Black & White Substrate

[AzFish]

Hi,

As the title suggests, who is using a mixture of Black & White Subtrate as all white washes out the colour of my sandsifters.. Does it look any good? Im wanting to add a bag of black sand to my white sand for my new tank, pics of your set up would be great!

Cheers,

Aaron

[electricyellowz]

I have done it before (but I have no pics) and It looks alright. What type of sandsifters do you have? It will look better (imo) if you have more of one colour than another.

Hth,

Ben

[AzFish]

there will be Callochromis pleurospilus in there and some cyps.

Cheers,

Aaron

[luket]

I did this recently with a 5' 270L tank that houses a colony of 20 Multi's and shells + a dozen Cyps.

I used Black reptile sand (only black sand I could find at short notice) and 1 - 2mm grains of Argonite about a 30/60 mix. Black sand being predominate

It looks okay...I'm not that happy with it for a few reasons.

The black sand is way to fine...it's more like silt, due to the silt like nature of the black sand it doesn't really "breathe" like your other courser substrates do, meaning uneaten food just sits on the type of the substrate and very quickly develops a white fur on it....meaning I need to vacuum the tank every few days therefore disturbing the fish more then I'd like. It's easy to vacuum up the silt too when your vacuuming if you focus on one area to much.

The positives are I believe the fish's colours seem more prominant then they might be over a lighter substrate....the Multi's love it there building like mad, they find it very easy to dig through .

Overall though I'll be getting rid of this mix in the near future....It's eating at me