- Joined
- Mar 3, 2016
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Hello everyone,
As you can see in this video, my liverock came very much alive! This is my first reef tank and I opted for liverock as you can get it very fresh here in Taiwan. So far I've seen a sea cucumber, clams, macroalgae, pipe organ coral (not sure if it survived transit), wild Zoas or Palys (not sure which), purple and green sponges, fanworms, and a live mushroom coral. It's pretty cool to find new creatures almost every day... and so far it's all been pretty positive except for the tiny crab or two that I know is hiding in the rock. I will get those eventually if they prove to be an issue. Now for my questions to all of you folks:
- There's a lot of detritus on the rocks from the die-off of transit a week ago, mostly dead Zoa/Palys as you can see in the video. I want to be very careful with Palytoxin, so how should I go about removing the dying polyps? Any risk in just tweezing them off? There's also what look like long hairs (in the middle rock) that my friend said were worms, although they look very dead to me.
- Will all of this crud eventually break down and lead to cleaner rock? I can tolerate a mess for a while as long as I know it'll look better in a couple months...
I understand all of this shedding is part of the cycling process with these rocks, but I would like to remove as much of the detritus as I can to soften the inevitable algae bloom. I was thinking of using a toothbrush to scrub the gunk off the rocks and a tweezer to remove the dead Zoa slime.
I also tested the water today:
Ammonia - 0 ppm
Nitrites - 0 ppm
Nitrates - 60 ppm
It's all running in a 40 gallon custom tank with 20 gallon sump and plenty of liverock, both in the DT and the sump as well. I dosed a bottle of Tim's One & Only a few days ago.
Thanks for any suggestions you can offer!
As you can see in this video, my liverock came very much alive! This is my first reef tank and I opted for liverock as you can get it very fresh here in Taiwan. So far I've seen a sea cucumber, clams, macroalgae, pipe organ coral (not sure if it survived transit), wild Zoas or Palys (not sure which), purple and green sponges, fanworms, and a live mushroom coral. It's pretty cool to find new creatures almost every day... and so far it's all been pretty positive except for the tiny crab or two that I know is hiding in the rock. I will get those eventually if they prove to be an issue. Now for my questions to all of you folks:
- There's a lot of detritus on the rocks from the die-off of transit a week ago, mostly dead Zoa/Palys as you can see in the video. I want to be very careful with Palytoxin, so how should I go about removing the dying polyps? Any risk in just tweezing them off? There's also what look like long hairs (in the middle rock) that my friend said were worms, although they look very dead to me.
- Will all of this crud eventually break down and lead to cleaner rock? I can tolerate a mess for a while as long as I know it'll look better in a couple months...
I understand all of this shedding is part of the cycling process with these rocks, but I would like to remove as much of the detritus as I can to soften the inevitable algae bloom. I was thinking of using a toothbrush to scrub the gunk off the rocks and a tweezer to remove the dead Zoa slime.
I also tested the water today:
Ammonia - 0 ppm
Nitrites - 0 ppm
Nitrates - 60 ppm
It's all running in a 40 gallon custom tank with 20 gallon sump and plenty of liverock, both in the DT and the sump as well. I dosed a bottle of Tim's One & Only a few days ago.
Thanks for any suggestions you can offer!