Uncured live rock experiment.

[shovelhead91701]

I purchased 60 lbs of uncured Caribbean live rock from etropicals.com and since my 55 gal. tank only has three damsels, 1 long tentacled anemone, 1 brittle star and some hermits and snails I thought i would experiment with "curing" the rock in my tank. Whoo boy!!!!! BIG MISTAKE! lol I added 2 more powerheads to push flow through the new rocks and took them back out after 1 day to clean them with a bristle brush. The interesting part is that after putting them in the tank at noon, I checked my water at 5:30 and EVERYTHING was off the charts after just 5 1/2 hours. I did a water change at that point of about 15 gallons and repeated this for three more days. The numbers were down some after three days but still not within reasonable amounts. At this point I began to wonder about the livestock and why they were showing no signs of stress. I decided to quit doing the water changes and to see what would unfold. At this point I also added some mushroom calerpa to the tank to "eat" up some of the bad stuff in the water. We are going on the beginning of the third week with the new uncured rock in the tank and all of the critters seem fine so far. The tank still has not cycled out yet so I will keep you guys posted on my experiment's progress. However, based on what I have seen so far.....NEVER ADD ANY UNCURED ROCK OR SAND TO YOUR TANK! LOL

[dakar]

YIKES! SH you keep messing around and you'll find your experiments will get expensive quickly... In an very established tank you can often get away with adding a piece or two of rock like that, but not 60lbs worth!

Hope everything works out for you and you animals don't suffer. Keep us posted. Glad you decided to post this though, a good read for folks just starting up tanks.

[shovelhead91701]

That's my job in the world...... To make expensive mistakes so that other people don't have to! Seriously though, this looks to be an interesting way to see things unfold in a tank with a huge die-off for one reason or another. It should maybe give me some insight as to what can happen when things go wrong as well as an idea of what to do to correct future problems. The only thing that scares me is for the fishies to suffer. The clinical side of my brain is fighting tooth and nail with the compassionate side! I am keeping a good log of all the water conditions and what I am doing with the tank each day....wish I had a program to input all of the data so that I could plot out the cycle and see where (if at all) there was a turning point and things started to settle down. Also might show spikes where things I tried did more harm than good. Also, I am changing one variable per week to see where the cycle is affected and to what degree.(For example: stop water changes, add algae, clean rocks with brush daily, change skimmer settings, so on and so forth.) Since the cycle is just that,(a CYCLE) I am afraid that the results of my variables will be skewed since the idea is that these water conditions will change until the tank finds a bacterial equilibrium. Any Input from you guys will be greatly appreciated! Shawn

[dakar]

wish I had a program to input all of the data so that I could plot out the cycle and see where (if at all) there was a turning point and things started to settle down.

I started trying to write something like that so I could actually plot the parameter changes over time, still in the early development/drawing board stage. No serious amount of time to dedicate to it.

For now why not use your 'blog' to document the changes and effects?

I've been pretty good about documenting EVERYTHING lately across all of our tanks, it makes for a great reference as to just when I did what to which tank and stuff like that.

[pass1over]

So what exactly is the best method for curing LR when putting it in a tank? I've always just put rock in and never had any problems. But yea, I wasnt adding 60 lbs. at a go.

[shovelhead91701]

Most people seem to favor putting the live rock into a separate salt water container such as a rubbermaid tub or trash barrel. People usually put a couple of powerheads into the container to get some water movement through the rock and then do 100% water changes every day or two for a couple of weeks(testing the water before changes). When your water tests come back "clean" finally, then I usually put the rock into a new batch of very salty seawater and after a few minutes a lot of critters come spilling out of the rock.....don't know why but they don't seem to wanna stay in the rock in the super salty water. I then rinse the rock w/ fresh water and install it into the tank. I also go through the rinse bucket of critters that came out of the rocks and try to catch all of the "good" stuff like little stars etc. and then dump out the rest such as bristle worms.

[pass1over]

Hmm, sounds like a go0d idea. This method probably would of saved me the headache of removing 3 mantis shrimp from my LR.

Then again, the process of torturing them was far worth the trouble they caused the little buggers!!