using sea water

[timrandlerv10]

I am headed to Mobile this weekend, and I was wondering...has anyone used real sea water?

If so, how/where do you collect it? What is the process and caveats?


I would love to bring home 25 gallons!

thanks,

tim

 

[dgrammer]

I may be wrong, but I would think you would have to go out a good distance to get good quality water. I am sure most anything near the shore is pretty polluted.

 

[Tomoko Schum]

That's what I have heard, too.

There is a guy on RC who has a really old established tank with old beer bottles in it. He uses ocean water that he collects himself. I recall he posted a method to nuke the water using chlorine or something before he uses it.

Tomoko

 

[timrandlerv10]

can you collect it from the surface? i have friends in florida who go fishing lots, and i imagine they could pull up five gallons ten miles out!

 

[SueQ]

The best water is out in blue water (>30miles offshore). BUT, you still shouldn't use it unless you plan on sterilizing it first. When I say sterilize, I mean nuking the snot out of it in the microwave or putting it through a filtration system that can filter down to 0.2 um. There are microbes present that can really mess up your tank. Bay water and water from inshore is a big no-no. Too much crap (microbes, nutrients, pollutants/toxins) in it.
Your best best is so spend the $$ on salt. Saves you time from doing the aforementioned and you get a piece of mind knowing you're not introducing anything that will be detrimental to the livestock in your tank.

 

[greenbean36191]

I say go for it. The sea lab uses water from 50 yards out from the beach on Dauphin Island. All they do to treat it is run it through micron filters to remove larvae from fouling organisms. Unless you're super careful about quarantining every new addition, then you've probably got a better chance of adding something that will destroy your tank by just livestock additions than by using NSW. If you're really worried about it then store the water in the dark for a few weeks to kill off everything in it. You'll probably want to let it sit stagnant for a while to settle out any suspended sediment anyway.

To me it wouldn't really be worth the hassle, but I wouldn't be worried about introducing some sort of parasite. Plenty of people collect and use their own seawater without problems.

 

[SueQ]

See that's the thing. They still filter it through micron filters. That's what we do too with our sea water even though we get it from way offshore. That's not something the average home user has;p Plus, water inshore has higher nutrient loads than out in blue water making it just as "usefull' as using the culligan water machine at wallyworld.
There are grad students here that have to use unfiltered beach water for their projects and they frequently battle fish diseases and parasitic outbreaks and forget collecting when there's a red tide.

 

[greenbean36191]

Who can't filter their water to 50 microns or less? You can do it with a filter sock, which is what the shellfish lab does.

Both the sea lab and the estuarium use the water without issue. It works fine for culturing fish, inverts, and plants. I never heard of any complaints from the professors, grad students, REUs, or estuarium staff about water quality other than low salinity and being unable to use it during red tides.