Little Black Thingies in Sand

[FishieFlashdrive]

Hi all. I am a newbie with yet another question. Photos attached. There are these little black things in the sand. Sometimes they float. They appeared everyone basically overnight. I know I'm going through the ugly phase, but until today it wasn't so bad.

Tank info:
75 gallon display with a 30 gallon sump
Sump has two filter socks, a protein skimmer, autotop off
Stocking: two baby clownfish. 10-ish astrea snails. 6-ish cerith snails. 5-ish red-legged hermit crabs.
Parameters:
0 ammonia
0 Nitrite
10ppm nitrate
0.1 phosphate

 

[JNalley]

if they float sometimes, turn up your wavemakers to 100%, bring them low to where they just barely disturb the sand, then raise them slightly up so they're not, it should float all the pieces up and they'll eventually get sucked into your overflow. I do this for 10-20 minutes every day to get everything up and into the overflows, into my filtration. As to what they are, my first guess was going to be carbon, but they look too regular-shaped for that (they all look like a little chocolate sprinkle) so my next guess would be poop. But I'm no expert at identification, so you may want to wait for someone else to chime in.

 

[Yeos87]

My guess is that those are snail poop? I have those all over my tank from my turbo and trochus snails. With a protein skimmer, and bi weekly sand bed cleaning it should go away.