Aquacultured Live Sand

[setht]

An idea occured to me about aquaculturing live sand. With all the craze about southdown sand going about, coupled with the practice of clubs/friends trading, combining sand for greater diversity, has anyone tried both practices.

Here is how I see this going. A trusted member sets up a large container of saltwater/southdown sand (several hundred pounds) A group of hobbiests all contribute a cup of mature sand from their tanks to this project. Stir, and let cook for several weeks/months, and all participants can harvest 10's hundreds of pounds of aquacultured live sand from this process.

You could even make it sustainable by always leaving behind 25% of the total capacity of sand, and starting up again by adding another batch of dry sand.


Of course I am WAY too lazy to organize this type of effort, but I thought it might be a cool idea

 

[rickb1]

its a good idea but not really necessary, it only requires a handful of sand to seed a tank. Its a good idea to keep a tank mixed with everyones sand but you'll only need a few punds total.

rick

 

[StrikeThree]

The problem I see with it is a depth issue, deeper than 6-8" would reside sand thats anaerobic, so you would need to spread out a couple hundred lbs over a large area to use as "live sand", say 6'X 2'X 2', and thats an awfully large tank/responsibility for growing out live sand. On the other hand, if you have multiple meetings you can all just trade a dixie cup full of your sand with a new person each time.

Good Luck,

Brian

 

[Anonymous]

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