?: There is an issue with the sand now that im pulling out plants so often. The bank of sand is sliding down in record time, and the layer of sand in the back covering the mesh bags is getting so thin its becoming hard to plant in. The crypts in the front also keep getting slightly buried in increasing amounts of sand. I need to remove the mesh bags of pebbles banking the substrate in the back, and get the tank set up with a perfectly level substrate. It wont be the best for visual depth but it will keep the sand from jumping around all over the place in the long run.
I was supposed to take it easy this week but instead I ended up doing this whopper of a job on wednesday.
Ive known this needed doing and been dreading the job for months, as I knew it was going to be an all day kind of task.
Theres never a "good time" to completely turn your tank on its head, aside from if you happen to need to move the tank anyway.
So when I felt the slightest urge to begin the job on wednesday I knew the inclination wouldnt come again any time soon, and just started pulling out plants and doing it.
It didnt take me long to regret starting it but half the plants were already out so I just needed to push on with it and get it done once and for all.
I started around 10:00 and wasnt finished putting everything back until 23:00
I was torn whether I thought keeping the "aged detritus" in the sand was a beneficial thing for my tank or whether it was detrimental.
My plan was to just skim off the topmost layer of sand and then carefully pull out the bags of gravel from under the sand.
It quickly became apparent that this wasnt going to work, so I ended up using a hose and siphon to vacuum all of the sand out, bucket by bucket, until the gravel bags appeared.
I have previously added a few cups of coarser sand to see how I liked the look of a mixed substrate, and for some reason I really love this look in
other peoples tanks but not my own.
I dont know why. I will probably try to create the look again some time in the future, but this time definitely not adding it to the tank until I am 100% sure I like it!
Also, having mixed sand sizes works poorly on a banked substrate with sifting fish, because the biggest sizes will very quickly just settle in a layer at the lowest area of surface / front, ruining the mixed effect.
So I wanted to run my sand through a fine sieve/mesh to get the larger grains out and return to the uniform and clean look.
I kept the livestock in the tank and worked in one half at a time so they could hide out in the other.
My neocaridina were annoyingly not very interested in hiding, and had to constantly be herded away from the area I was working in to avoid vacuuming them.
They go absolutely crazy for the black/brown thing that grows in the sand along the pane of the glass, and as soon as a new bit of it was uncovered they were swarming over it to gobble it up.
I ended up grabbing a few big chunks of it for them and placing it away from the construction zone so they could have a lovely little picnic without getting in my way. This worked really well.
I washed my sand in the shower with aquarium temperature water. Enough to get most of the detritus out, but my goal was not to
clean the sand, just to give it a refresher.
There was a fair amount of dirt particles in the sand despite the small grain size.
I have gotten more respect for the processes and microbes that live in a substrate since I joined UKAPS, and I already felt guilty about turning the entire microbial assemblage on their heads.
I imagine that the microbes that live in the top 3mm of the substrate do not like living 30mm down in the substrate, and vice versa. So while everyone will need to reestablish themselves where they like to live, I wanted to at least make sure enough of them made it alive through the rinsing process to make sure they can bounce back within a couple of weeks time perhaps. So no hot or ice cold water.
Also most of my Thiara(?) sand snails were present through the process, and while these are really hardy snails I didnt want to be too mean to them.
After the rinsing of the sand I ran it bit by bit through a sieve I had which worked well to sort out larger grains, the few bits of detritus and old plant roots, weird black/brown yummy algae flakes and any snails. This was
a lot of work and took hours.
I was quite pleasantly surprised by how well the substrate bags had held up, they have kept the very fine grain sand (0.1-0.5mm) out but still had a good smell to them, a faint smell of filter sponge.
I wasnt sure how much movement/circulation would get down through such fine particles. There was some very very fine dust that had made its way into the bags, but I imagine this has been a very slow process. This sand has been mostly undisturbed for about a year and a half if my memory serves. There were no black areas in the main part of the sand even in the deepest layers, no gas pockets or anything like that.
The only area that had any smell or gas pockets is the biome/band that had established on the edge of the substrate on the front glass and the right side of the tank.
