Preventing Old Tank Syndrome

[Paul B]

Paul, these are cold water critters in warm water system? But this is what works for you?
R.

It actually does not work for the barnacles. They will die shortly but I don't feel bad for them. As I said, I spend a good sum of money scraping them off my boat every year.
I added them for their interest but mostly for the bacteria in the mud they were incased in. I could just add mud but it was easier to collect barnacles on rocks.
I have been adding barnacles for many years.

Unkel j, that will work, anything you can do to clean the pores in the rock is fine. Blasting them with a water jet is better but if it works for you, do it.
I have been to Arizona, not many salt water beaches there.

The way you shake your rocks is exactly how I collect amphipods, I take rocks from the sea and shake them in a bucket of salt water.

In this old picture of my tank from the 80s or 90s you can see some local NY barnacles.
I have always added local items with no problems.

 

[BeanAnimal]

Paul

My only 'conern' (not that I really have any) would be the die off of the barnacles outweighing any "diversity" benefit they bring. The "dead stuff" (Tissue and everything it has absorbed over the years as a filter feeder) has to go somewhere and I can't think of anything good that comes with it.

 

[Paul B]

Bean old pal, those 50 or so 1/4" barnacles add up to the body mass of about 6 mysis. There is almost nothing to a barnacle and as they starve in my tank they just about disappear. Besides that all the mud I added with them will far outweigh any concerns of dead barnacle tissue.
If nothing happened in the 40 odd years I have been adding them, I don't think it will be a concern now.
Besides the stuff they absorbed over the years was pooped out before I collected them. They don't have much of a digestive system being filter feeders, they don't store anything in their guts, if they even have guts.
I sometimes add large colonies of them because as you know, my reef is not built on the theory of sterility. :beer:

 

[srusso]

Same here, never quarantine a single thing. I believe everything must compete for its right to live in my tank, including pests and parasites... I've never had an ick outbreak and fish and corals are all well fed. The rock is covered with sponges and worms of all types. Pods of all shapes and sizes crawl all over. The extra food ensures a strong diversity of lower life forms.

I believe if you focus on keeping the smallest of life happy in your tank. It will take care of the rest.

 

[BeanAnimal]

Bean old pal, those 50 or so 1/4" barnacles add up to the body mass of about 6 mysis. There is almost nothing to a barnacle and as they starve in my tank they just about disappear. Besides that all the mud I added with them will far outweigh any concerns of dead barnacle tissue.
If nothing happened in the 40 odd years I have been adding them, I don't think it will be a concern now.
Besides the stuff they absorbed over the years was pooped out before I collected them. They don't have much of a digestive system being filter feeders, they don't store anything in their guts, if they even have guts.
I sometimes add large colonies of them because as you know, my reef is not built on the theory of sterility. :beer:

far enough...

I don't know anything about them. I am (was) a surfer but stayed far clear of the creepy crawly piers and other places where creepy crusty critters grow.

My only visual interpretation of their body bass is from the dirty jobs episode where Mike Rowe chissled them from a buoy and they landed on the deck as gobs of gewy nasty barnacle meat.

 

[power boat jim]

Im glad Im not the only one who thought stirring up the sand and rearranging things every so often was a good idea. Many people said disturbing the sand bed releases large amounts of things that will crash the tank. I have found this, by practice, to be a false statement. If there are toxins in the sand bed you can be assured it has already found its way into the water column and needs to be removed.

This was especially true after a couple years with a dsb and a tank declining in health. The H2s in the dsb was leaching into the water column. I removed the entire sand bed in a couple hours and changed water. I no longer keep a dsb but I now change the sand out with new 3-4 times a year and blast the heck out of the rock with a powerhead.

Many folks say I cant remove so much sand and replace it, it will cause a cycle in the tank. Again I can assure you it does not. You would also not believe the amount of "stuff" that comes out when I siphon all the sand out. It doesnt look dirty in the tank but in the white bucket you wonder how anything could live in such filth.

Glad you brought this up Paul, us old boaters sometimes see the world through different eyes then the rest.

 

[Paul B]

Same here, never quarantine a single thing. I believe everything must compete for its right to live in my tank, including pests and parasites... I've never had an ick outbreak and fish and corals are all well fed.

