Continued from page 1
Starting the Culture
Cultivating live sand is not difficult to be successful at, and can be done in either of two ways:
- In the existing aquarium
- Outside the aquarium
Cultivating live sand can also be undertaken factoring "speed" of making it live into account. This would give us two more methods (by speed is meant the amount or quantity of sand processed all at the same time in the tank):
- The fast method
- The slow method
Altogether that would give us 4 ways to follow:
- In the aquarium and fast
- In the aquarium and slow
- Outside the aquarium and fast
- Outside the aquarium and slow
The last method would not make much sense in my opinion, though. Indeed, when dead sand is cultivated to its "live" state outside of an existing aquarium, hobbyists do not have to factor the "stress effect" on any animals in, so they may as well go the fast route, and obtain as much live sand as they need, as quickly as possible (by fast is meant the amount of live sand produced, that is: cultivated in one session).
This reasoning then, leaves us with three methods. The first three of the four listed above, since we agree that cultivating it outside of the aquarium in small amounts is really not a way to go that makes a lot of sense. When culturing sand outside of the aquarium we may as well go for the total amount needed, all in one cultivating session.
Let us take a look at all these methods and what techniques are suggested to start with "dead" sand and end up with "live" sand. Mind you, all we are doing is enabling the sand to act as a traditional biological filter by allowing and promoting the growth of, mainly, Nitrosomonas and Nitrobacter in the sand. We are turning the dead sand into a biological filter (first stage) and then later, as the sand sits in the aquarium for some time, it will automatically becomes more than that as we shall see below (second stage).
Any other bacterial and microbial life will come later as the sand ages in the existing aquarium (by this I refer to, for instance, the sand being populated by bacteria that denitrify and thus reduce nitrates in the process). These bacteria eventually appear in the sand mixture as well. We do not cultivate them in advance. We let that process take place when the sand is already in the aquarium. These are the bacteria that are referred to as facultatively aerobic anaerobic, because when oxygen levels are low in the area where they grow, they can uptake needed oxygen from compounds in the water that contain oxygen (in this case nitrates).
We are also not, in this article, dealing with the culturing of macro life-forms such as sand sifters, small hermit crabs, worms, brittle stars and any of the other small animals that are traditionally added to live sand to keep it in movement, and prevent it from forming anaerobic areas, especially in the lower parts of the layer.
These are, in fact, not cultured at all, but added to the sand. They will still have to be bought or collected, although if one has a fair amount of good quality live rock in the aquarium, some of the small animal life on that rock will transfer to the sand and populate it with those types of desirable animals. This is not an uncommon experience, especially in aged tanks containing live rock. Note also that if you wanted to see animal life-forms that are actually present in your tank, but that you are not aware of, you could look at the reef you have, during the night, with a red light. Using red will not make the animals that are in the open at night, flee and hide.
Note that we are culturing straight live sand here, and that we have not dealt yet with what else can be added to the sand to make it more effective in maintaining the water quality parameters.
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