octo sand

[Rudiger]

Ok well the octopus is just about done, so in another week Ill have a good opportunity to rip out the gravel in my tank and replace it with sand. Here is my current plan, open to change of course. Ill do about an inch and a half of sugar sized aragonite sand. Then Ill see if I can get a cup or maybe a pound of live sand to seed it. Question: Would it be beneficial or detrimental if I mixed in a little larger sized sand to give a varied texture look?

Thanks.

pat

[schmunkel98]

Hey man, how big is your tank? I have about a 3 to 4 inch sand bed in my 135 gallon. The deeper the sand bed the better. I would stick to just a fine grain of sand if you plan on keeping more cephs. The larger grain can hurt the skin of cuttlefish, not sure about octos.

Mike

www.schmunkel.0catch.com

[OctoMonkey]

Hi Pat
you may find that 2 grains of sand will eventually split up with one sitting on top of the other if your bed is deep.

In my tanks i like to use fine sand with gravel, shells and small stones mixed in, i prefer that look to a "blanket effect" of just sand. MY substate is barley 1/4 inch deep though.
C

[cephalopoder]

My favirite is useing a plenum. I think you can't do any better for bio load capability. I have two other tanks with deep sand beds and hate them compaired to my eco sand plenum. They can handle no where near the same bio load. If your not into plenums I would go with a shallow sand bed like colin uses and do all my filtration in a sump or use a lot of live rock. Check the msg bords. A lot of locals use south down tropical play sand for their sand beds. It's cheep and has different grades of sand in it.

[Rudiger]

what kind of store sells southdown play sand?

[DrMilhouse]

Do a search for it on the board here and you'll find more references to it than you'll have time to read today. :)

SD (South Down) playsand is sold at Home Depot.

You'll probably even be able to find it easily in your neck of the woods.