I don't have to quarantine either but I didn't want to mention that because of the hate mail I will get. Some tanks simply do not have to. Before you sent hate mail remember that my tank is over 40 years old and I have been adding stuff, including mud, water, barnacles, flounders, crabs, snails, amphipods, worms, eels, etc.
I am not sure if it is because of the age of the tank, the health of the animals or the food I feed (which I think it is) but for some unknown reason my fish seem to be immune from ich. I don't recommend that practice to anyone because every tank is different and as I said, I don't know why my fish are immune, but they definately are.
If they were not, my 18 year old fireclown or 10 year old hippo tang (no longer with me for other reasons) my 17 year old cusk eel or all of my other ten plus years old fish would have gotten it by now.
Besides this thread is about "OTS" and I didn't want to side track too much like all my threads do.:strange:

Bean, on that episode of Dirty Jobs he was scraping Gooseneck barnacles which are many times larger than run of the mill NY barnacles which cover virtually everything in the intertidal zone. Every rock, every shell or piece of flotsam is covered in barnacles. They live on the propellers on my boat (talk about getting dizzy) they live in the water intakes, all over my dock lines, buoys must be scraped of them of eventually they will sink. They are a big pest here and I don't feel sorry for them, but they are tiny.
Your tax money goes to keep them off Navy ships

Glad you brought this up Paul, us old boaters sometimes see the world through different eyes then the rest.

I would imagine we do :wavehand:

In this picture of my tank circa 1972 you can see blue devil eggs in a goose neck barnacle near the blue devil male. That barnacle is about an inch wide.

 

[rick12]

I've only been in this hobby for a few years and my system has been rescaped once (I would call typhoon).
I just used an aqua clear filter with a sponge to help clear cloudiness .

Another note:
I don't know about others but long time ago I stopped using pellets or vodka etc. I no longer even use carbon and my system has never done better.

 

[BeanAnimal]

Rick,

Don't be lulled into thinking that you don't need some means of export. Most of us that have suffered "Old Tank Syndrome" thought everything was doing well for years...

You need to remove the detritus one way or the other. If (when) it builds up, bad things happen. I am months into phosphate removal. There is so much bound in my rocks that I am not sure it will ever go away. I am giving it another month and if it is not gone, the rock is going.

 

[jerpa]

Im glad Im not the only one who thought stirring up the sand and rearranging things every so often was a good idea. Many people said disturbing the sand bed releases large amounts of things that will crash the tank. I have found this, by practice, to be a false statement. If there are toxins in the sand bed you can be assured it has already found its way into the water column and needs to be removed.

This was especially true after a couple years with a dsb and a tank declining in health. The H2s in the dsb was leaching into the water column. I removed the entire sand bed in a couple hours and changed water. I no longer keep a dsb but I now change the sand out with new 3-4 times a year and blast the heck out of the rock with a powerhead.

Many folks say I cant remove so much sand and replace it, it will cause a cycle in the tank. Again I can assure you it does not. You would also not believe the amount of "stuff" that comes out when I siphon all the sand out. It doesnt look dirty in the tank but in the white bucket you wonder how anything could live in such filth.

Glad you brought this up Paul, us old boaters sometimes see the world through different eyes then the rest.

I'm new to this hobby but I had read much of the same advice as you prior to getting my first tank. I bought an established system and "violently" cleaned the rock with powerheads and by repeated dunking in fresh saltwater until the filth stopped coming off. I set it up with a new sandbed seeded with a few cups of sand.

Fast forward nine months and I'm upgrading to a larger tank. I performed the same routine as far as rinsing the rock. I was amazed how much had built up in the rock and sandbed in just 8 months. It was nowhere near as bad as during the original move but it was dirtier than expected.

I now plan on throughly blasting the rock several times a year. Once a year I hope to replace a portion of the sandbed and rearrange some rock to allow me to really deep clean the aquascape.

I hope these procedures, along with other means of export, will allow me to avoid OTS. I have never had a detectable nitrate reading or any problems with algae. I have witnessed firsthand how much detritus can be hidden in a system that seems to be humming along quite nicely. It only seems logical that eventually there is just too much of the stuff to allow the not-so-visible processes to take place.

 

[Nano sapiens]

Good topic that I think doesn't get as much coverage as it should.

I ran a 50g reef tank for 10 years. The first 5, not much disturbance other than the odd rock being moved around. Once I noticed Cynao on the SB and LR I started vacuuming the SB and using a powerhead on the LR every few months. Tank thrived from then on until it was sold.

I've been running a 12g Nano for nearly 4-1/2 years. Everything seems to happen faster with a Nano, including OTS. Listening to the pundits exclaiming you should never disturb a Nano SB, I didn't for a year or so. Well, long story short, typical OTS type problems developed, so back to full vacuuming/blasting every week with the WC. Tank looks great, Corals are healthy, Nitrate and Phosphate always test '0'...what more could you ask for

 

[rick12]

Rick,

Don't be lulled into thinking that you don't need some means of export. Most of us that have suffered "Old Tank Syndrome" thought everything was doing well for years...

You need to remove the detritus one way or the other. If (when) it builds up, bad things happen. I am months into phosphate removal. There is so much bound in my rocks that I am not sure it will ever go away. I am giving it another month and if it is not gone, the rock is going.

Yes, good point. I did have a green cyno outbreak awhile back. I basted the rock daily and did a 5g WC daily for weeks on end (100g) system. And I ran the aquaclear filter with the sponge that I change regularly.
Of course fed less etc.
Did clear up.

