What an unsupervised 5 year old can do to a 30 gallon tank

Awwww man so sorry that happened to ya..but keep your head up.it will give you a chance to do it better this time around..I don't.see why you couldn't clean out the rock in fresh saltwater and a power head,then reuse it..

 

sorry to here about your loss there. next time around build a wood canopy and put safety locks on the doors. I had a bar of soap get into my 55g freshwater last year myself. it wasnt a good scene.

 

i have read somewhere if you fill a bucket with salt water with a level of 1.035 to 1.04 and dip your live rock in it for 1 to 2 minutes all inverts will vacate the rock with out harming anything and you can pick and choose what you want to keep dont know if you want to do this but it is meant to rid the rocks of mantis shrimp and bristle worm i dont have salt water setup yet but i read about this late last night hope this helps even though im a newbie

 

There is a reason you shouldn't do this. Simply rinsing LR (particularly with FW) will end up killing off a lot of the bacteria. The rinse won't remove it, you can't rinse the inside of the rock. It'll just kill it.

That dead bacteria is 'die-off' and is what causes LR to kick off cycles.

We nuke (or boil) LR because of this - the idea isn't to get rid of the bacteria (you can't) but to sterilize it so it doesn't decay and cause spikes in your numbers.

Just rinsing LR to clean it is counter productive. Either do nothing, nuke it (bleach), or boil it if you have the means (be careful with boiling though, you can end up breaking your rock apart).

 

anybody with actual experience on this idea? Sounds interesting.

 

I don't really have the ability to boil it. So here are my options, Nuke (but I would need more info and instruction on this), do nothing and just re-use the rock, rinse in FW or buy new rock. I'm interested in Nuking. I really hate to lose all this rock, as it's not cheap to replace. You sound pretty experienced in it. If you could tell me how to Nuke it (bleach) I would really appreciate. Thanks for all of your great feedback!

 

It's iffy. I used it on my aquacultured rock when I first got it (just let each piece sit for about 10 minutes), and about 1/3rd of the crabs came off. I went back, and did the same thing, except using a turkey baster to get freshwater inside the nooks and crannies of the rock, and got nearly everything.

The porcelain crabs were less affected by the freshwater than the gorilla and stone crabs. I got 2 porcelains off the rock, 5 stone crabs, and about 50 gorillas. I now have many porcelains in my tank (20+), and a single gorilla crab (it's the biggest one). The pistol shrimp ran from it, but were hard to get to (since they live deep in the rocks). The larger the invert was, the less likely it seemed to be affected by the freshwater. It took more time in the FW for them to run; the larger gorillas needed to be basted over and over again, while the tiny ones jumped ship with just a single squirt.

I realize this is talking about FW and not ultra high salinity water, but it's the same concept. Most of the places I saw while researching ways to get rid of crabs that mentioned one method then mentioned the other in the same breath.

This isn't exactly on topic, I know, but I have over 10 hours of experience (and over 100 kills ;D) with this method, so I figured I'd chime in.

I would nuke the rock, Avon. I'm not 100% on that procedure, so someone else has gotta help.

 

Make up a large enough vat for your rock (I use 5 gallon buckets).

Fill bucket will a RO/bleach blend 1:10 or so. Doesn't have to be exact.

Put rock in and let sit for 3 days.

Take rock out, dump water.

Fill bucket with RO. Put rock in and let sit for 3 days.

Take rock out, dump water.

Fill bucket with RO (some like to use RO/DI at this stage). Put rock in and let sit for 3 days. (Doing this twice)

Take rock out and let air dry for 2 weeks.

Good luck.

 

I hate to kill the rock if I don't have to, but I'm really worried the exposure to the all the food that was dumped in the tank could have absorbed in the rock, which would cause extended cycling once I start the tank over. I hate to buy new LR if I can successfully keep this LR. Again, thanks for the great feedback!

 

It *might* be OK but I wouldn't want to risk it. Long term, I'd have the question in the back of my head "is this problem x due to that uncleaned rock?"...

good luck with it dood