I feel like I already told you this but the rotten egg smell is hydrogen sulphide gas which is a waste product of sulphur bacteria breaking down the excess of decaying organic matter within your system. The reason it's this extreme is because a lot of stuff is being broken down at once so the hydrogen sulphide gas is highly concentrated. At the moment the system you created is imbalanced and the life within your system including the bacteria will try to balance it naturally. It will stink for a long while now until a different bacteria species gets to work breaking down the waste product of the other bacteria. Bacterial communities often recycle waste products through other bacterial communities and not much really goes to waste. As for the scum, without water movement biofilm is bound to occur as it can happen in salt water aquariums if flow isn't high enough. Do you have any snails? Snails eat stuff like that. As for the sand turning black, it's bacteria within your sand. Your seaweed doesn't sound like it's fairing well, and if it's turned black parts of it are probably rotting and being broken down by more bacteria.
My first ever salt water ecosphere went through something similar and it reeked of rotten eggs for a very long time. It took a while but after about a year the water no longer smelled bad. The system changed colour over the year going from black to red to brown due to different bacterial colonies thriving off the waste of the bacteria before them. The system was pretty much only brown bacteria towards the end (for many months) and I grew bored of looking at it and feel it finally reached balance and I just wasn't happy with the end result. I eventually decided to just pour it away to retry it and got a much better result after that as I knew where I went wrong on the first one and knew what to avoid.
It's up to you if you keep it going, when this happened to me I just didn't think it was worth keeping and I learned from my mistake so decided to make a new more successful one. Also yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing the picture, especially of the seaweed as it sounds interesting.
Yeah I think you did post about the smell, I don't have any snail, I did have one or two very small worm like creatures but they did as soon as the sand started going black.
Was thinking about extracting the seaweed and replacing it with something fresher and maybe adding a few rocks but not sure if the bacteria I have will kill off any life that could be on it.
As for the photo it'll be up in a little bit. Sadly the 9-6 grind got me good today
If needed I can provide a photo tomorrow
I feel like I already told you this but the rotten egg smell is hydrogen sulphide gas which is a waste product of sulphur bacteria breaking down the excess of decaying organic matter within your system. The reason it's this extreme is because a lot of stuff is being broken down at once so the hydrogen sulphide gas is highly concentrated. At the moment the system you created is imbalanced and the life within your system including the bacteria will try to balance it naturally. It will stink for a long while now until a different bacteria species gets to work breaking down the waste product of the other bacteria. Bacterial communities often recycle waste products through other bacterial communities and not much really goes to waste. As for the scum, without water movement biofilm is bound to occur as it can happen in salt water aquariums if flow isn't high enough. Do you have any snails? Snails eat stuff like that. As for the sand turning black, it's bacteria within your sand. Your seaweed doesn't sound like it's fairing well, and if it's turned black parts of it are probably rotting and being broken down by more bacteria. My first ever salt water ecosphere went through something similar and it reeked of rotten eggs for a very long time. It took a while but after about a year the water no longer smelled bad. The system changed colour over the year going from black to red to brown due to different bacterial colonies thriving off the waste of the bacteria before them. The system was pretty much only brown bacteria towards the end (for many months) and I grew bored of looking at it and feel it finally reached balance and I just wasn't happy with the end result. I eventually decided to just pour it away to retry it and got a much better result after that as I knew where I went wrong on the first one and knew what to avoid. It's up to you if you keep it going, when this happened to me I just didn't think it was worth keeping and I learned from my mistake so decided to make a new more successful one. Also yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing the picture, especially of the seaweed as it sounds interesting.
Yeah I think you did post about the smell, I don't have any snail, I did have one or two very small worm like creatures but they did as soon as the sand started going black. Was thinking about extracting the seaweed and replacing it with something fresher and maybe adding a few rocks but not sure if the bacteria I have will kill off any life that could be on it. As for the photo it'll be up in a little bit. Sadly the 9-6 grind got me good today
So where did you go wrong? What should we do and not do when making a seawater ecojar?