Quote:
Originally Posted by mseepman
Wow, looking forward to the pics of the Walt Smith stuff! You're scaring me on the sand comments since I've pre-bought 160lbs of that to mix with 60-90lbs of the select.
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Nah don't be. Unless you plan on wrecking your tank with a nutrient orgy. My sand is brand new, so there's not a whole lot in terms of micro-fauna living in it yet (I just spotted my first worm against the glass yesterday) and I really over did it with the cycle. Before I left for Hawaii I had been letting between 3 and 5 shrimp rot in a bag in my sump every 2 days for the better part of a month to try and build the biggest possible bacterial population on my rocks in anticipation of receiving 60 pounds of uncured live rock. I give that process partial credit for why the coral on the Walt Smith rock survived curing, but before I left for hawaii, my water was testing over 60 ppm nitrates and 1.2 ppm phosphates. I had also added a small piece of seed live rock from a store here in town to try and trigger a diatom bloom in mid April, and that piece of rock seeded my tank with a really specific kind of pale green macro algae that looks like hair algae from far away, but isn't when you look at it closely. Since it was an otherwise sterile tank, it basically became a massive mono-culture of the stuff, and it grew on the sand as easily as it grew on the rocks. The nutrient issues are largely resolving now, and thankfully that first species of algae was like crack to the bristle tooth tang so he's polished to rocks and over flow boxes pretty effectively. However, he doesn't like to eat it off the sand and I'm having to wait while the glacially slow conches clean it up. In the meantime, the remaining algae on the sand (a lot of it seems to be dead) is collecting detritus, making it look even worse.
Moral of the story, I don't think there's anything wrong with that particular sand, but my process was really hard on it. As the algae continues to recede and get eaten and the population of decomposers builds up in my sand, I expect it will return to sparkling white again.