special method behind it. It's just a matter of achieving balance and making sure you correct issues that lead to detritus problems. I can appreciate the work you've done and how you've documented everything, but it's not exactly groundbreaking news that physically rinsing the gunk out of your sand will make your tank have less gunk for the time being. It's almost like me saying that I have a method to stop dogs from going to the bathroom in the house and this method is to clean up the poop from the house once a day.

Again, I'm not knocking what you're doing and I think you've helped a lot of pico owners have a better reefing experience. I just think it goes a bit too far sometimes when you're trying to turn this into common place for all tanks. I can appreciate your success stories, but not without pointing out the other 98% of successful reefs that don't employ your method.

 

[brandon429]

We worked on non pico tanks in the sand rinse thread as the majority of work, it's rather inclusive of all sizes of tanks and presentations but I see your point about biodiversity where rinsing isn't required to make safe transitions or resets from invasion. I’m having them rinse it the heck out before hand to save everyone the redo effort even though some never need the redo.


I keep referring to invasion work as the true challenge and place where detritus shines as a big deal but it’s also readily apparent in simple tank relocation threads where the keeper had to disturb detritus they once stored...anyone who doesn’t plan on reefing in the same spot 30 years has that factor to consider one day, detritus will matter then and in other times not under invasions.
Most will be moving the bad kind of detritus...the classically bad-smelling h sulfide risk type, they’re not moving the aerated and safe type of detritus Paul moves, because he’s using the only RUGF in reefdom. They’re moving sandbed detritus which is a big huge risk, proponents of detritus need to highlight the zones it’s safe vs dangerous: for example it’s safe when under a RUGF filter plate, and safe when resting on the glass bottom of an aerated high flow sump in a tank of substantial dilution. It’s dangerous everywhere else if providing the first step in eutrophication to your investment is considered dangerous and not just creative feeding.

When detritus does matter, where does one go for the order of ops to work with it and not kill the tank? How do we know -when- it matters in a given reefing procedure? Do those authors mentioned have work threads I missed (am aware and have read their articles, would appreciate links to restoration or tank address threads)

Blog posts are decent, but they’re not very accountable live time and they don’t nimbly respond to all the various ways reefkeepers present a tank for rework or relocation...only live threads handle that in my opinion. Only live threads give the author that painful public sting of ‘you just killed my tank/fav coral/fav fish and I did everything you said’ and we get to watch them respond to that statement

I see your point and can accept that ideal biodiversity is possible to attain and sustain in reefing substrates, and when it’s done right the keeper works far less than we work in my threads.

There are also other example threads we collected where I didn’t solicit anything we just tracked patterns, the mp10 that came unstuck, fell and aimed down into one of those sandbeds you describe while the man was on vacation...detritus mattered to him and manifested as a total loss. He wished only at the moment of arriving home to the stench that he was a bare bottom reef tank owner, before then he was down for diversity You gave me some good thinking points.

 

[brandon429]

something makes this crew feel totally different about detritus


https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/my-white-sand-method.252861/


*i agree both hands on and hands off methods will grow coral. We’re just tracking the other side of the coin by examining trend differences. They all got fed up with something that made them gather and contemplate new action, not nanos

 

[Elegance Coral]

Yes....... Mine do too. That's also how parasites and disease are spread and animals die.

 

[Elegance Coral]

A perfect example of detritus as food was illustrated 75 years ago with intensive pig farms in which cages were stacked three levels high. Only top tier cages were feed grains. Because of incomplete digestion, detritus was dropped to second level with enzyme processes ongoing making detritus a nutrious food.

When growth rates were compared, the top level and the bottom level of pigs weighed the same. The middle tier of pigs averaged 30% heavier. Go figure.

And they had to start treating them with antibiotics to keep them from getting sick and dying. When they're kept in clean environments, there's no need to keep them pumped full of antibiotics.

 

[Scrubber_steve]

Yes....... Mine do too. That's also how parasites and disease are spread and animals die.

 

[Subsea]

And they had to start treating them with antibiotics to keep them from getting sick and dying. When they're kept in clean environments, there's no need to keep them pumped full of antibiotics.

Obviously, you have never been on a farm. We get dung on our hands, no worries. If you think that animals grown for meat are in a clean environment, you are in a bubble.

Perhaps if you buy organic, you may not get antibiotics. In any other intensive cultivation of meat, antibiotics will be prevalent.

Laissez les bonne temps roulee,
Patrick

 

[Elegance Coral]

Obviously, you have never been on a farm. We get dung on our hands, no worries. If you think that animals grown for meat are in a clean environment, you are in a bubble.

Perhaps if you buy organic, you may not get antibiotics. In any other intensive cultivation of meat, antibiotics will be prevalent.

