What’s your opinion on the role of detritus in a reef tank

[atoll]

Good Morning My Buddy Atoll. How's the weather in the UK. I always said you Brits have a funny way of talking. I can't decipher this sentence so I am sorry there is no more to say. I am going to study my English language now because I can see I can't read.

Lots of the UK have snow but not here we have none of it. Hope you and yours are keeping well.

I posted a thread about detritus titled is detritus as bad as it's made out to be or something like that a while back I can't recall exactly. I detailed my way of dealing or not dealing with it at the time. Hence I have nothing more to add to the debate. It works for me but like you am not a scientist just an old retired chippy who has been keeping his tanks longer than most on here have been on this earth not that, that matters so much.
The masses keep their tanks in a far different way to how we keep ours Paul.
PS can you send me some of your finest white snow as I am eager for my 6 month old dog to play in it, he's never seen snow. I would ask those in the UK who have snow to send me some but they want it all for themselves and it seems you have more than you need over there.

 

[atoll]

This is my thread I started a while back on here about detritus.

Detritus is it as bad as some make out?

I have been running my 100 gallon for nearly a year now without filter wool. socks or other forms of mechanical filtration unless you call protein skimming mechanical filtration which is it to a point. I currently use Siporax, Oxydators and an ATS to deal with nutrients and all seems well. I...

www.reef2reef.com

 

[MnFish1]

Lots of the UK have snow but not here we have none of it. Hope you and yours are keeping well.

I posted a thread about detritus titled is detritus as bad as it's made out to be or something like that a while back I can't recall exactly. I detailed my way of dealing or not dealing with it at the time. Hence I have nothing more to add to the debate. It works for me but like you am not a scientist just an old retired chippy who has been keeping his tanks longer than most on here have been on this earth not that, that matters so much.
The masses keep their tanks in a far different way to how we keep ours Paul.
PS can you send me some of your finest white snow as I am eager for my 6 month old dog to play in it, he's never seen snow. I would ask those in the UK who have snow to send me some but they want it all for themselves and it seems you have more than you need over there.

Was I hallucinating - or on a recent British documentary I was looking at - there were lots of tropical plants - outside - in November or so. Are there areas that really do not get that cold?

 

[atoll]

Was I hallucinating - or on a recent British documentary I was looking at - there were lots of tropical plants - outside - in November or so. Are there areas that really do not get that cold?

In the south west there are some hardy tropical plants. Palm trees for one.

 

[Dan_P]

Agreed detritus poses a huge risk, but not 100% across the board so the folks who are successful in keeping it feel we‘re being too detailed and wasting time cleaning it out as a preventative


a little detritus, balanced, aerated, cast up into the water is good feed marine snow. Trick is most reefers don’t have that balance, they have mass poo in the state of poo lol

Upgrade disaster

Recently had a huge leak in our 90 gal reef which forced us to upgrade sooner than expected . The upgrade being a 230 gal with a 48 gal sump . Mistake #1 I added some of the old sand assuming it would be beneficial to have a little bacteria .. I was wrong . Nuked the whole tank killing all fish...

www.reef2reef.com

I assure anyone that if he added new, rinsed sand, his fish would not be dead. Our sand rinse thread is now forty pages of this exact type of job above, with no tank losses, and occasionally when we see an outlier what they did differently was...

We should keep in mind that detritus is a term applied to many forms of visible solid that can have a varying amount of digestible material. The fluffy grey material that collects in a sump, likely has a low amount of bacteria food. The “mud” buried in sand or crush coral can have a higher food value if it is collecting under anaerobic conditions (a sulfur aroma when disturbed is a good indication of this condition). It is slowly releasing all sorts of nutrients to the surface of the sand or coral rubble. Rip cleaning works because it removes this nutritious mud from the system. Rip cleaning a bare bottom sump would probably have little effect.

 

[brandon429]

that's a perfect explanation for the clear loads of detritus shown here in tanks doing fine, swirled all around it seems drained of its nutrients much moreso in the aerobic zone

that's fascinating science for mud layering/stratification etc how position in the tank, and time in degradation controls risk.

there are gradients of risk associated with detritus. its not all 100% bad or 100% good/inert/ safe to be messing with in-tank (and this accounts for our loss example threads as they come along)

I believe its safe to say the majority of high detritus tanks are safe vs loaded w sulfide pockets/bad zones etc.

its heartbreaking to lose someone's time/money in work threads even at a small % rate so the blanket blast approach, at the expense of worms and pods and diversity we love so much, is current best mode on file in my opinion. whether that's ideal for invasion battling/easily debated

but for tank moves or bed swaps we got that market like tesla

 

[MnFish1]

We should keep in mind that detritus is a term applied to many forms of visible solid that can have a varying amount of digestible material. The fluffy grey material that collects in a sump, likely has a low amount of bacteria food. The “mud” buried in sand or crush coral can have a higher food value if it is collecting under anaerobic conditions (a sulfur aroma when disturbed is a good indication of this condition). It is slowly releasing all sorts of nutrients to the surface of the sand or coral rubble. Rip cleaning works because it removes this nutritious mud from the system. Rip cleaning a bare bottom sump would probably have little effect.

