| The corals will use a little of it and the rest will rot. This is where mechanical filtration (that is cleaned often), chemical filtration, and especially protein skimming comes into play. We want this stuff out of our systems.
The reason that many books tell people not to disturb the sandbed is because most people don't have a clue if they have a sulphide zone.....those puppies can nuke a tank if released. If I had a sandbed that was several years old, I would be careful to only touch the topmost layers. If you are puting in a new sandbed and regularly perform maintenance on them, then this is much less of a worry.
This is also the reason, it is not a good idea to cure LR in the tank with sand in it. You are just filling the sandbed quicker than necessary. I know there is a thought that the sand bed critters keep breaking waste down until it no longer exists but this just isn't true. Here's an example....
Lets pretend I landed a spaceship on a planet where there were 10 alien tribes who were dumb as dirt and completelely operated off of instinct. Tribe A's instinct is to take bricks of a specific size, break off 10% of it and put it in their pockets. The remaining 90% of the brick was handed off to the next tribe B who preferred smaller bricks and would also break off 10% of the the brick and put it in their pockets. Etc., etc., and so on. They were accustomed to having boundaries around them at all times and after much trial and error, it was determined that they were quite content in a drained olympic sized inground swimming pool on Earth.
However, they had an instinctive need to break bricks and there were no bricks in the drained pool. Obviously, it was decided to provide them with 2000 lbs of bricks. It takes a while for the bricks to move from one tribe to the next. However, after a short time, each of the 10 tribes was quite happy as all of the bricks were broken. (The 10th tribe decided the remainder wasn't worth dealing with and chose not to put it into their pocket).
How many lbs of bricks remain in the swimming pool? When weighing the last pile of bricks that the 10th tribe wouldn't take, it weighed 200 lbs. However, just because you can't see the bricks, all 2000 lbs of it is still there....it's just in a different form.
If an alien dies, another alien immediately steals the recently deceased aliens bricks.
In this example, tribe A, B, and C would be cucumbers, crabs, snails, etc. Tribes D and E would be pods and worms. The remaining tribes would all be different types of bacteria. The only brick that was visible was the last 10% and we call that mulm.
Dr. Shimek claims that the reason that sandbeds eventually fill up is because the suppliers are not providing us with enough different critters. However, this is ignoring one simple fact. If I brought in ten new tribes and told them to work on the remaining 200 lbs of brick, I would still have 2000 lbs of brick in my olympic pool. |