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I'm downsizing, and I want to keep a 15g tank with a few fish. I have a 15 gallon currently housing a single aggressive bn, and I will be making the 29g safer for the khuli loaches, that are in there, before moving the bn in with them.

I have sand and two ornaments in the 15g, I was thinking that 1) I could remove the sand, get rid of the ornaments, clean the sand.

2) then I'd remove some gravel from the 29g, clean it, and lanscape the 15g. I was thinking of having gravel of either side of the tanks, and having a 'stream' of sand in the middle of the tank. I will be using large pebbles to try and separate the sand/gravel as well as set the boundaries of the sand/gravel.

Is there any way I could do something to effectively separate the sand and the adjoining gravel?

Thanks in advance.

R_Boy1

I've been doing sand and gravel for the past year, and I've learned one thing. They are really hard to keep separate... You might want to try keeping an actual boundary between the sand and the gravel, not one made of pebbles, as the gravel and sand can get mixed between the cracks between pebbles. I had something like this but I used large stones, which wasn't very effective. Gravel would leak into the sand pit, and the sand would get kicked up out of the sand pit and fall over the gravel areas. Fact is, sand can be picked up by the water current if it's kicked up enough, so it's going to go into your gravel regions seemingly no matter what. Of course, the sand going on the gravel really doesn't change the look since the sand just falls into the cracks between the gravel. However, gravel pieces in sand is really obvious. So you can try to control for gravel entering your sand region, in which case you only need some sort of boundary where the holes are smaller than the pieces of gravel. Otherwise you're going to have gravel "leaking" into the sand areas, as I mentioned. Right now I'm retrying my gravel/sand concept by having a strip of plastic canvas containing the gravel, sort of like a solid-ish net. The strip is then hidden by rocks. It's worked so far, but I haven't needed to move any any of the plastic canvas and stuff which is good, otherwise I'm pretty sure I'd lose some gravel into the sand.

There is no way to keep sand and gravel completely separate just because of sand getting kicked up. But if you can keep the gravel from moving then you're doing pretty good.

BTW, I can't really imagine a bristlenose being aggressive. My male will defend his cave and chase the female around, but that's all.

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The aquarist is one who must learn the ways of the biologist, the chemist, and the veterinarian.

The answer to that is easy. "With great Difficulty"
You could try strips of a plastic/type material cut into strips one continuous length for each side even then it would have to be completely hidden with DW or rocks. The water/fish movement and your cleaning will move the sand and substrate around no mater what you do.

If you want to still try the stream effect you could try a different coloured natural substrate but you choice would have to be very careful other wise it will distract you from the overall effect. This could be easily separated by rocks and DW.

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Keith

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