I live and fish off the Mississippi gulf. What would be the risk/benefit to bringing water back from my trips for water changes. Also, could i use LS from some of the barrier islands in a refugium?
local gulf water
- Thread starter btyrep
- Start date
IMHO dont. think of all the sunscreen and cigaretts etc i there your bringing home. btw on another board a member found a cigarette butt in his purchased ls
hey i live in mobile, and i often fish Horn island and Pettyboy. I know a guy who got some live sand from the east end of horn island, he waited for a good incomming tide and planed his trip so he got there about an hour before high tide, (water from the gulf should be pretty clean, where as water from the sound????) he had all kinds of stuff that showed up in the tank (im not a saltwater guy, did not know what they were). I have a 16' trall net that we use to pull for bait and we catch a bunch of stuff that would look great in a tank, seahorses and the like. there are some old stumps about 1/4 mile west of the east end of horn island, I pulled one up several years ago with an anchor, would something like that act like live rock?
I think everyone above is making the point that the state of our ocean's waters is not good, and I totally agree. Plus there are a lot of natural things in the ocean that we may not necessarily want in our home aquaria, because we can't control for them.
See my post in this thread re: using real seawater in a tank
http://www.aquariacentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=78874&highlight=ocean+water
With regard to the hormones I mention, it refers to human hormones. Due to the popularity of hormonal birth control (e.g. birth control pills, etc.), estrogen and other female hormones are found in high concentrations in sewage These end up in the ocean and other bodies of water because they cannot be removed by sewage treatment procedures. There are now cases of fishes become feminized, where males actually start turning into females (and this is not in fishes where this is normal, like sheephead wrasses)!
But the final call is always yours, so it's up to you.
See my post in this thread re: using real seawater in a tank
http://www.aquariacentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=78874&highlight=ocean+water
With regard to the hormones I mention, it refers to human hormones. Due to the popularity of hormonal birth control (e.g. birth control pills, etc.), estrogen and other female hormones are found in high concentrations in sewage These end up in the ocean and other bodies of water because they cannot be removed by sewage treatment procedures. There are now cases of fishes become feminized, where males actually start turning into females (and this is not in fishes where this is normal, like sheephead wrasses)!
But the final call is always yours, so it's up to you.
Last edited:
There's also the issue of parasites. In his "Breeding the Orchid Dottyback," Martin Moe describes in detail the battles he had with chaetognaths and cryptocaryon that came in with plankton he collected.
thats a good point dave. you never really know what all you are introducing into a tank when you put anything straight from nature in it.
One thing I read in the very first saltwater book I ever read, and an old one at that, was to let the collected water sit in containers where no light will get in for a month. Most if not all parasites will die during this time, ditto for algaes or anything else living in the water.
but this method won't remove cysts (some of which can survive for months or years without food), pollutants, inorganic stuff.