Ants!!!!

Okay For the past 2 nights, when I do my midnight checkup on my tank, I have found ants floating in my sump...And they are atleast 1 cm big....Maybe thats just them getting saturated with water or somthing I dont know but the problem is there seems to be a oily..in the water of my sump... I have no clue what the hell it is but I am afraid that it could do some damage to my tank. Any ideas?

 

From the ants maybe? Or how much flow is going through your sump? High or low flow?

 

um..well I have part of the return going back to the sump and have a reactor pushing water in as well.

 

If you have plants (in pots) close to your tank move them further, the ants might be living in there.. Or look around your tank for holes in the wall/floor.. Couple of ants won't do much damage to you tank.. But if you keep getting them then look into it

 

aight, im actually not so worried abt the ants, as to the oil like hing thats swiveling around my sump haha

 

lol. I had that in my DT( I don't have a sump in this tank), but that was because I didn't have a skimmer or powerheads. I was told it was fish oil - from low water movement. You can soak up the oil-like mess with paper towels or you can use news paper.

 

I use newspaper and skim it from the top. Basically its excess proteins. The are aquaphobic so bind with the air at the of the tank, pretty much in the same way a skimmer works. People with sumps dont have this problem as the drains surface skim the water.

 

oil on top? maybe you should try chemical drop by plane or maybe try and contain with a net? or if all else fails maybe a "top hat" or even top kill? yea those won't work you just have some bio film, need better surface agitation or a surface skimmer u can use a paper towel to help pull the film off the top of ur water.

 

As we've seen, none of those methods posed as a success