Stimpy darts in front of an amazingly clean live rock

Last week I discussed purchasing some “Reef Janitors”. Well, they have been hard at work, cleaning up the aquarium. I have to say, I’m very pleased. One of the live rocks has lots of hills and valleys, and it’s about half way up the aquarium. Last week green algae, and a little bit of red algae covered the entire rock. This week, it’s almost bare. If you look at the picture on the right, you’ll be able to see some of the hermit crabs and snails working on the last bits of algae.

I had also purchased some Grunge from GARF.  The Grunge came the day after the cleaning crew.  Grunge is something like live sand, but it is cultivated in aquariums instead of gathered in the wild.  Beneficial bacteria, Coraline algae, and even tiny starfish and sponges are supposed to be all over in this sandy goop.  The instructions said to just put the Grunge on top of the substrate and live rocks.  They seemed to know what they were doing, so that’s exactly what I did.

The aquarium just after adding Grunge

Just after adding the Grunge I also turned the white light off, and just had the Actinic light on.  As you might expect, the water got just a little cloudy with all that new substrate.  And, the fish got just a little agitated.  They began zipping back and forth in front of the aquarium.  The picture above will probably never be repeated, at least not in this aquarium.

It took me a few more days to discover the most impressive part of the changes.  Yesterday, I did my weekly chemical check.  The week before, I had both ammonia and nitrite levels at 0, and nitrate at 5.  The nitrate level was low enough that I had decided to skip my usual 10% weekly  water change.  This week, I expected the nitrate level to be back up to 10 or 15, and expected to change the water.  I was shocked to see that the ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate levels were all 0!  The Grange had an almost immediate positive affect on the bio filtration system of the aquarium.

All in all, I’m very happy with both the Grunge and the Reef Janitors.  Bravo, GARF!