Liverock

[TwelveL16]

So I been out of the hobby for about a year and I’m getting back in looking for liverock. I have some questions.... why are people calling rock with tons of life on it from like TBS and KP aquatics “uncured?” If it is from the ocean and has an established bacteria population and tons of life on it I was under the impression that was a cured as cured gets. Also why is it that TBS is the only place that put water in his bags? I looked at other places with rock sites and and they only put wet towels on their rock which IMO cause die off do you guys know if anyone else that ships the rock submerged in water. I called one of these places recently and he said all I had to do was add a bottle of bacteria the day before I get it and it would handle the ammonia spike from the die off . It seems like if you are going to buy rock with life you would want to make sure ALL of that life made it to your tank with out causing a massive ammonia spike. Plus the one time I started a tank using TBS i avoided any sort of “cycle” all together. It makes so much more sense to submerge the rocks in water while shipping. TBS is back ordered unfortunately prompting me to look elsewhere but I’m not finding anywhere that does what I want.

 

[CavalierReef]

Other than the obvious - the cost of shipping rock + water, there probably isn't any reason.

 

[brandon429]

check out pictures in here of older reef tanks, they're mainly all corals and on the live rock is coralline. not tunicates. not varied algae, its typically down to just coralline and corals we can see after a while.

im sure someone in here has kp quality rock after twenty years, but not many. most tanks are purple + corals, that's what reef tanks support.

the feed webs in the ocean simply support more than what our tanks will support, so some of the higher order life will die off, or else old reef tanks here would look like that rock.

the bac are indeed set, if you can believe it, some people actually cut / knife scrape off the life forms we know wont survive forever.

The rocks are so hungry for ammonia, after the initial spike it wont be a big deal they're good at shipping them the most affordable way. all you do is a bunch of water changes and it will stop. after initial transfer spike, when the ammonia goes back down the slow curing off of the higher order animals doesnt make more spikes, its just nutrient changes up and down as the rock matures.