Sand And Snails

[PoseidonSB]

Hi All

I have sand in my new fish tank, nothing else yet and I haven't started cycling. But my question is how deep should my sand be? I think I may have over done it lol.
And also I know MTS are the best for shifting through the sand but is it possible to get them in uk/ireland? I asked my LFS and he looked at me like I just pee'd in his cheerios.

any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[fluttermoth]

The sand should be no more than 2 or possibly 3 inches. MTS are readily available online (there are people on here who sell them and post them out, and there's loads on Ebay)

 

[PoseidonSB]

I'm pretty sure that I can't order live stock to be shipped into Ireland. So if anyone here is from Ireland and is able to supply some I would love to sort that

 

[OldMan47]

I can well understand the look you got from the LFS. I have only one tank contaminated by MTS and that was an oversight on my part. I will probably break that tank down completely one of these days to be rid of them.
Depth of sand depends on what you intend to do with the tank. If it will be fish only with nothing but fake plants and decorations, a simple 1 cm thick layer is plenty. If you intend to grow plants, you will need more to give the plants a place to set down roots. In that kind of situation I tend to run my substrate at around 3 to 5 cm.

 

[Rynofasho]

I've got about 600,000,000 of them but I'm in the US. Had to start a separate MTS tank to keep rehoming those buggers. I don't care what anyone says, you cannot 'check' an MTS population effectively if you start of with a decent amount of adults. I have two tanks, one that I liberally feed the fish in, and one that only has two cardinals and 6 cories (5 cardinals kicked the bucket, getting more soon). I put probably 5 or 6 snails in there (10 gallon) because I have sand in half of it, and I feed microscopic amounts. Im talking the smallest pinch ever for the Cardinals and usually 2 shrimp pellets every 2 days for the adult green cories. I am still getting new baby snails in there too, so I don't really think overfeeding THE catalyst to snail population growth. I just think it helps exacerbate it.