I get your point and I have no issue with mulm at all. I think most of your tanks look very good mulm or not. But you should look up dirt/soil as they are exactly the same thing. Dirt is just soil that has been displaced. "Dirted tank" is absolutely correct.
@@DanHiteshew-oneandonly Huh...I thought you would want your audience to know the correct term and definition. Especially since dirted tanks are "hot" right now. Also...if you remove rich black soil ripe with nutrients and minerals from the ground and put it into your raised bed garden (also currently very hot) you will be planting in dirt. And just for the record...that's just fine with this master gardener. LOL
Excellent video. I have a friend who grows show quality aquarium plants using mulm as a fertilizer. He has a great innovation to keep the mulm in the root zone as opposed to sitting on top of the gravel. He siphons out the mulm and lets it settle out to the bottom of a container. He then pours off the clear water leaving a thick, rich concentrated mulm. Next step he puts the mulm into small ice cube trays and freezes. When he fertilizers his plant he takes a frozen "mulm cube" and pushes it under his sword plants and other substrate feeding plants. Mulm is great stuff if you have a separate area from your food to make mulm cubes.
So I sat down last night and watched my Guppies and shrimp graze in the mulm! I recommend everyone should do this it's really cool to watch the inhabitants of our little water worlds explore and their behavior while they do! Even though a lot of it we can't see by the naked eye it was very obvious when the fish found something.. All that wonderful Life living in that Mulm that creates these amazing ecosystems!! So of course after I finished watching them I started researching and hearing what others had to say.. RU-vid brought me straight to your video 💪👍😁 It also got me wondering when is too much is too much? I've noticed it builds up a whole lot quicker when you use a deep sand substrate and sponge filters. Then add in botanicals and the normal organic and fish waste ... soon it's a thicccccc layer🤣 Thank you for your super definitions of detritus, mulm and waste. Super informative and as always ,I learn a bunch when I watch your videos. I'm still watching I just haven't had the chance to comment like I used to because of work!! Thanks again Dan for sharing your experience and another great discussion!!👍🥰❤️🌿🐟🌿
Sponge filter work great for biological filtration, but don't pull much of the physical material out of the water. It's the physical material that breaks down into mulm. A HOB filter moves the water around a lot more and picks up the physical material which gets removed when we do a filter change.
@@DanHiteshew-oneandonly thanks Dan I know the first time around in the hobby I always used HOBs so I had never seen a buildup like I have right now.. I'm also using aquarium Co-op course sponge filters and although I do like them I'm starting to lean towards placing another sponge filter with a finer sponge!! I enjoy the ease of use and the budget friendliness of the sponge filters... An HOB with a sponge and biological media really can make a difference!! Thanks Dan and I hope you're having a wonderful day 🙏🌿🐟🌿🥰♥️
It would be an interesting experiment to collect a decent amount of mulm and put it in a small nano or pico tank with a sand top cover and a few plants, and then track how it cycles from start-up.
I have so many cory cats in my tank that they keep the mulm suspended until the filter removes it from the water column. So i never see mulm settle on my substrate (pool filter sand)
Mulm is free fertilizer gold. I always siphon it out right next to the front tank glass just because I don't like how it looks, and pick up stuff that's on the surface of the substrate, but around the plant roots I let it be. Has cut my dependacy on root tabs literally in half, with zero parameter spikes.
Great video. I watched your video on Detritus worms and this explains Mulm great. I left my tank which is gravelled for a month with young Hillstream fry showing and finally vacuumed the weekend and also to keep my small colony of Detritus worms down. I always think it's everyone to their own and i love the tea colour look and your fish are stunning and so healthy.
Personally, I never touch the mulm in the planted aquariums. It sometimes does kick up a bit during a deep water change, but within 15 minutes, it's back down into the substrate. The fish seem to enjoy it, too.
It seems if you let nature take over and let her do her thing all goes well. My most neglected tanks seem to run the best, plant growth wise with low to zero nitrates
Will mulm in the substrate help stem and rhizome plants that get the bulk of their nutrients from the water column, or will only rooted plants make optimum use of it?
I noticed that fish that live in high amounts of mulm don't grow that much because indeed it's just too much complicated to just say is bad. Could be hormones in there? It's the same old tank syndrome? Maybe there are denitrifying bacteria so plants don't grow so don't suck up those nutrients? I don't know but I think it's very interesting :D
Hey i saw you had some experience with crayfish so i had a question, i found a little lobster looking thing on the road the other day, my uncle says its a langostino and it definitely looks like it, but langostinos are saltwater and this little guy was no where near the ocean and likes to be in freshwater. So is it a crayfish or a langostino? Its a teeny bit bigger than a crayfish and hes dark red.
I looked up langostino, and it's a kind of shrimp or prawn it looks like. If what you have looks like a crayfish, than I'm guessing it's a crayfish. Shrimp won't leave the water, but crayfish regularly crawl around on land.
I can't agree with your defenitions on mulm/detritus or soil/dirt. Nothing wrong with your interpretation, they are fine. However you mention being pandentic and this is where I have to disagree as in fact both sets of defentitions are interchageable. Check out miriam or oxford dictionaries. Otherwise, great viddeo. :-)
Good video but your description of dirt and soil is kinda pedantic and very inaccurate. The term “dirted tank” is as accurate as it gets when it comes to the English language.
Do you realise you talk about the same subjects over and over. Mulm build up is due to bad design. How you get that much mulm in a tank with no plants is beyond me just from a couple of fish. If there was shrimp in there you wouldn't get build up. Maybe you need a new project mate. We all need something new otherwise life is dull...