Laissez les bonne temps roulee,
Patrick

I think you missed the point of my post, or completely misunderstood it. At no point did I suggest farm animals were kept in clean environments. Your statements prove my point. We keep animals in filthy conditions, therefor we must pump them full of antibiotics so they don't die. IF......... They were kept clean, we would not need to depend on antibiotics to keep them alive. When people keep pot belly pigs as pets, or as you put it, they're raised "organic", they don't keep them pumped full of antibiotics, because it's a cleaner environment.

 

[Subsea]

Let’s get to the point.

Antibiotics should not be required if we were exposed to germs/bacteria, thereby developing immune systems that are healthy.

Detritus, like anything else, is a good thing when managed.

 

[Elegance Coral]

It boggles my mind to see so many people suggesting that filth, rot, decay, detritus......., are somehow healthy environmental factors for higher forms of life, like those with brains and nervous systems, or those that evolved in very clean and nutrient poor environments.
I grew up in a house where my mother kept the bathroom clean, the kitchen clean, and washed the dishes. Why wash dishes if detritus, rot, and filth, are good things? Just leave last weeks rotting chicken skin on that plate. It will be fine............ I'm sure no one could get sick, right?????

 

[Scott Campbell]

We worked on non pico tanks in the sand rinse thread as the majority of work, it's rather inclusive of all sizes of tanks and presentations but I see your point about biodiversity where rinsing isn't required to make safe transitions or resets from invasion. I’m having them rinse it the heck out before hand to save everyone the redo effort even though some never need the redo.


I keep referring to invasion work as the true challenge and place where detritus shines as a big deal but it’s also readily apparent in simple tank relocation threads where the keeper had to disturb detritus they once stored...anyone who doesn’t plan on reefing in the same spot 30 years has that factor to consider one day, detritus will matter then and in other times not under invasions.
Most will be moving the bad kind of detritus...the classically bad-smelling h sulfide risk type, they’re not moving the aerated and safe type of detritus Paul moves, because he’s using the only RUGF in reefdom. They’re moving sandbed detritus which is a big huge risk, proponents of detritus need to highlight the zones it’s safe vs dangerous: for example it’s safe when under a RUGF filter plate, and safe when resting on the glass bottom of an aerated high flow sump in a tank of substantial dilution. It’s dangerous everywhere else if providing the first step in eutrophication to your investment is considered dangerous and not just creative feeding.

When detritus does matter, where does one go for the order of ops to work with it and not kill the tank? How do we know -when- it matters in a given reefing procedure? Do those authors mentioned have work threads I missed (am aware and have read their articles, would appreciate links to restoration or tank address threads)

Blog posts are decent, but they’re not very accountable live time and they don’t nimbly respond to all the various ways reefkeepers present a tank for rework or relocation...only live threads handle that in my opinion. Only live threads give the author that painful public sting of ‘you just killed my tank/fav coral/fav fish and I did everything you said’ and we get to watch them respond to that statement

I see your point and can accept that ideal biodiversity is possible to attain and sustain in reefing substrates, and when it’s done right the keeper works far less than we work in my threads.

There are also other example threads we collected where I didn’t solicit anything we just tracked patterns, the mp10 that came unstuck, fell and aimed down into one of those sandbeds you describe while the man was on vacation...detritus mattered to him and manifested as a total loss. He wished only at the moment of arriving home to the stench that he was a bare bottom reef tank owner, before then he was down for diversity You gave me some good thinking points.

We used to have a lot of forum posts similar to this thread about nitrate & phosphate. Basically phosphate = evil / bad. Which I never found to be very helpful. Now we have a ton of threads recognizing that nitrate & phosphate are important and helping folks manage nitrate & phosphate levels. Basically giving people the tools to develop long term husbandry strategies. Which I believe is extremely helpful. Because nutrients are not inherently "bad" - but too much of most anything can indeed be harmful.

Helping folks more with carbon management would be fantastic. Because you are absolutely correct that huge, trapped stores of carbon are dangerous. And few people would be better qualified than you to help. People pay a lot of money to buy carbon bio-pellets. Fish poop is pretty similar to bio-pellets - except that fish poop is free. Everyone knows that bio-pellets are not very effective unless they are in a fluidized reactor. But not everyone seems to recognize what Tiggs is pointing out in an earlier post - you need to "fluidize" detritus in much the same manner. You need proper tank water movement and flow to move bacteria off the detritus and into the water column. Substrates are another huge issue. I have never found microfauna to much care for a coarse substrate. So the substrate just fills up with detritus, few creatures move into the coarse substrate to break down the detritus and eventually you have a huge reservoir of carbon waiting to create problems. I have had much better success with a bare bottom tank or with a substrate that is roughly half mud & half very fine sand. The worms and snails and cucumbers seem *much* more active in a finer, more mud-like substrate. The microfauna has to be able to access the detritus. Beyond flow and substrate issues, you need a sufficiently diverse and sufficiently large microfauna population to break the detritus down so that it can eventually enter the water column. And finally - there needs to be awareness of just how much carbon your tank is generating. If you have a lot of fish, if your fish require a lot of food to be added to the tank, if you don't have a lot of worms and amphipods - then you need to strongly consider sand rinses, detritus siphoning, water changes, filter socks and such as a way to control carbon levels in your tank. You need to be aware that growing macro-algae isn't going to do much to control carbon levels in a tank. I have always thought it odd to both carbon dose and siphon out detritus. Why add carbon to a tank that already has more carbon than it can process? Try to make use of the carbon that is already in your tank before adding even more carbon.