I'm not sure where this thread has gone - and I only quoted your post becasue it was the last one - not becasue I disagree. @brandon429 - I'm curious - after all these pages - what are your thoughts (not work threads, etc) - what do you think about detritus. IMHO - taking your post into account Dan - I think that detritus is normal - and doesnt cause a problem. If you over feed - and don't do any maintenance - or don't have a good clean-up 'method' (not necessarily 'Crue') - you're going to have algae - cleaning all of that dirt out - will help. But the dirt/detritus is not the 'problem' - its the result of the problem. I get the sense that this to some was not about detritus, it was about whether 'rip-cleaning' - which keeps being turned into a debate (where there is no real debate) - works or not...?

 

[brandon429]

summary as I read the thread:

the crowd is largely in favor of detritus being neutral, unimpactful, in all settings such that I haven't seen many in the crowd name times (or post them) where detritus caused harm.

there are a few testimonies who did detect outbreaks or negativity associated with waste transfer, and it takes patterns to test out cause/effect in my opinion

the number of tank transfer jobs we like to log exposes us/home movers to instances where we think detritus caused great loss and variability. the only thing I have to offer is the data we extracted the cause/effect from (ongoing work thread) and a request for someone else to make a home move work thread where zero rinsing is done, that's opposite of our mode

by page ten of that alternate work thread we will have a fair picture of how detritus presents for the masses, not just the top reefers in the world.

give me two brownie points for a concise summary this instant.

 

[MnFish1]

summary as I read the thread:

the crowd is largely in favor of detritus being neutral, unimpactful, in all settings such that I haven't seen many in the crowd name times (or post them) where detritus (assumed, up for debate) caused harm.

there are a few testimonies who did detect outbreaks or negativity associated with waste transfer, and it takes patterns to test out cause/effect in my opinion

the number of tank transfer jobs we like to log exposes us/home movers to instances where we think detritus caused great loss and variability. the only thing I have to offer is the data we extracted the cause/effect from (ongoing work thread) and a request for someone else to make a home move work thread where zero rinsing is done, that's opposite of our mode

by page ten of that alternate work thread we will have a fair picture of how detritus presents for the masses, not just the top reefers in the world.

give me two brownie points for a concise summary this instant.

You can have 10... Here is what I think - As dan said - Detritus is 'many things'. That makes it hard to define. For example - No one would suggest dumping in 1/2 a can of fish food into a tank and letting it sit there (though it is still detritus). On the other hand - I completely agree with you - that this 'fear' - of moving a tank is not true. The tank itself is not what contains the 'good bacteria' (or the bad bacteria) - its the rest. You can easily move everything from one tank to another without worrying - assuming you're relatively quick about it. I don't see the debate (i.e. I dont see lots of 'experts' claiming you cant do that In other words - It seems to be debating something thats already being done all over (i.e. moving rocks, etc to a new tank - maybe replacing sand, etc) with no problem - maybe I'm wrong>?

 

[steve bergmann]

I don't really worry about ditritus, never have. Just set up a solid ecosystem and Detritus is a part of that in my opinion.

Here is my 11 year old reef tank: I struggle to get Nitrates and Phosphates so I have to dose to get them.

 

[brandon429]

extremely sharp reef there
maybe the acros make me salivate

 

[MnFish1]

I don't really worry about ditritus, never have. Just set up a solid ecosystem and Detritus is a part of that in my opinion.

Here is my 11 year old reef tank: I struggle to get Nitrates and Phosphates so I have to dose to get them.

nice

 

[AllanPritchard]

Interesting discussion. I have been doing an experiment on a small tank I have in the garage. It has quite a lot of live rock and a Devils Hand and a Mushroom coral. The lighting is extremely average, it has high swings of temperature from 22 deg c to 29 deg c and salinity swings due to evaporation. Both corals are doing really well, they were on the verge of expiration in my display tank and they have come back and are looking much healthier. Originally I set the tank up just to keep the rock cycled and as a hospital tank for a fish that got bullied and these two corals and have just let it go since the fish moved back. What I noticed was that even though I do no feed the tank at all the amount of detritus build is quite phenomenal. I have been letting the GHA grow to see if it would simply die out as there no nitrates going into the system to feed the GHA. But it seems to keep growing, although it is very wispy and unformed, and the detritus builds up quite quickly. I do a water change once per month at the moment and pull out the GHA. It seems the various bristle worms and other micro lifeforms create a lot of detritus themselves, the CUC don't clean up after themselves. There are no filter socks in the system, I have a skimmer running only to act as an aerator and it drains back into the system.

