How do you know when LR is cured? (It's used LR that's re-curing)

Hi folks! I've been lurking here for a while, and finally have a question:

Do all of my water parimeters, in a bucket with LR curing, have to read 0 before putting the LR in an established tank?

I'm not going to throw it in the the tank until it's ready. I'm just not sure how to tell when that is... (The established tank has a DSB, some hermits, crabs, snails, a starfish, a few small zoas, and a few damsels.)

Unfortunately, I might have done something stupid, and now I'm trying to fix it. Here's what I did:

I pulled some LR from a tank that had been neglected (I wasn't the one in charge of maintaining it at the time ) and the LR had quite a bit of algae growing all over it.

I replaced it with some LR from my other tank. (That LR and that tank was healthy and cured, and looked much better.)

Then put the ugly algae rock in a bucket with tank water, where it sat overnight.

The following day, I decided that I wanted to keep the algae covered rock, so I scrubbed it, rinsed it, scrubbed it, rinsed again, then put it back in bucket with tank water.

It sat overnight again in the bucket. The next day, the water and the rock smelled like death, and was an interesting color that I've never seen before... (no suprise).

I changed some water (maybe 40%) and put a powerhead in there. The next day, it smelled less so I did another water change (this time with natural seawater). I did the same thing 2 days later, and again 2 days after that.

Today, I finally checked the water in the bucket with the Lr:
ammonia: 0.25
nitrite: 0.50
nitrate: between 20 and 40

I'm about to do another water change in the LR bucket. After that w/c my levels will go down, but do I need to keep doing this until my levels are zero? And, is 2 days in between w/c's to soon/ too little/ too late?

Thanks for the help!

 

did you scrub and rinse with tank water or tap ? the ammonia is the rock dying off so if they read zero you should be ok to return the rock to your tank
oh and welcome to the 3reef

 

Thanks for the welcome, and the reply!

In response; I scrubbed the rock in tank water, rinsed it in tank water, and stored it in tank water. Then water changes were done with natural seawater.

The last water change gave me these results:
ammonia: > 0.10
nitrites: > 0.25
nitrates: : 5

My concern is that, since I had a massive die-off/spike after less than 24 hours, even with the 'curing' process', I'm very leary of putting re-cured LR into an alrerady established tank. And I'm also not sure if I should expect that again before it's done curing....

 

Hey! What is your nose telling ya' ?! On top of stable water parameters, simply take a piece of rock and smell it! Fancy odour, suggests incomplete curing process, anaerobic decomposition of organic matter/still present die-off. Hope this helps... Good luck!

 

Welcome I would just add a little bit every other day or something like that and turn your skimmer on to a wet skim. that is how I do all my live rock. A tote or rubbermaid works better then a bucket also I store a lot of it in my sump before I put it in my tank.

 

Reefdiver72 said it nicely! How much live rock are you talking about? It is best to just place small amounts into your main tank as that will not drastically reduce the water quality too much, plus with the skimmer running, it will help to reduce the Disolved organics etc. from elevating.
The other thing, is that I wouldn't do water changes when cycling a tank or live rock, until the cuycle is complete. Running a skimmer is one thing but water changes should be avoided initially till the cycle is complete!

 

I recommend that everyone starting a tank read this from Eric Borneman:

When you get a tank, you start with no populations of anything. You get live rock to form the basis of the biodiversity - and remember that virtually everything is moderated by bacteria and photosynthesis in our tanks. So liverock is the substrate for all these processes, and also has a lot of life on it. How much depends on a lot of things.

Mostly, marine animals and plants don’t like to be out of water for a day at a time...much less the many days to sometimes a week that often happens. So, assuming you are not using existing rock from a tank, or the well-treated aquacultured stuff, you have live rock that is either relatively free of anything alive to begin with, or you have live rock with a few stragglers and a whole lot of stuff dying or about to die because it won’t survive in the tank. Some, if not most, rock exporters have a “curing process” that gets rid of a lot of the life to begin with and some of this is to keep it from dying and fouling further, but some of it would have lived if treated more carefully.

From the moment you start, you are in the negative. Corallines will be dying, sponges, dead worms and crustaceans and echinoids and bivalves, many of which are in the rock and you won't ever see. Not to mention the algae, cyanobacteria, and bacteria, most of which is dehydrated, dead or dying, and will decompose. This is where the existing bacteria get kick started. Bacteria grow really fast, and so they are able to grow to levels that are capable of uptaking nitrogen within...well, the cycling time of a few weeks to a month or so. The “starter bacteria” products give me a chuckle. Anyone with a passing knowledge of microbiology would realize that for a product to contain live bacteria in a medium that sustains it would quickly turn into a nearly solid mass of bacteria, and if the medium is such that it keeps them inactive, then the amount of bacteria in a bottle is like adding a grain of salt to the ocean compared to what is going to happen quickly in a tank with live rock in it.

However, if you realize the doubling time of these bugs, you would know that in a month, you should have a tank packed full of bacteria and no room for water. That means something is killing or eating bacteria. Also realize that if you have a tank with constant decomposition happening at a rate high enough to spike ammonia off the scale, you have a lot of bacteria food...way more than you will when things stop dying off and decomposing. So, bacterial growth may have caught up with the level of nitrogen being produced, but things are still dying...you just test zero for ammonia because there are enough bacteria present to keep up with the nitrogen being released by the dying stuff. It does not necessarily mean things are finished decomposing or that ammonia is not being produced.

