Starting new DSB setup - need live sand

[pszemol]

Hi everybody, my current 30gallons/36" long reef tank crashed spectacularly with a bloom of toxic dinoflagellates and all animals started to die. Tuxedo urching is loosing needles, cucumbers and anemone shrivel. Almost all astrea snails are dead already. I have placed a live order of janitorial crew on reeftopia already.
As an emergency management I have dismantled my current setup and moved all living critters to plastic tubs with heaters, powerheads and lights to provide minimal life support. So far all tubs with fresh saltwater do not exhibit the dinoflagellates bloom. I am optimistic about their survival.

But I need to start a new reef tank as fast as it is possible.
I plan to move to a slightly bigger 40 gallon "breeder" tank - it is also 36" long to keep my current lamp and the stand and save some money in transition giving a little more room for aquascaping and for fish to swim. Also the old 30 gallon tank is very old, glass is scratched, a lot of algal grow under the silicone - ugly - time to get new glass tank.

I need really fast new live sand for the DSB. I am not sure where to get it and how much to get. I do NOT want to start with a sand from a plastic bag and some seed of live sand - it would take tooooo long. I would like to start with 100% real live sand from the ocean. So here are my questions:

- where to get online a good live sand with all these little bentic critters (not only wet sand with bacteria in it)?
- how much pounds of live sand would I need to cover 4-5" of the 40 gallon breeder tank bottom (4"x16"x36" volume area)?
- anybody from the neighborhood would like to share a larger order of a box of live sand from real reef supplier with me to save on volume/shipping costs?

 

[Douglas LEHMAN]

Hello
Here is a formula that I use...
LxWxHx.06 = lbs of sand...
16"x36"x4"=2304x.06=138.24
I'd start with 4 - 40lbs bags and see how it looks?

 

[pszemol]

Does your formula apply to wet or dry sand ?

I am planning to get live sand, which will be wet/moist.

 

[Douglas LEHMAN]

Hello
The formula will get you close, it is a generic formula for all aragonite sand bed volumes...

 

[hansnfrans]

Unfortunately I can't offer much help here, but I am curious as to how this "crash" came about? Do you have any idea what might have caused it? Just tryin' to learn, I'm sick of learning the hard way in this hobby.

 

[pszemol]

What I call "crash" was a massive infestation of small brown living and moving cells in the water column. My microscope is very poor, so I could not see details allowing proper identification. I just saw light brown spheres moving a lot in the drop of water. These organisms were creating "clouds" hovering over my live rocks, smothering everything on the rocks. Some people on the forums recognised them as dinoflagellates. The idea is that these organism could generate a large amount of toxins poisoning the water. They grow rapidly. When I syphon out almost all of this stuffand even take the rocks out of the tank and brush it - they regenerate over 1-2 days in the tank, in the new water. I was considering using UV lamp, but then decided not to, since the "clouds" of algae rather stayed hovering on rocks and were not helpless in the water column.

The reason behind it, which I suspect, was neglecting nutrients export. My cleaning crew died over time and I have not replenish population of snails or hermits. Algae grew on the rocks, then they die, but released nutrients to the water. There was also a lot of gunk in the thin, 1" layer of crushed coral sand I had in the tank. I started vacuuming the sand, but could not keep up with the increasing amounts of gunk. Generally tank become heavily unstable and I had decided to disassemble it, move animals to plastic tubs and start over.

Originally I was thinking about reusing the old tank after cleaning, but I have realized it will be good opportunity to upgrade my glass, so the whole operation extended a lot in time for the process of choosing proper tank, ordering 58gallons from OCEANIC and starting the whole process of preparing plumbing, aquiring sand and cycling the new setup.

I had not purchased live sand, as planed originally. I am using 3 bags of dry Southdown. Washed it a little, half a bucket at the time...

I had some amount (about 1x50lb bag) of Southdown sand in the sump previously connected to the old setup. I was little concerned using this sand, after dinoflagellates infestation, but I run this sump for some time now disconnected - trying to see if the infestation will regenerate in it, and it did not... I had to vacuum just the thin top layer of the very dirty sand but the rest of "live sand" with all the worms and other sand dwelling animals was too valuable for me to discard. The sump was running for couple of months now and no signs of infestation. I have even let two baby-clownfish (from the two hatches I am rising in the meantime for over a half year now) in this sump, also about 12 cerith snails to clean the sand from organic debris and put some small light over it to see if everything is ok - it is so far OK.

Recently I had moved the sand from the old sump to the 58gallons tank with dry sand, filled with water and observe new setup.

The current stage of the main tank is that it is clean, no nutrients, it has 4 test animals: two large ceriths and two astrea snails from the 20 gallon plastic tub working since January as my temporary setup to keep my animals alive. Originally I planed to keep animals in this tub for couple of weeks when my new setup cycles - now it turned out it is used over 4 months, the walls are covered with coraline algae (I am no way to scape plastic tub!). Fish are doing just fine, rocks are pretty clean, anemone fully recovered and clowns layed eggs again several times now.

The 58 gallons tank is basically ready to accept live rock from the plastic tub and first animals into their new home. The sand has small amount of debris, originating from the old sump (I put live sand from the sump as the top layer) but I plan to take it out. What is more interesting, I have noticed a quite large amount of cerith-looking baby snails! They look like baby-ceriths, suggesting the 12 ceriths I placed in the sump couple months ago had enough food in the sand to multiply and some baby snails survived the move to the large tank. I hope these are not parasitic snails living on the other molluscs hosts, but I will soon find out since there is nothin in the tank to act as proper host for a long time. Also, baby snails seem to live in sand, and walk on glass after the lights are out only. They have varying sizes from 1mm to about 4mm. The larger ones have slightly darker shells, the small ones have white shells with patterns similar to ceriths under magnification.

So far, everything is looking just fine