How Healthy is Your Bottom?

[Bunnee911]

In regards to this topic, is stirring considered ‘cleaning’? I don’t consider myself to ‘clean’ necessarily, as I don’t remove any sand or water.

I do place a new filter pad in the sump before stirring and remove it afterwards though.

Perhaps I’m in the middle ground on the subject.

Does stirring actually remove microfauna, or just move it around to settle back in.

This is what I do. About every other month, I move rocks and blow gunk around to be filtered out.

 

[mattzang]

My experience has been the opposite. I take care of fish tanks as a job. What I see when taking over a service from another company is that those that siphon their sand end up with slimy feeling sand devoid of microfauna. And in those tanks when taking out the sand the water is a gross brown. Comparing that to tanks where the sand bed hadn't been disturbed and has healthy microfauna, any cloudiness from the sand is more of a milky white.

But that's where husbandry in the first place is essential. Overfeeding for years does have a cumulative affect that takes almost as long to resolve as it took to create, and thats where extreme measures of replacing the sand bed are needed. But if properly done in the first place, the bed can be kept for along time without that sort of maintainence or replacing.

around how long have the tanks been set up when you see this? i've kinda gone back and forth, sometimes i clean the sandbed, sometimes i leave it for months. i watched a sanjay video awhile back and he laughed when asked if he has ever cleaned his sandbed, so that kind of encouraged me to stop worrying about it. conch seems to clean the top visual part and keep it white, wrasses and nassarius probably stir it up a bit here and there.. so i guess i'm somewhere in between

 

[leorii2000]

I justmdid some major changes in my 60gal. Stirring and cleaning the sand spiked up nitrates bad.
Water woke-this perfect 2 years. Now working on getting nitrates back down.
In my 220 mix reef. No touching the send bed. All parameters are good.

 

[stevieduk]

trouble is nowdays that some people want a tank that is a pristine ornament, and not a "bit of the ocean in their house". ive been keeping marines for 40 plus years and have never cleaned a gravel bed in any of the tanks i have had. The creepy crawlies do all the work for you if you get the set up correct in the first place

 

[brandon429]

I too ran hands off sandbeds at my start in reefing I think most do

what changed me was losses after full maturation, after all my hard work and time...

proponents of hands off sandbedding need to make threads that say "send me your dsb problems for live time fix" and then work things out a few pages







entrants into sandbed help threads haven't ran them balanced, I want to see corrective works where mud is left in place.

*the best way to make recommends about DSB usage/maintenance is to have a few examples on file of -aged- out systems one guided from start to finish, not just caught in the middle. complete systems

this is easy to track in nano reefs, they're set up by the thousands and easy to move, so we do get to track many into total maturity to see how sandbeds work when you remove the time variable, and the dilution variable only.



working w smaller systems -to maturity- will show the progression to invasion much faster, since only dilution is missing.

everyone with a big tank thinks after a few years the bed w work forever, and for some it does. AZDesert rat has a 17 yr untouched dsb in a 150~

but lets see them threads of public worked DSB's that's where the real patterns emerge. not the single home examples.

to test, anyone can make a sandbed thread where zero rinsing is ever done and corrections are made using the biodiversity in the bed. we're safe zone pondering at this point without the direct works logged for pattern checking

 

[Dan_P]

I often see new reefers advised to clean their substrate. In my experience, this is not a "best practice" unless the size of the substrate is relatively large. But for most of us that use sand, I find in counterproductive.

I'm not just talking about deep sand beds either, where you can see visible zones at various depths. But even prettu shallow sand beds have more microfauna than just beneficial bacteria. Amphipods and copepods can be seen in little micropockets in the sand. Small, beneficial scavengers and filter feeders can be found in sand beds less than 1.5."

So it surprises me to see people advised to clean their sand or even add sand sifting stars, which eat that microfauna. A healthy microfauna population keeps the sandbed cleaner than a hobbyist doing it as maintainence.

How do I measure the microfauna population? Is two or two hundred species necessary to be considered healthy? What is the typical number of species in a reef system? Size of the population? What is the method for counting? How is a population of microfauna disturbed by cleaning the sand? How quickly does it recover from a cleaning? Might microfauna be more an indicator of organic debris (@brandon429) in the sand rather than a sign of health?

I guess the title for this topic could also be “how many trophic levels are necessary to manage waste in saltwater aquaria?” The sand bed is a very complicated waste treatment methodology which we all start by pouring it in and maybe adding some bacteria. After that we go our separate ways. @brandon429 has a perspective on dealing with troublesome sand beds. @Paul B finds a reverse flow through his sand bed a reasonable management strategy. Others advocate leaving it alone and let nature take its course. I follow the “ignore it” school of thought, though because of the size of my fish that can more a lot of sand with a swish of their tail, my sand bed management approach might be more accurately described as clean the sand every time I accidentally startle the fish.

With sensors becoming so cheap, we might eventually have electronic gadgets to measure sand bed parameters that might be useful for judging its health and effectiveness of the sand bed. DNA testing might become a tool to assess the diversity of the microbiome in the sand bed.

 

[fish farmer]

How do I measure the microfauna population? Is two or two hundred species necessary to be considered healthy? What is the typical number of species in a reef system? Size of the population? What is the method for counting? How is a population of microfauna disturbed by cleaning the sand? How quickly does it recover from a cleaning? Might microfauna be more an indicator of organic debris (@brandon429) in the sand rather than a sign of health?

I guess the title for this topic could also be “how many trophic levels are necessary to manage waste in saltwater aquaria?” The sand bed is a very complicated waste treatment methodology which we all start by pouring it in and maybe adding some bacteria. After that we go our separate ways. @brandon429 has a perspective on dealing with troublesome sand beds. @Paul B finds a reverse flow through his sand bed a reasonable management strategy. Others advocate leaving it alone and let nature take its course. I follow the “ignore it” school of thought, though because of the size of my fish that can more a lot of sand with a swish of their tail, my sand bed management approach might be more accurately described as clean the sand every time I accidentally startle the fish.

With sensors becoming so cheap, we might eventually have electronic gadgets to measure sand bed parameters that might be useful for judging its health and effectiveness of the sand bed. DNA testing might become a tool to assess the diversity of the microbiome in the sand bed.

I have a hard copy of Ron Shimek's Live Sand Examination 1999 article from the old reefs.org site (which no longer exists).

Here is some info take from that article on how to examine your sand.

You need to make a rentangular grid on the bottom of a clear plastic bowl, the squares need to be 1 cm apart.

Fill the bowl with seawater and illuminate from below. With the light off, add about 1 cubic centimeter of substrate from the aquarium. Place in bowl and distribute the sample over the grid evenly. There should be a THIN layer of sand, too much will obscure organisms. Let the sample sit for 5 minutes. Turn on the light and examine using a hand lens(20x best) or microscope. Look for movement. Count and tabulate organisms. Total the number of organisms. Repeat several times and find the average of all the values. Multiply by 10,000 to find the number per square meter, the common benthic measure. There was nothing in the article about species diversity, but I would venture to say that if you sand bed fauna is 100% copepods, it would be less "healthy" than one with more species represented.

Here's a screen shot from the second page of the article.

 

[brandon429]

Out of twenty pages of random res publica sandbeds worked in our thread, I think only one dredge sample had moving animals we could see. All the rest, pure mud. Not even a pod

We're nearly universally only extracting organic decay, the goodies are usually in the live rocks

The animals that Shimek is dealing with in his book did not come from a nano reef sand bed sample, that's for sure. he would have to sample about 200 full size sand beds to ever find some with moving animals. Reef sandbeds are usually just muck we show the actual pics of the extracted mess


I know they're chock-full of tiny microbes you can't see without a microscope...am talking about the bigger motile animals that supposedly do turn over - not there in most beds and actually hardly ever occurring. Early books made it sound as if all sandbeds turn into that, they don't ever

I know there are pictures on the threads occasionally of cross-section aged sand beds that show microfauna worth saving, we just never encounter it in our daily work. They're rare, not common, in my opinion that's where early sandbed biology went wrong-theyre just not that diverse as once stated.

 

[rockskimmerflow]

Out of twenty pages of random res publica sandbeds worked in our thread, I think only one dredge sample had moving animals we could see. All the rest, pure mud. Not even a pod

We're nearly universally only extracting organic decay, the goodies are usually in the live rocks

The animals that Shimek is dealing with in his book did not come from a nano reef sand bed sample, that's for sure. he would have to sample about 200 full size sand beds to ever find some with moving animals. Reef sandbeds are usually just muck we show the actual pics of the extracted mess


I know they're chock-full of tiny microbes you can't see without a microscope...am talking about the bigger motile animals that supposedly do turn over - not there in most beds and actually hardly ever occurring. Early books made it sound as if all ssndbeds turn into that, they don't ever

I know there are pictures on the threads occasionally of cross-section aged sand beds that show microfauna worth saving, we just never encounter it in our daily work. They're rare, not common, in my opinion that's where early sandbed biology went wrong-theyre just not that diverse as once stated.

I've seen enough tanks in my time running a service business to know that leaving a sandbed undisturbed for years is not an ideal situation. Often times it still looks 'white' on top. But as you say it's all just sedimentary muck locked up below the surface and IME regular siphoning/stirring is the only way to achieve a nutrient equilibrium in a tank long term. I don't have a single customer account at which the sand is not touched during service. Corals grow year in and year out. And the best part is, when a client does something stupid or a housekeeper gets a little crazy with the cleaners near the tank and some corals show stress, I have one less variable to worry about when troubleshooting.

Personally I think the whole 'never touch the sandbed' strategy works great until it doesn't. There are of course outliers, but IME there is trouble ahead if one plans to leave a sandbed undisturbed indefinitely.

