I'm in agreement with yur neighbor. If you have access to it get it
and use it. Its all I use along with locally collected salt water. I
do not go to any extremes to get the sand either, but I like to get a
fair mix of finely broken up shells and sand such as that which
collects between sand bars or in depressions., I guess yu could say
the sand grains I like are between .05mm and 2 or 3 mm in
size...sometimes yo ueven find extrememy tiny clams and cockels in
it, All of it does fine.

I have a tank currently in operation with a piece of locally collected
liverock in it, that I got probbaly 25 years or so ago while diving
off Navarre Beach (P'cola area) in about 125 feet of water. I bleached
it snow white, and even soaked it in formaldehyde, to kill off the
smell. I wanted it for display with a massive shell collection and I w
asnot all that keep on keepin gmarine faish back then. It eventually
wa placed in a fresh water tank for a numbe rof years and then wound
up outside in the garden. I then got abrain storm to sterilize it
and use it. So I dosed it in PP 2 times, rinsed well then set abaout
curing it, It took weeks to finally get cured..........but what I had
in the end wa a rock comprised of quartz bits and peices and full of
tiny holes, quite porus though but heavy as hell. I broke it up an it
was loaded with allkind sof embedded shells and snails etc, so thats
why it took forever to cure. Its now fully coated in coraline and
looks fantastic in a 30 gal cube. Its the primary rock in that tank
along with a few small pieces of FIJI to seed coraline. The sand is
predominately Gulf of Mexico sand gathered between sandbars off the
beach, water is strictly GofM locally collected. I did add about 2
cups of aragonite sand as I had a pico tank I wanted to take down so I
just added that aragonite sand to the GofM silica based sand....I have
never really had any issues with nitrates or anay algaes for that
matter. I leave my daylight type lights on for no more than 10 hours,
but do utilize actinics quite heavility befrope and after daylights
follwed by night time with lunar lights of 460/470nm.


So listen to yur neighbor and carry yur butt down to the beach wade
between the sand bars if there is any and get yu some good sand.

On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 14:09:44 -0500, KurtG
wrote:


I ran a test with the fresh beach sand (dug out of the surf) and my tank
sand. I setup two small containers and added shrimp meat to both and
put them aside for 24 hrs.

The beach shrimp had a thick clear gel mucus on the shrimp and it reeked
bad! My tank sand barely had any growth (if any) and not much odor.

So, is this a reasonable test? If so, do I have "dead" sand?

Reason being that nitrates are not getting processed very quickly out of
my tank, and I'm trying to figure out why. My aquaculture neighbor is
encouraging me to put some beach sand in the tank to get the nitrate
eating bacteria growing. I've been letting the sand "stand" in a bucket
for a few days to see how the "test damsil" does (still with us).

--Kurt





-------
I forgot more about ponds and koi than I'll ever know!