Live Rock Curing

No worries, my fault I missed the part of the post above you were referring to somehow, my bad.

 

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

 

Hi Mike,

Firstly, my apologies, my question was not only stupid it was badly phrased :-(

I guess the point I was trying to make was, what is the use of using THAT much live rock and then scrubbing most of the life from the surface. Surely the same results could be gained by using mostly base rock with just a few pounds of live rock.

My biggest thrill was putting very fresh live rock into my tank and after just a week being able to see the life that was there. All sorts of different algae, sponges, worms and coral fragments. It just seems to me to be a complete waste of a natural resourse to scrub all of that off considering the initial cost and considering the source.

JMHO

John

 

John no offence taken at all, it was a good question.

I hear ya, Most of the life on the surface of the rocks is going to check out anyway, Sponge exposure to air is a death sentence. Same for more marine algaes when exposed to the point of dehidration. What ends up happening is little pockets of water and biofilm protect most of the critters in the rock, so they will come back, it just takes a couple of cells in most cases.
On the base rock, that poses a slightly different problem. When rock is allowed to completely dry out, all life in it dies. With this death come a ton of nutrients and alot of cloging of the arteries of the skeliton rock, that takes a long time to rid yourself of. An example would be the FLorida rock that was dry and then returned to the water to make it live. This rock is generally more dence (clogged) and is covered in algaes (nutrient laidened).

But John your not scrubing all the life off it, just the surface material that has been comprismised anyway and is going to die one way or another. If you allow the sponges and decaying algae to stay on the surface thier basically just going to rot off, manually removing them instead just saves time. When the rock was pulled out all the bacteria, worms, critters migrate to the interior of the rock where thier are pockets of water to sustain them. What ever reains on the surface, beyond coraline is dead anyway.

take care

Mike

 

Mike,

I guess it's a matter of perspective.

The rock I got was straight from the GBR, was collected in the morning and in my tank by that afternoon. It still had a some 'travelling' time but was certainly not dried out, in fact it smelled quite nice

Since then, because of a latter tank crash and again because of a house move, the rock has been dried, cleaned and reused a few times. Each time reseeded with just a piece or 2 of live rock, with good results.


In fact I am going through this process right now and intend to post some pics of the tanks progress here next week.

John

 

Yea John if you can get it in your tank that quick, it is a different story and I wouldnt go through what I do for sure.

Looking forward to seeing some pics.


take care

mike

 

I don't believe in blindly scrubbing the rock. I've seen people take it straight out of the box before and begin vigerously scrubbing it without even checking whats on it first. Obviously if it's been out of water for a long time, then yes most of what's on the surface will be dead. But if it's been out of water for a short time, isn't it better to try to save as much as we can? If all we want is pre made bacteria colonies so we can set up an aquarium as fast as posible as some coraline algae to make the rock look pretty, then isn't it better to use base rock? It's my opinion that if we're taking something from the reef, it's our responsiblity to save as much life on it as we can. When curing rock I do little more then rinse it out, remove the sponges and what obviously looks dead and trim the macro algae back to the rock and place it in a tank with a good skimmer and miminal light. Yes I know most people don't have a 300 gal tank sitting around just to cure rock in, nor do they want to waste that much water for 1 batch of rock. But you don't need to cure an entire batch all in the same container, you can use more then one. you can set up a tank with base rock and add a small amount of premium rock to give you a diversity life and coraline algae. After a couple of weeks I check the rock again for die off and remove anything dead and give it another good rinse then place it in the final aquarium to finish curing. Yes it takes much longer then just scrubbing the rock, but that's all part of the hobby and the results in the long run will surprise you.

 

Boy you wouldn't want to be at my house then...I soak it in bleach before it goes in my tank. Instant quarantine!

 

Ha ha, that's a good one. It's ok I don't mind people having a joke at my expense now and then.

 

He's not kidding He got some really nasty live rock for free and to avoid contaminating his tank, he bleached it. Now, if he had bought the rock, I doubt he'd have done so.