 

[atoll]

Worth a read.

http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2003-03/eb/index.php

 

[Sallstrom]

@brandon429 , since you mentioned my and the pile I posted.
You wrote in two posts about balance, and the lack of balance in some tanks. Those without balance had problems with detritus.
Why not aim for a well balanced tank instead of keep running it in a way you need to “rip clean” it every now and then?

I agree on cleaning the sand if you move to a new tank. Or buy new sand, and perhaps keep some of the old.
But that depends on the time you have the old sand in buckets. If you move a little dirty sand from one well working tank to another next to it, I don’t think that will be a problem.

 

[Paul B]

I realize many people have a fear of a lot of things in this hobby but I moved my current tank 60 miles 3 years ago to my new home here on eastern Long Island. The tank sat in that last spot for 40 years and I use a reverse UG filter so you can imagine the mud and detritus that was under it.



Here my Son N Law is lifting the UG plates for the move. 100% mud or detritus under there and much of it came here to my new house.
I didn't purposely add all that detritus to my new tank and I couldn't even if I wanted to because I would need a shovel. And I wanted to see my fish in case they decided to swim around as they were already stressed from sitting in a tub in the back of a truck in traffic for a couple of hours with no heater or air. But my fish are not Girly fish so all of them pulled through with no problems.

I didn't want all that detritus in my tank because my UG filter would have clogged but besides that, for me detritus is a non issue.

 

[Garf]

I realize many people have a fear of a lot of things in this hobby but I moved my current tank 60 miles 3 years ago to my new home here on eastern Long Island. The tank sat in that last spot for 40 years and I use a reverse UG filter so you can imagine the mud and detritus that was under it.



Here my Son N Law is lifting the UG plates for the move. 100% mud or detritus under there and much of it came here to my new house.
I didn't purposely add all that detritus to my new tank and I couldn't even if I wanted to because I would need a shovel. And I wanted to see my fish in case they decided to swim around as they were already stressed from sitting in a tub in the back of a truck in traffic for a couple of hours with no heater or air. But my fish are not Girly fish so all of them pulled through with no problems.

I didn't want all that detritus in my tank because my UG filter would have clogged but besides that, for me detritus is a non issue.

That pic links to your photobucket account, just saying in case it’s a problem

 

[Paul B]

No, it's not a problem, that Photobucket account is just fish related stuff and I reserve most of the pictures of myself in a Speedo for my private album. But unfortunately there are 2 or 3 of them on there so you may not want to look.

Besides, I have no idea to use that Photobucket just for this forum.

 

[brandon429]

One of the proponents for detritus needs to start a thread on actual sandbed work

how to add sand to an existing tank


how to fix invasions


how to move homes

how to upgrade


and you can’t use your own tank for any portion of example, it’s all live public jobs assembled from lfs and petco

it’s not a theory thread, or a link of someone else’s work. a hands on, live job handing work thread and we roll the null hypothesis that detritus is always safe, and unrinsed new sand will clear overnite because it did for Rob in PA in that one post. No rinsing. Clouding = ok.

i could make such a thread and @ each proponent here for live time input, as readers post big $ jobs upcoming

I won’t mention clean rinsing in the process-won’t say it once

someone make a betting pool on how that will turn out before we begin.

I bet it stalls. The first invasion posted the answer will be: wait longer. Done!

secondary requirement then: when you are atted (@) you have to predict on file how the job will turn out before you advise them on steps, and completion date. In literally every post in the sand rinse thread, that’s the standard for the rinsers. You’ll have no problem whatsoever. we handle tank transfers, upgrades, bed removals and full changes, we especially handle invasions, and we have years of data using other people’s reefs.

we aren’t using magic to predict completion dates, nor is it lucky guesses.

predicting what clean sand does merely requires one to see a toy snow globe, thats what your sandbed is about to become if you want to be in a safe sandbed work thread.

 

[Garf]

On my previous tank I just ran a skimmer in sump (and later with a scrubber). There were thousands of bristle worms down there, writhing around in a good 1/4 inch of crud, never detected a problem in 9 years. That being said I’ve gone totally the opposite with my new small tank with sock, skimmer, scrubber, bare bottom, mortared dry rock, dip everything before it goes in tank. That’s going well also.