We have discussed this layer before in my journal.
Its very interesting to see that this layer is almost entirely missing on the left side of the tank.
The left side does not get any sunlight or much light from the ambient lamps.
The very front left corner gets a little bit of light from the ceiling lamp in the other room, you can see a few smudges on the glass in the picture below.
This leads me to conclude that the band is made up of primarily photosynthetic organisms.
A while ago (late june) I removed this bacteria/algae band from the front right side of the tank, and left the front left side. Mostly just to see what would happen
It didnt take long for me to see the band starting to grow back, it didnt creep out from the left, it just gradually faded back in again.
By now, about 3 months later it was almost back to the same thickness as the side that was not removed.
This band is comprised mainly of the "black/brown thing" that the shrimp and snails find so delicious, with a few small pockets of true Cyanobacteria sprinkled in here and there. Towards the very top of the band there is also a bit of green algae. This band seems entirely harmless to me, and it does not spread into the main bit of the substrate, it only grows right against the glass.
I slightly prefer the look of the tank without it, but having the band there doesnt bother me enough that I feel like regularly cleaning it to keep it away either.
Since I was taking all the sand out I scraped the glass clean down to the bottom on all sides while I had free access to it. I found it interesting how the black/brown thing can be slided off with a finger, while the true Cyanobacteria is attached much firmer and needed the algae scraper to come off.
There was no wonder I was struggling to replant stems before, the substrate thickness in the most problematic corner (back right) only had about 2cm of sand left to plant into.
Its going to be so much easier from now on, now I have a good depth of sand all the way over the substrate. I have lost a bit of visual depth now that the substrate is flat, but this is a much better long term solution for a tank that gets this much replanting. The fineness of the sand and the livestock that I keep definitely contributed to sand sliding down the bank, but it wasnt until I started uprooting and replanting so frequently, that the sliding really accelerated.
A flat substrate is definitely the way to go for this setup.
After shot:
A few of the plant groups have just been shoved in for now, its friday and my body is still hurting all over, so im doing a little bit per day.
In the back right you can see the bottom spray bar, this one was right above the back of the substrate before. And when the tank was originally set up, the right side filter intake sat right above the sand.
Needless to say the back of the tank is a lot deeper down now.
Ive gotten rid of the Ludwigia palustris 'Super Red', it is too rowdy, I have enough red plants and I can easily reacquire this if I regret it (but I dont think I will).
Hygrophila polysperma is also gone, its too much work to keep in check and too large growing, and it is less useful as a chlorosis indicator than Heteranthera zosterifolia.
Ludwigia inclinata var. verticillata 'Cuba', im thinking of moving this one out of the tank and into an emersed culture.
Theres too many yellow/orange plants, and this one was always on my list of plants to remove eventually. Dont want to let it go completely though, therefore emersed culture.
Later on I have plans to remove:
Rotala rotundifolia 'H’ra'. My idea about using it as a nitrate indicator wasnt quite as useful as I thought it would be, and like I mentioned my tank is too heavy on the orange/yellow/red.
I want to take a comparison picture of Orange Juice, H'ra, and Blood Red SG grown side by side in the same tank, and after that I am thinking of removing the H'ra.
Heteranthera zosterifolia: Removing this one when the chlorosis issues have been thoroughly sorted, until then it makes a great indicator plant. Have Syngonanthus on my wish list which will bring some of this kind of bright green color back in to my tank later on.
Some crypts: Need to downsize crypt collection, have to grow them out big enough to tolerate shipping first. Most of the crypts currently still upset with me, this weeks upheaval probably wont help, but might as well get all the disturbances out of the way eh.
Now that the substrate is sorted I can also do an overhaul of the spraybars, intakes and general plumbing, as well as look closer into how I can implement the CO2 spraybar for testing 😃
ill still take it)
Glad to have it done and over with though!
😅
The tank has been treated every other week since early june through to mid september, so three and a half months of treatment, and the shrimp have been visually free/clear for months. I did add the Caridina shrimp this fall, but somehow I dont think they brought in the parasite again.
