Year old bed material.. stinks!

[Samala]

A dispatch from the front:

I just recently took apart five individual seagrass tanks, some display, some for prop, all of them at least eight months old and the oldest near fourteen months. Allllllll of the substrate stinks to high heaven and is dark grey in color. The smell is gone inside of four hours though, and doesnt come back. Dark color also goes away. Think that's bacterial exhalations?

Substrate was also heavily invaded with roots and rhizoid material, so much so that the bottom layer of mud come out as a thick mat. Pretty cool.

Interesting finds from the tanks: baby grass shrimp (Palaemonetes sp.) which I have previously never been able to raise. I'm guessing they were hiding in the Halodule and Caulerpa prolifera forests. I also found small patches of Ochtodes growing, which I thought I'd lost long long ago.

Also, I have clams! I found multi striped clams, which I'm pretty sure are coquina (Donax sp. possibly variabilis). I havent added substrate since the tank start back in June '05, so it seems I've missed them since then. I found eight in all, with wildly different color patterns including a beautiful brown and white striped. They're filter feeders, as you'd guess, and I'm thinking they have been living off of precious little phyto and zooplankton and lots of detritus.

Hopefully I'll have picks up soon. Its been a messy relocation.

>Sarah

 

[rustybucket145]

I can't wait to see the pics. I feel you on the smell thing. When I added the 'native mudd' to my fuge last month my entire sunroom smelled like super stinky marsh. The smell lasted for a couple of days. Yours probably will as well. It seems that you get accustomed to the smell after being around it for a while. When you leave the room and come back later you will definately smell it.

Oh, and if you need any temp. housing for any critters/plants send em down my way!!

 

[billsreef]

Good stinky muck is the best

 

[piercho]

Stinks like Hydrogen Sulfide? At very low levels, H2S is recognized by a characteristic foul odor. At less than low levels, it can't be smelled and will just lay you out dead as an iced fish. Its odor is very recognizable when I'm down on my hands and knees in the eelgrass beds digging geoduck clams. In the eelgrass beds you are into the anoxic (sulfur-reducing bacteria) zone at almost the surface.

FWIW, a whole tribe of reefers will tell you that you are in imminent danger of "crashing" your tank by H2S released from the sand bed. I, personally, am not one of them.

I can't say that my 4-year old sand bed was that smelly when I broke down my tank for moving August last year. But, it wasn't being held together by mats of roots either.

I kept small clams similar to Manila clams in my 65G for a few months. They grew well initially but eventually expired, I believe from starvation. I couldn't keep grass shrimp going in my veg filter, and never saw any evidence of reproduction except for carrying broods under the tail, although they did persist several months. That was back when my veg filter was more of a refugia, and was full to overflowing with weeds like Sargassum.

 

[slowECUdiver]

digging out geoduck clams...sounds like a recent episode of Dirty Jobs.

hope that move is going well Sarah. and i'd love to see some pics of these clams!

 

[piercho]

I should have said, at MORE than low levels... ha, ha. As I recall from an atmospheric monitoring class I was required to take for my job, higher levels of H2S are not smelled because at higher (dangerous) concentrations the gas inhibits your olfactory senses. Joe Beets leans over to sniff test the septic tank he just took the hatch off of ... never smells anything but keels head first unconscious through the hatch.

Delbreek & Sprung take H2S pretty seriously, and consider grey anoxic zones in the sand bed a potentially deadly situation for the tank inhabitants. Like I implied earlier, I'm not convinced any harm is done in a typical tank.

 

[carman9941]

I get those dark gray spots where my live rock meets the sand in my display tanh

 

[Samala]

Pretty smelly, most certainly hydrogen sulfide of some amount and other odorous substances mixed in. Definitely some darker grey areas. As I said, smell goes away (or just dissipates into the whole room) after a few hours and the dark color is gone by then as well.

I'm not sure how dangerous the situation might be in a closed environment. As Howard mentioned, natural grass beds are anoxic and smelly just below the surface, critters from there dont seem to mind too much. As with everything though, when you squeeze down large processes into a glass box, strange things can happen.

Sprung may be sending me Thalassia seedlings to play with, which should be really interesting.

For now, its time to dive and snorkel 'grass beds!

>Sarah

 

[rustybucket145]

Where you diving at?