Substrate For Bottom Dwellers

I have B D Trading aquarium sand in my main tank, and in the 54 litre before I had to sell it. http://aquariumsand.co.uk/ It was cheaper than any other 'aquarium sand' in the shops, and I liked the colour of it. It is a light tan coloured sand with very slightly larger black particles. I had pygmy cories in the 54 litre, there is one of the shoal left in my 180 litre tank.


The betta's tank has the coarser grained Unipac silica sand but there's only a betta and a nerite in there, no bottom dwellers.



It is usually recommended to avoid white sand (the PFK article mentions this) since virtually every river, stream and lake has a dark floor. Fish have evolved so they are dark when seen from above so they are camouflaged against the dark bottom, and pale when seen from underneath so they are harder to spot against the sky. Fish 'expect' the bottom of the tank to be darker than white.

Dependant on plant choices the corys will definitely prefer sand.  Can you tweak your planting to provide them this? Cryptocorynes, vallisnerias, echinodorus, lillaeopsis and many more I have successfully grown in sand.

Unipac Fiji Fine looks good. I've had the Tana sand for years - great for the tank when I didn't use lighting but possibly a bit on the light side with lighting. The Fiji Fine looks somewhere in between the dark colour of JBL Manado and the Unipac Tana Sand - in fact, not unlike the mix of Tana and Limpopo I now have.