So what will you do? Put in all new live rock? Or Eco-rock?
What about the rock you remove? Do you cure it somehow or toss it?
R.

 

[Spirofucci]

Great information as always! Applies to neonatal tanks as well!

 

[Thisseemsfishy]

My sand bed is about 3". Is that to deep to stir? It's sand/crushed coral. Would it be wise to do half, let it rest for a week and do the other half? Or do it all at once?

 

[power boat jim]

Its no too deep to stir. You can do all of it at once just have a way to filter out the detritus or it all just settles back down. I usually do a water change after the stirring and blasting.

 

[nbgen12]

Great thread going here! What are good organisms such as worms/pods/starfish which consume detritus? Would having things like bristle worms, micro stars, and mama mia worms from Indo Pacific Reef Farms make a noticeable impact on the consumption of detritus? I know the typhoon is important either way, but just wondering about natural consumers of detritus...

Sent from my MB865 using Tapatalk 2

 

[jerpa]

Great thread going here! What are good organisms such as worms/pods/starfish which consume detritus? Would having things like bristle worms, micro stars, and mama mia worms from Indo Pacific Reef Farms make a noticeable impact on the consumption of detritus? I know the typhoon is important either way, but just wondering about natural consumers of detritus...

Sent from my MB865 using Tapatalk 2

Those are all good consumers of detritus but I don't know that they will do anything to stave off detritus buildup in the context of this thread. Anything that eats will produce waste, and in a closed system this will add up.

With Paul's theory it is not the detritus itself that is the problem. It is more so the clogging nature of all the waste inhibiting bacteria and other microfauna from doing their jobs thereby weakening the base of the ecosystem leading to a crash. At least I think that's part of his theory, I don't want to speak on his behalf.

 

[power boat jim]

Great thread going here! What are good organisms such as worms/pods/starfish which consume detritus? Would having things like bristle worms, micro stars, and mama mia worms from Indo Pacific Reef Farms make a noticeable impact on the consumption of detritus? I know the typhoon is important either way, but just wondering about natural consumers of detritus...

Sent from my MB865 using Tapatalk 2

I have found the natural consumers populations tend to stay in check depending on how much there is to eat. It doesnt really matter what species the detritus eating crew consists of, as long as it isnt dangerous to other tank inhabitants. It will be limited in its numbers as the tank allows.

Its for this reason I shudder when people buy 50 snails 25 crabs and who knows what else to put in as a cleanup crew. You need to start with only a few of the species you want. I havnt bought a clean up crew in years. They have spawned in the tank. I think its better to have too few to start with and let them populate to the correct level then to buy more then there is food for and have them die and create other problems . To answer your question they certainly do help.

 

[Paul B]

I don't know about others but long time ago I stopped using pellets or vodka etc. I no longer even use carbon and my system has never done better.

I don't use any of those things and my system is fine.

With Paul's theory it is not the detritus itself that is the problem. It is more so the clogging nature of all the waste

Exactly. The detritus doesn't bother me and I doubt it does anything except to clog things. We need water flow to all parts of everything. No water flow means dead spots, dead anything is never good. I am sure there is detritus all over my gravel, I don't see any because I run a reverse UG filter and it kind of breaks it up and distributes it all over in the spaces of the gravel. I need those spaces free so water can flow.
I don't think detritus causes or releases phosphates either, if it did, with a tank the age of mine, it would be all phosphates by now.
I have never cooked my rock and some of it is over forty years old, why doesn't my rock release phosphates? I don't know, but I don't have algae growing up the walls and my nitrates are about 40. I wonder why?

At least I think that's part of his theory, I don't want to speak on his behalf

You can speak on my behalf any time you like, I am tired.:wavehand:

I also think clean up crews are over rated. I have a load of (free) mud snails and hermit crabs only because I think they are "Snazy" but they are producers of wastes, not eliminators of wastes. If they eat detritus (and most of them don't) they poop it out. In my reef the main "crew" is the brittle stars of which there are hundreds or maybe thousands. They grow in a tank that is not very pristine. I hate pristine, sterile tanks, they are usually the ones with the algae and ich problems.
I have some thoughts on ich and I was just talking to my wife's neurologist so I am going to start another thread about those thoughts.

My copperband takes a special interest in the new barnacles. He watches closely and tries to catch them as they come out to feed. He gets lucky occasionally.

I think these guys are just cool. Yes they have no color but I am kind of past that and just go for something that I don't see often.

 

[Paul B]

I love this stuff and I especially love it when people join in like you guys (and maybe girls) have.
It makes me all tingly inside. :wavehand:

How about you lurkers, you know that we know that you are out there. :lol2:
You don't have to agree with me, most people don't, so don't be shy.
Yes you, I am talking to you, the guy with your face near the monitor.
I can smell your breath. :beer: