Sandbed maintenance

1979fishgeek · Jan 30, 2018

Just looking for opinions on maintaining a sandbed that’s been left for over 2 years now without any disturbance from me. It’s abour 3 inches deep at the back but slopes to practically bare glass in places at the front. Had loads of cuc in it, snails, conchs, sand sifting stars, bristle worms, burrows with little tiny little shrimps and every square centremeter has a spaghetti worm so is absolutely full of critters HOWEVER when it is disturbed say by a wrasse diving in the mess that can kick up is horrendous. Skimmers only take about 10-15 minutes to clear it up but there must be a shed load of fine particle detritus in it.

Do I continue to leave it alone or do something with it, I’m not concerned about the occasional dive bomb clouding as it’s not every day, I’m just wondering if it’s going to turn into ticking time bomb?

brandon429 · Jan 30, 2018

At that depth likely not. Because it's not deep hand stirring it in portions is fine. Amazing tank

We have a nine page thread here called official sand rinse thread about how to take a tank apart, make the bed cloudless immediately via skip cycle rinsing, and putting it all back without a single loss on all pages. Your tank is too big for that work

rare I'd say that.

Matter of fact I'll link yours to it as the first example seen of detritus maintenance and not advocating a full parted takedown. That occasional stirring/ siphoning out is marine snow done in small sections. The bed isn't deep enough to be black sulfide at the depths, the cross section pic doesn't show pocketing, and busy animals burrow there we read.

The cuc waste is actually a huge load in the sand

Reconsider adding as many next run. All cuc members are whole pellet waste producers. None eat the waste of the others, they're bioloading for a bed, they only clean it if they're goby fast enough to kick things up for mech removal. Patrick starfish not helping ha but he looks cool agreed.

a few weeks of focused work, even basic changes for new sand if you want in places, is indicated here. Put back any cuc that survive the siphon ride out.

1979fishgeek · Jan 30, 2018

brandon429 said:
At that depth likely not. Because it's not deep hand stirring it in portions is fine. Amazing tank

We have a nine page thread here called official sand rinse thread about how to take a tank apart, make the bed cloudless immediately via skip cycle rinsing, and putting it all back without a single loss on all pages. Your tank is too big for that work rare I'd say that.

I’ll try and find the thread give it a read thanks. Thanks for the compliment too.

I have nitrates and phosphates little higher than I want, was using bio pellets which were becoming a pain and so uncontrollable, so I started NOPOX a few weeks ago and they still not dropping, so Im guessing it’s stored up in the systems sand rocks etc. I’m going to keep up with the NOPOX till I hopefully start to see numbers going down, but if I don’t I wondered if slowly removing the sandbed would be beneficial, but the sandbed is so packed with critters I’m thinking it’s also a major part of my tanks bio diversity and filtration. Have a group of 22 Bangaii from a single breeding pair and breeding spotted mandarins that rely in the fauna as well for food, So I’m going round in circles in my head what to do....

It’s def not deep enough for hydrogen sulphide issues, but it’s certainly capable of being a nutrient sink...unless the crazy numbers of critters negates that? Gahhh! Round in circles I go! Lol

brandon429 · Jan 30, 2018

also good recharging opportunities. with a clean palette no matter how you get there/all at once/incremental replacements if you strip that bed of its nutrients you'll inevitably take the microfauna, its worth it in my opinion.

buy replacements, places sell recharging kits yeps. make it diverse again, wo nitrate reserves. 1000 gammarid order/throw in 200 micro brittles/add some of the smaller motile pods all sourced out, recharged./

their eggs, reproductive gametes, larvae are the marine snow you mention.

1979fishgeek · Jan 30, 2018

brandon429 said:
also good recharging opportunities. with a clean palette no matter how you get there/all at once/incremental replacements if you strip that bed of its nutrients you'll inevitably take the microfauna, its worth it in my opinion.

buy replacements, places sell recharging kits yeps. make it diverse again, wo nitrate reserves. 1000 gammarid order/throw in 200 micro brittles/add some of the smaller motile pods all sourced out, recharged./

their eggs, reproductive gametes, larvae are the marine snow you mention.

Thank you, not sure where in the UK I could get recharging kits, would love to have purchased brittle stars, that be awesome.

