I have some crushed corals and live sand that I am planning to put into my aquarium, any i dea if it is good to mix them together and put them into my saltwater aquarium?
yes aragonite sand is a mixture of shells, corals, and sand, i use this on my fish only with live rock tanks.
yes aragonite sand is a mixture of shells, corals, and sand, i use this on my fish only with live rock tanks.
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If you wanted to mix them, you certainly could. It would be better than using just the crushed coral alone, which lets food fall down into the spaces between the pieces where it can decompose and affect your water quality. The spaces would be filled with the finer material, so everything would stay at the top of the sand [unless you have some burrowers that would pull the food under the surface]. But you would want to have some burrowers to keep the sand portion stirred. With the smaller particle sizes, there are fewer openings to let oxygenated water move through the substrate, and the openings which are there will be smaller, and there will be a tendency to have some anaerobic pockets form. The bacteria that live in the anaerobic areas will still remove nitrogen wastes, but they form toxic hydrogen gas in the process. So you will either need living organisms [sand sifting starfish, nassarius snails, bristleworms] or stir the sand yourself. Stirring also discourages algae from growing on the surface.
The only way that I can see mixing the substrates would be a problem is if you have a lot of the crushed coral and were planning to have fish that sift the sand through their gills to find food or that lived along the bottom and scooted across it as their means of locomotion. Then sand is preferable for them. But very fine sand is poor substrate for fish that construct burrows, a moderate size or a few different sizes works better for them.
So while there’s no reason you couldn’t mix them, there might be reasons you shouldn’t depending on what you plan to keep in the tank.
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