Now, if things are decomposing, they are releasing more than ammonia. Guess what dead sponges release? All their toxic metabolites. Guess what else? All their natural antibiotic compounds which prevents some microbes from doing very well. Same with the algae, the inverts, the cyano, the dinoflagellates, etc. They all produce things that can be toxic – and sometimes toxic to things we want, and sometimes to things we don’t want. So, let's just figure this death and decomposition is going take a while.

OK, so now we have a tank packed with some kinds of bacteria, probably not much of others. Eventually the death stops. Now, what happens to all that biomass of bacteria without a food source? They die. Some continue on at an equilibrium level with the amount of nutrients available. And, denitrification is a slow process. Guess what else? Bacteria also have antibiotics, toxins, etc. all released when they die. But, the die-off is slow, relative to the loss of nutrients, and there is already a huge population, and yet you never test ammonia. "The water tests fine.” But, all these swings are happening. Swings of death, followed by growth until limited, then death again, then nutrients available for growth, and then limitation and death. But, every time, they get less and less, but they keep happening – even in mature tanks. Eventually, they slow and stabilize.

What's left? A tank with limited denitrification (because its slow and aerobic things happen fast) and a whole lot of other stuff in the water. Who comes to the rescue and thrives during these cycles? The next fastest growing groups...cyanobacteria, single celled algae, protists, ciliates, etc. Then they do their little cycle thing. And then the turf algae take advantage of the nutrients (the hair algae stage). Turfs get mowed down by all the little amphipods that are suddenly springing up because they have a food source. Maybe you've bought some snails by now, too, or a fish. And the fish dies, of course, because it may not have ammonia to contend with, but is has water filled with things we can't and don't test for...plus, beginning aquarists usually skimp on lights and pumps initially, and haven't figured out that alkalinity test, so pH and O2 are probably swinging wildly at this point.

So, the algae successions kick in, and eventually you have a good algal biomass that handles nitrogen, produces oxygen through photosynthesis, takes up the metabolic CO2 of all the other heterotrophs you can’t see, the bacteria have long settled in and also deal with nutrients, and the aquarium keeper has probably stopped adding fish for a spell because they keep dying. Maybe they started to visit boards and read books and get the knack of the tank a bit. They have probably also added a bunch of fix-it-quick chemicals that didn’t help any, either. Also, they are probably scared to add corals that would actually help with the photosynthesis and nutrient uptake, or they have packed in corals that aren't tolerant of those conditions.

About a year into it, the sand bed is productive and has stratified, water quality is stable, and the aquarist has bought a few more powerheads, understands water quality a bit, corallines and algae, if not corals and other things are photosynthesizing well, and the tank is "mature." That's when fish stop dying when you buy them (at least the cyanide free ones) and corals start to live and grow and I stop getting posts about "I just bought a coral and its dying and my tank is two months old" and they start actually answering some questions here and there instead of just asking questions (though we should all always be asking questions, if not only to ourselves!).

So, ecologically, this is successional population dynamics. Its normal, and it happens when there is a hurricane or a fire, or whatever. In nature though, you have pioneer species that are eventually replaced by climax communities. We usually try and stock immediately with climax species. And find it doesn't always work.

Now, the "too mature" system is the old tank syndrome. Happens in nature, too. That whole forest fire reinvigorating the system is true. Equally true on coral reefs where the intermediate disturbance hypothesis is the running thought on why coral reefs maintain very high diversity...they are stable, but not too stable, and require storms, but not catastrophic ones....predation, but not a giant blanket of crown of thorns, mass bleaching, or loss of key herbivores.

This goes to show what good approximations these tanks are of mini-ecosystems. Things happen much faster in tanks, but what do you expect given the bioload per unit area. So, our climax community happens in a couple years rather than a couple of centuries. Thing is, I am fully convinced that intermediate tank disturbance would prevent old tank syndrome.

My advice on starting tanks is to plan the habitat you want. Find the animals and corals you like. Learn about the tiny area of the reef you will try and recreate, and do not try to make a whole coral reef in one tank. Then, purchase the equipment required to emulate that environment. Then, add the appropriate types of substrate (sand, rubble, rock, whatever) and wait long after “your tank water tests fine” before you add fish and corals. First, add herbivores and maintain water quality. Water changes, carbon, skimming, alkalinity, calcium. Keep the water of high quality, even for things you can’t test for. Wait a few months and enjoy the growth that will happen. Then, add some of the species that you plan to keep….invertebrates and corals. They help create the environment, and also photosynthesize, add biodiversity, stabilize nutrients, etc. Then….then….add fish. The fish will have a reef as their new home. They won’t be stressed by this variable bouilllabaise of water and a strange habitat that keeps changing as things are added or die. They will have a stable tank with real habitat, and then the original concept you imagined will have happened.

 

Hey! Jason! Thanks! Good article!

 

The rock that I'm recuring is pretty much just branches that were taken out of my other tank, maybe 7 or 8lbs.

And, I'm sorry to say, I don't have a skimmer yet. I started out with a nano and there were conflicting opinions on wether or not a skimmer is good for small tanks. I do plan on getting one when I start up my 46 bow in a few weeks.

Thanks for the good article Jason. Eric Borneman is a great writer that explains things so even people like me (who has never taken a chemistry class in my life) can understand.

The rock smells like, well, a rock, not death like last week. I think I'll be ok if I add just a little bit at a time.

Thanks for the help everyone!