Thanks for your help.

brandon429 · Jan 30, 2018

we should do a little dredge sampling, actually count/see what we can see

tape to a dowel some half inch flex hose and work it down into the bed in a few suspect places, siphon out lightly for analysis

we could drain the water off the sample and have you look using a cheap amazon microscope at the inclusions just to see what it looks like

watch that sample wo microscope to see if there's movement in the mud...something a fish could eat and find.

for the most part, no sandbed we've dissected here was moving about with creatures, they're all mud piles. there could be outliers, real diverse ones, worth considering

Paul B's is diverse bc he adds animals from actual mud flats, he reseeds after occasional deep scrubs

even in my highly rinsed bowl, I still get worm tracks shown after a few mos as they migrate back down from the rocks into the bed. I have pods I can film at night feeding and scurrying about, what if you actually don't end up losing as much as predicted? we're not removing rocks, that helps tremendously.

so far the going tenet in the sand rinse thread is that they hold nothing required for reefing, only incidentals. that's not to impugn (watched titanic this week) our little friends that clearly will be scurrying about, but I think we aren't actually denting their numbers much over the course of a measured year after a rip cleaning

the live rock simply holds so much indefinite reseeding, I predict no loss of bed fauna would affect your tank, but then again people with massive awesome tanks have a right to hold on to things/take fewer risks I do see the association ha
also im sure there are companies who sell recharging kits for refugiums who ship like frozen feed delivered to you would be shipped, for sure there are some sources online but in truth your tank is likely to reassign them, from the rocks, with no help. we've made a fair presentation for that so far in my opinion.

1979fishgeek · Jan 30, 2018

Interesting about Paul B’s bio diversity from mudflats. I use natural seawater collected over mudflats that’s probably the reason my sand bed is practically running alive. The surface of it is smothered in tiny thread like tentacles of spaghetti worms, I wish my camera was good enough for you to see. There is more than one per sq cm easily must be literally 1000s. Tiny burrows built with grains of sand with ampipod looking critters inside. I’m on the fence to remove or keep. If I can get my nitrates down with NOPOX it probably stay for a while longer.

brandon429 · Jan 30, 2018

i had no idea you had a replenishment source nearby I didn't think of that ha! im in the middle of vast dirt cotton fields, it never dawns on me that anyone is near a beach area

that makes it lean heavier on the clean it up side/put some fresh stuff back in/mail some of those as recharge kits to your buddies. Paul B has posted on his 40 yr tank thread pictures of gammarid shrimp galore, just thousands he can scoop up yep for sure.

cracker · Mar 7, 2018

Holy Smokers ! That was an in depth read. I started this morning , checking out all the links etc. I just now finished it up ! I have info overload at the moment .

Give me a bit , as I need to organize my plan & throw it by You Folks .

brandon429 · Mar 7, 2018

I have no way to be brief
but we did collect them after pics and that's the universal language, and we flip flopped many a living reef with no losses and happy peeps> that part is at least good to go!

cracker · Mar 8, 2018

I have 2 tanks, A 75 reef experimental tank. & a 180 fish only.( Until I improve my coral keeping skills.) I'll say a little about the 75 but this post concerns the sand bed in the 180. I had so many issues with HA growing on/in the sand bed in the 75. So bad in fact I have removed all but a sprinkling of sand. I haven't tried BB so why not, it's an experiment tank anyway. On to the 180
This tank had been up & running since August 2016 . It's not mature so to speak because of a very small bio load for all that time. I just now added a 5th fish. I'm beginning to see some Ha sprouting in this sand.
I didn't rinse the CaribSea live sand before adding. As this will be a fish only with a pretty good bioload, I want to nip this before it gets out of control. I can't remove all at once for various reasons. Mostly because I'm lazy. I can do it in sections say, 3 . My plan is to have new sand prerinsed. Remove the old & replace with the new. Then I can take my time rinsing , drying & storing in buckets. This way I can have clean sand on hand for the next swap. I "think" that adding only 1/3 new dry at a time won't hurt what life that's in it.
Think this is a sound plan? Thanks.

brandon429 · Mar 8, 2018

yes I do bet you can remove, rinse and reinstall in sections pls take pics of all that so we can link all forms of sandbed access in one place, sounds good. for that to be dangerous, the cross section pics of the sand would need to show black/strong impaction I bet doesn't apply. can remove in sections and replace all cleaned sounds good for a very large system.

cracker · Mar 8, 2018

It will be a while but will try this when it gets worse. I will add pics so the next person can spend ALL day reading this thread !

So using new sand & saving the old for later replacement would be Ok?

brandon429 · Mar 8, 2018

Once the detritus has been rinsed out it's true all the grains are inert except the old sand has been exposed to phosphate and there's many people that are concerned about its uptake and re exposure from bacteria when it's used again. No other form of parameter carryover other than phosphate would be my concern