So yes - too much detritus / carbon is not good. But carbon in and of itself is not a bad thing. We need to help people find strategies to manage carbon. And those strategies might be very different. Which is why it is very difficult to respond to your tank rescue challenge. I doubt many people would really want to do what I do - fill up a tank with worms, amphipods and algae and fill in with fish that eat worms, amphipods and algae. That just isn't going to be everyone's (or anyone's) ideal tank. Giving people the tools to develop their own strategy will be preferable, in my opinion, to giving people a strict plan of action. I think the protocol you have put together to help folks in a crisis situation is quite excellent, but there is not going to be any "perfect & science-based" single strategy for long-term success. Simply because no one is going to keep the same types of fish and corals, no one is going to feed the same, no one is going to stock the same, etc.

Bottom line - helping people find better husbandry techniques to keep detritus & carbon levels safe would be a better thread than arguing about whether detritus / carbon is "as bad as some make out".

 

[Elegance Coral]

Let’s get to the point.

Antibiotics should not be required if we were exposed to germs/bacteria, thereby developing immune systems that are healthy.

Detritus, like anything else, is a good thing when managed.

The farm animals are exposed to "germs/bacteria. Those germs/bacteria are overwhelming their immune systems. That's why antibiotics are necessary.

 

[Sallstrom]

It boggles my mind to see so many people suggesting that filth, rot, decay, detritus......., are somehow healthy environmental factors for higher forms of life, like those with brains and nervous systems, or those that evolved in very clean and nutrient poor environments.
I grew up in a house where my mother kept the bathroom clean, the kitchen clean, and washed the dishes. Why wash dishes if detritus, rot, and filth, are good things? Just leave last weeks rotting chicken skin on that plate. It will be fine............ I'm sure no one could get sick, right?????

Who's cleaning the reefs in the ocean?

 

[Subsea]

When we say "it breaks down into nutrients" all food does that and IMO it's a matter of how much nutrients detritus breaks down to. I have a fair number of various critters as outlined by Randy above, along with them and my other nutrient export mentioned above I don't find detritus an issue at least not so far and if Randy has a 1" depth of it then I see no reason why I should have an issue.
If anybody can point me to a proper scientific paper on just how much detritus adds nutrients to the water I would like to read it as I have done extensive Googling without much being revealed at all. I am not suggesting detritus does not break down but is it exaggerated especially when there are the likes of critters, bacteria and ATS filtration to deal with much of it.

While I can’t direct you to a detritus scenario in a marine system, I can draw on previous municipal wastewater data concerning detritus. When we ran anarobic digesters, all organic carbon was removed with only minerals left. In those days, the data was not linked to internet. Once we dried out this sludge, it was spread on grass land to negate soil compaction.

Atoll,
I think you may have stirred up some S.H.I.T. with your detrivore thread.
Laissez les bonne temps roulee,
Patrick

 

[Subsea]

The farm animals are exposed to "germs/bacteria. Those germs/bacteria are overwhelming their immune systems. That's why antibiotics are necessary.

You conviently ignore a healthy immune system that needs “some” exposure to germs to be healthy.

 

[Scott Campbell]

It boggles my mind to see so many people suggesting that filth, rot, decay, detritus......., are somehow healthy environmental factors for higher forms of life, like those with brains and nervous systems, or those that evolved in very clean and nutrient poor environments.
I grew up in a house where my mother kept the bathroom clean, the kitchen clean, and washed the dishes. Why wash dishes if detritus, rot, and filth, are good things? Just leave last weeks rotting chicken skin on that plate. It will be fine............ I'm sure no one could get sick, right?????

You realize, I hope, that a home is a rather artificial environment and that outside of a home - there are no dishes to wash, no bathrooms to disinfect, no kitchen to mop? Nature has no problem dealing with chicken skin. And most higher forms of life manage just fine without indoor plumbing and Lysol.

That said - we do have the choice to manage our aquariums as either an artificial home or as a patch of nature. And I think either approach is reasonable. If you prefer to pre-emptively remove "filth, rot & decay" from your tank - that is certainly your choice and an acceptable way to manage tank health. If I prefer to allow fish waste to break down and flow through my system as nitrate, phosphate, carbon and then later export as some other form of biomass - that is my choice and very much appears to *also* be an acceptable way to manage tank health. My fish are as healthy as anyone's.