mr.maroonsalty
New member
I guess I'm a wee bit of a hoarder. I have a hard time flushing the toilet, so to say when it comes to my tank basically because I don't want to kill anything. Last Fall when I started using Rx's for gac and gfo I started dumping my month old gac into one of my wc buckets not just to perhaps glean a few pods or some snails (I have a healthy population of Collonista snails), but also to see what power month old carbon may have. To my amazement, if i can avoid huge temp swings, my little non-circulated pail does a pretty darn good job not only clarifying the water but, it also keeping a few hardy inverts alive as well. I have killed it off and dumped it a few times, most recently after leaving the windows open all night with the temps in the lower 50º's. This is a side by side three days after a wc (giving snails time to crawl the side of the bucket and be collected):
The pail on the right has week old used gac with some of the previous weeks water changed out with fresh dirty wc. I do vacuum the weeks detritus into the non gac bucket, however both pails are used to rinse my two sponges. The carbon bucket doesn't see nearly the detritus load as the non gac one, nevertheless, I find it a little amazing that it appears to be enough of a filter to sustain life with no other mechanisms. Now one week later the water looks even better:
If you look closely you can see medium size bristle worms, Asterina sea stars, and many Collonista snails ( it looks like a fresh hatching is mixed in having either reproduced in the pail or were very small when introdused). Next time I dislodge a piece of Xenia perhaps I'll remember to toss it in to see what happens, or perhaps a stalk of Pocillopora. I wonder if livestock might ship better with a wee bit of carbon added to the container?
The pail on the right has week old used gac with some of the previous weeks water changed out with fresh dirty wc. I do vacuum the weeks detritus into the non gac bucket, however both pails are used to rinse my two sponges. The carbon bucket doesn't see nearly the detritus load as the non gac one, nevertheless, I find it a little amazing that it appears to be enough of a filter to sustain life with no other mechanisms. Now one week later the water looks even better:
If you look closely you can see medium size bristle worms, Asterina sea stars, and many Collonista snails ( it looks like a fresh hatching is mixed in having either reproduced in the pail or were very small when introdused). Next time I dislodge a piece of Xenia perhaps I'll remember to toss it in to see what happens, or perhaps a stalk of Pocillopora. I wonder if livestock might ship better with a wee bit of carbon added to the container?