And to concur with your point about lack of critters I honestly can't say I've ever found much microfauna in those muckbeds of sand in new client tanks that have never had a proper full sand cleaning. I think a rubble rock refugium is much more effective at cultivating the microfauna cleanup crew than a sandbed in home aquariums.

 

[eatbreakfast]

SoI don't chronical and record my practices, I know I should, but am lazy I guess. What I am sharing are my experiences of taking care of reef tanks for over a decae and what my observations have been. In this period of time of taken care of tanks ranging from 5g to over 1000g, some from the start, others taking over for someone else. In most cases the maintenance is done once a week or every other week, with some tanks more, some tanks less.

One tank for example has a 4-5" deep sand bed that has been in place for almost 20yrs. It's a 5' tall tank and narrow, which makes doing any maintenance on the sand bed arduus, but it has been unnecassary anyway. When I took over this account about 7yrs ago, the nitrates and phosphates were off the charts and the only sessile inverts were a browned out anemone and button polyps. Many reefers would have written it off as old tank syndrom, it was 12+yrs old after all. But with a reconfiguration of flow and adding only the microfauna from coral colony bases that were in established tanks the tank has rebounded and NO3 and PO4 are 5ppm.

In another tank, a 180g that I had taken over, the substrate was getting partial siphons every other week. When I took it over, we stopped the siphoning, and in a few months the NO3 and PO4 have halved, despite increasing the feeding to the tank and fish load.

In tanks were the substrate has gone to silt and is lifeless it is easier to replace the substrate rather than trying to reseed it. But there isn't the need to siphon the new sand and IF flow and feeding are adequate it doesn't regress back to that state.

I guess the point I was trying to make was more along the lines of a "work smarter, not harder" mindset. Is it easier or harder to rinse your sand before putting it in, or just put it it? Is it easier or harder to siphon and sift through your sandbed everyweek or just leave it alone?

Build ups happen when the nutrients going in are outpacing the systems ability to deal with the nutrienta. However, nature, even though it's in a closed environment, "WANTS" to balance itself, and the way it does this is through the microfauna in place. And removing that microfauna has a destabilizing effect on that balance, rather than a stabilizing one.

Can rinsing substrate and regular cleaning of it work? Definitely. But so can leaving it. There is work involved in both methods, but were do you spend that effort. Personally I prefer and recommend an informed approach to feeding and flow and let the microfauna do their thing, rather than me trying to do it for them.(they've been doing it for aeons, they're better at it, and they want to, so let them.)

 

[Dom]

My guess will be for new tanks possibly no. Let the sand bed build some microfauna and then after a year possibly do some maintenance but still when you do it you are actually taking out alot of the good things too.

I am possibly not the best person to comment as I run a barebottom ...lol

I recently went bare bottom as I was dealing with a Cyano issue and removed all sand. Typically, I never touched my substrate. But I began vacuuming it in an effort to deal with the Cyano (which didn't help).

 

[brandon429]

Vacuuming is partial work, we work in full increments is why. See our thread we can fix your tank too

Working in sections breaks the stratification that keeps dsb nutrients out of the water column... Once we rip clean the tank its done all at once, no nutrient upwelling

No redistribution of cyano

If a tank isn't under particular invasion then leaving things alone isn't going to kill the system as most reef tanks have been ran this way

Our rinsing came about to address the noncompliants following the -exact- recommended setups


This doesn't help in large tanks much... Pretty much only medium to small tanks can wield the direct access benefit

This is why eatbreakfasts method or any variation of care is all legit, if there is no work on balancing sandbeds in larger systems without removal then the science wont progress. All methods are valid

I'm only passionate with my method because it will stop an invasion in its tracks where possible, we just like helping the sincerely interested in being restored. My rinsing with tap is the most unnatural cheat one could inflict lol but them after pics. The skip cycle science is gold, knowing how to wield that saves money in any venture. Simply learning and harnessing deliberation vs hesitation is an intended benefit of the sand rinse thread~ forced control reefing is awesome. My reef isn't allowed to not live to fifteen years old. if I tell it to drain and hang there in the air half an hour for nothing other than another skip cycle video, it does. It is possible to make a reef tank that cannot fail biologically, but you need to be able to access all of it upon command

the water

the substrate, whatev

as soon as we get into reefs beyond accessibility the game changes massively. but the greatest tragic self limitation in reefing is thinking we have to manage accessible tanks like the big ones-waiting, hoping, tinkering, testing, dosing, reacting, making ID threads etc

not what we do. you can snap your fingers and command, demand, that a smaller reef comply. the number one advise I give new reef keepers is to choose a size of tank that allows for a 100% water change when required. If you have the goods to produce 100 gallons of salt on hand, go 100 gallons. 40 and below is much nicer...accessibility is the secret to bulletproof reefing the rest is a gamble but big tanks are awesome where afforded