Live Sand question....

[druxcyck]

I am lucky enough to live 5-10 minutes form the ocean. I know it's beneficial to collect ocean water and use it in the aquarium, my question is does anyone know of any downsides to collecting ocean sand and using it in the aquarium?

Do the bacteria I need only thrive where the reefs are? Or do you think this would work, just trying to save the 100 dollars or so that I'll end up spending for the sand for my 75 gallon tank, I'd like to put that money towards more rock and getting a start on my lighting

unfortuneatly no reefs in Daytona ..

 

[wayne]

Collecting ocean water is tricky. Are you sure it's unpolluted, and untainted by sewage? No - if I lived in Daytona I wouldn't put it in my tank, I'd get a bargain bucket of Instant Ocean. The Scripps institute in San Diego sell filtered seawater - ask them what they do to it. I live somewhere with reasonable water, but I can't imagine driving down and hauling up 75 gals in buckets. Fossa and Nilsson liver elatively near to me and claim to use seawater, but again I don't know what happens in the middle.
Live sand. Might work , might not. Some stuff will survive, but larger 'sifting' organisms likely not. Is it silica based? How fine is it? If it's too fine, like much beach sand, it will pack down too hard. Why don't you just buy a volume of dead aragonite oolite sand, and seed it with the substrate in your current tanks, and/or some substrate from another reefers tank, and/or by getting some garf grunge or similar, then letting the thing populate itself. I can't imagine ever imagine just buying 10 bags or whatever of live sand.

 

[druxcyck]

Well,
There is a local shop down here that collects seawater and I have used it, the process they use is the pump it out into big drums, and they filter it, I think using an RO membrane but I could be wrong, I'll pose the question to him today.

I do have a book called Natural Reef Aquariums and the guy that wrote it , said that he used to go down and drop buckets off of a bridge to collect the seawater, then let it sit in a closet for a week or 2 before using it.

I was just curious, we have had our 55 running for about 4 months now, unfortuneatly we are using crushed coral as a subtrate and we wanted to get to the sand so we can get an eel or some of the other fish that like to burrow, so I can't really use the crushed coral to seed it, at least not enough that it would make a difference.

I could use a sand/live sand mixture. I was just wondering if anyone had experience using sand collected from the ocean or knew of any draw backs for it.