Bag playsand already wet?! sub replacement ?s time sensitive

[hprmom]

All seven of our crabs have been up for a week so we decided to seize the moment and turn over the two-year old sub in our 65g, doing a 50% replacement in the process (unless we are wiped out before we get to 50%, or one of you tells me it's a bad idea!).

QUESTION: We purchased several bags of playsand tonight. When we opened it up, we found it was already wet... to sandcastle consistency! The bags were sealed, on a pallet on a shelf (well off the ground), indoors at a home depot. We mixed one bag with completely dry EE (5 to 1 ratio) and it was still at sandcastle consistency.

Should we be concerned about what is already moistening the sand? I wouldn't think chlorine would be a problem but I have no idea where the moisture/water came from and what might have been in it. We live in FL and it's been raining a lot, it's like 90% humidity most of the time so I'm not sure we'd be able to find dry sand anywhere right now.

My other concern is, if the sand is already wet enough, then I wouldn't be adding any msw to the mix, which I usually like to do to discourage mold. Since we'll be mixing the new sub 50% with our old sub (which was originally moistened with half strength msw), should we be okay? My only other thought is to moisten the EE with full strength msw and then distribute that through the playsand.

Finally -- we had eyes on all seven crabs 24 hours ago, but two went under today (one helpfully waved at us through a window 5" down!). We've set up a temporary 20g which we hope they'll only have to occupy for one day, and before we start work tomorrow morning we'll remove any crabs on the surface. If--when--we run into the others, will it be safe to simply deposit them into the 20g without special treatment? Because I figure they're unlikely to be molting this quickly?

Thanks all for your help! And HI to everyone who remembers me! You'll be glad to know our seven are alive, healthy, active and growing like weeds! And that Junior keeps me scouring shell shops on every vacation because he STILL will not accept any shell but a murex! I have the forums on tapatalk and drop in now and then, seeing familiar screen names is warm & fuzzy.

[hermitcrab.mom3]

The plays and should be ok, because it's probably just rain. Although, I have never had that problem before. I'm glad your hermits are doing well!

[GotButterflies]

Hello! I remember you! Hi fellow Floridian! I wondered if you still had your crabbies!

It probably is rainwater. The downside to it being rainwater, is rain does wash the contaminants out of the air. Then, who knows what is on those bags... I'm a germaphobe, and have OCD...so don't get me started! I'll tag @Wodesorel for her input!

[hprmom]

Hello! I remember you! Hi fellow Floridian! I wondered if you still had your crabbies!

It probably is rainwater. The downside to it being rainwater, is rain does wash the contaminants out of the air. Then, who knows what is on those bags... I'm a germaphobe, and have OCD...so don't get me started! I'll tag @Wodesorel for her input!

Hi, @GotButterflies! Great to see you again. So, the hubs thinks the reason we're seeing so many of our guys on the surface is our lovely Florida weather pattern we've been having lately. Lots of low pressure systems, I can hear thunder rumbling and 6 out of 7 are as high up as they can go in the tree!

Thanks for tagging @Wodesorel. The hubs had to run over to Tarpon Springs today so we delayed the sub replacement a few hours. He's going to try another store for dry sand while we wait for more HCA input. But since we've got six on the surface and I have the 20g ready to go, we'll probably go ahead and move them over. It'll be tight but hopefully they'll only have to hang in there less than 24 hours. I do wish Herminy would surface on his own; he's only been MIA 48 hours, but I can't specifically remember what condition he was in (whether he looked ready to molt) when I saw him 2 days ago. **EDIT: He's up! **

[GotButterflies]

A lot of my guys are up too...the only ones that still dig down regularly are the straws. That's always been the case though.

[hprmom]

The hubs found dry sand, woot! I’d still like an answer to the wet bag question, for future reference and as a point of info for other crabbers (I’m sure we’re not the first people to encounter this!). Is there a way to edit my post title to remove “time sensitive”?

All seven crabs surfaced during today’s rain, so we have no worries about disturbing molters, yay! They’re nervously cozied up in the 20g and we’ve begun removal of the top half of the sub (we’ll churn up the bottom half and mix it with new sub). I dug to the bottom glass and found the sub is remarkably consistent, just denser and a little wetter the deeper we go. Here’s a pic where you can see glass (shiny white spot) and a finger hole I poked about 2” up from the bottom:



Other than buried shells and debris, we’ve run into nothing smelly, discolored, or otherwise unusual. It’s been amazingly low maintenance all this time, I even had to stop misting it on the wall by the UTH (FL humidity, y’all, lol). This sets my mind at ease about going another two years after this sub refresh! At that point we might be looking at a bigger tank.


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[GotButterflies]

That's awesome! I'll tag @Wodesorel one more time. Please Wodesorel answer this

[wodesorel]

If you ever need me just shoot me a PM! For some reason I don't get tagging notifications so I never see it.

I agree with GB, it really depends how it got wet and how it was stored. Bags of sand left outside are probably low risk. Bags that got wet in transport or that had other chemicals stored around them are at higher risk. I've found bags before that had roofing and driveway asphalt stuck to them. Who knows what else they can be exposed to. I personally avoid wet bags completely, and I ALWAYS smell the bags before purchasing and after getting them open as I've found ones that smelled of deisel. It's a few bucks to replacr and it is the crabs' life at risk. I just don't like to take chances, there is so much else that can go wrong, the sand is an easy one to get right. We use the rejects in the garden, or to fill holes in the yard so it doesn't go to waste!

[Cjandt]

I Got my playsand from Home Depot as well. I'd been having bacterial issues with it until I let it dry out completely. This last time I used completely dry playsand and completely dry EE. I sprayed just a little salted water in to it, not to sand castle consistency. Then I just let the evaporation in the tank handle the rest. It's been great for weeks now and looks to be going good for the long haul. After this last round I'm going to be using completely dried playsand and the bagged EE instead of the compressed bricks. It just works so much better.

[hprmom]

Thanks, GB, @Cjandt and @wodesorel again! After reading your replies I'm glad we held out for finding dry sand!

The sub refresh went smashingly well. All the old sub below the surface looked practically new. We mixed new sub by soaking EE bricks and then mixing that with the dry sand; as before, the moisture from the bricks was all we needed to get the perfect consistency. Then we mixed reserved old sub with that at maybe a 30-50% ratio of old to new (originally we were going to do 50%, but the old sub was a lot more wet than the new, so we cut back to balance it). It went pretty quick; we even took a little time to redesign our "sand art" using variations of sub, crushed oyster, and 100% sand against the glass.

Our colony weathered 2 nights in the 20g just fine, then obligingly all crammed into the hollow tree branch so all we had to do was lift that out of the 20g and back into the 65 to move them all at once! They're all now happily messing up the sand art and changing into new shells (we cleaned and restocked the shop).

I was planning bigger pools since ours guys have outgrown the tupperware containers, but we realized we can really only fit one large pool in the tank. So we started brainstorming with the spare tanks in our shed, and my engineer hubs has a plan to build a 5.5g "bump out" that would house climbing space and the new freshwater pool. I may post a separate thread with how that works out...

Thanks!