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This might seem like a really stupid question, but why would you go to all the trouble of buying 'live' rock just to kill all the life on it?
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Hi John. Your not killing all life on the LR John. When ROck is pulled out of the ocean it basically sits out for days prior to getting to the end user. All the sponge and the vast majority of Algae on it is on its way out. When you are curing your rocks in tubs or wherever you are just sitting thier waiting for it to basicaly rot of. When I take the rock out and give it a scrub I am basically just helping dieing material come of the rock, which it is going to do anyway. Its just a choice between a month of waiting for the material to rot off or just removing it manually. As per the use of Ozone, this is just another way of helping the rotting part speed up.
John critters on LR, from bacteria to worms, will migrate to the inner parts of the rocks as they are still wet or are sealed by biofilms and if they can survive the time out of the water they will be unaffected. All sponges will be killed as soon as the rock is lifted out of the water. Most algae on the surfaces will also die (with the exception of corraline). When you allow the this water to just cure in a tank you are allowing for a massive bacterial bloom to meet the massive ammount of available rotting food. Not only does it take for ever for the bacteria to reduce the material to nothing. But once they have now you have a huge population of bacteria that you now dont have the food source to keep that population alive. So now it has to die and cycle through itself, the result of this is normally a large algae bloom, followed by sucessive smaller bacteria then algae blooms.
Anyway thats the reasoning behind the process
Mike