cleaning sand

i am a few weeks away from adding anything to my tank (i think) and was wondering about how to keep my sand clean when i do start adding. my 4 yr old son is dying for a starfish so i was thinkin of a sand sifting star....any pros, cons to them and should i have anything else to help....just lookin for you ideas....55gal with shallow sand bed

 

Any additions to sand sifting or digging creatures, just make sure to get a real fine grained sand.

I say if you have sand, then sand sifting additions are good.

I used the CaribSea Dry Aragonite | Aragamax Sugar Sized Sand | Aragamax Select | Seaflor Special Grade Reef Sand | Fiji Pink Reef Sand | Flamingo Reef Sand | Bermuda Pink | Grand Bahamas Biome | Super Reef white .01 grain. I like it. I have many sifters.

 

You'll find that alot of the natural critters found in your sand bed will help alot in keeping it clean. Bristle worms (very common on live rock) like crawling into the sand bed and eatting uneatten food. Personally I don't recommend using Sand Sifting Starfish, as without a huge sand bed (or one thats extremely populated) they have a tendancy to starve to death over a period of time. Also the things the starfish eat, as the very things you spent so much money on when buying live sand.

I've found The Clean Up Crew to be very helpful in helping me select my cleanup crew and its been quite successful thus far. I hope it helps you as well!

-Gavin

 

I would be careful with starfishes and reef, most, if not all don't mix... You can get sand sifting cerith snails... They bury themselves in the sand and rise above when its feeding time.. Another thing would be a engineer goby, but you have too shallow of a bed to do it... There are a couple more options and im sure someone will chime in...

Best of Luck

 

at the risk of sounding like a complete idiot i hafta ask.....when i hear everyone referring to "reef" what exactly do you mean? is it everything in my all-live tank, just the coral, or just live-rock? and why are the starfish bad? I have 20lbs of a very fine grain live-sand over top of 40lbs of a not so fine sand. if more of the fine-grain is necessary i can add to what i have but am extremely interested in some type of starfish, everyone in my family will get to pick one fish (trying to keep from overpopulating) and its all my 4yr old son talks about...any tips on an easy to care for starfish that will be coral friendly

 

When you hear reef it generally refers to tanks with coral, anenomes and such.....but that can get into a deeper detail...

 

should've read the clean up crew link first....it was extremely beneficial and i will only begin looking at brittle starfish (aidan, my son, approved)

 

dont get a green they can snatch fish.