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I was just having this discussion. I am a rather old salt myself, been out of the hobby for over 10 years. I just got back into this week and holy hell I am floored at the sterile tanks. I picked up my new one and just saw no life on the rocks. My local supply guy stared at me strange when I mentioned this to him. He told me for every good thing that comes in on seeded live rock there is something bad, that starting a sterile tank is the way to do it. I have a hard time believing that. My entire fun existence of a reefer back in the day was staring into my tank and going "what the heck is that? Where did that come from?"Been in the hobby for 15 years and I gotta spill my guts on this. So many algae filled white rock tanks out there these days. I mean picture after picture of unhealthy looking tanks. Whats up with this trend on starting a sterile dry rock tank?
Why are people so afraid of "pests"? I think the reason pests take hold and reach plague proportions is due to the lack of biodiversity found in these sterilized tanks. I mean I have vermitid snails and red planaria in my reef but they have found a balance in my ecosystem. I have to look hard just to find one flatworm and often times can't. I don't qt fish but my oldest is 12 years. I have so many unnamed critters and bristle worms yet my corals don't get eaten. I have algaes in my tank that can't compete against my Coraline. I relish the moments I discover a new critter in my tank, I certainly don't panic.
If you're new to the hobby just know that there is another way to start a reef that works. You can have a tank that is beautiful from day one. You don't have to go the dry rock route. Look at LIVErock as the single greatest investment in your reefs success.
I hope that a trend will start in the direction of farmed ocean rock. More biodiversity in reefs is needed. No longer will newbies wait for a year or longer for an established tank. No longer will the majority of tanks be a mixture of white, brown, and a handful of tiny unhappy frags.
I was just having this discussion. I am a rather old salt myself, been out of the hobby for over 10 years. I just got back into this week and holy hell I am floored at the sterile tanks. I picked up my new one and just saw no life on the rocks. My local supply guy stared at me strange when I mentioned this to him. He told me for every good thing that comes in on seeded live rock there is something bad, that starting a sterile tank is the way to do it. I have a hard time believing that. My entire fun existence of a reefer back in the day was staring into my tank and going "what the heck is that? Where did that come from?"
You can still get the good stuff
I also noticed one more thing in my travels this week. Is everyone running more blue lighting than before? I do not remember my lighting being this blue 10 years ago. The defaults on my Red Sea Reefer is way more blue than I am used to, or maybe the tint of blue is off? Sure I can change it but before I do I want to find out why this new thing is happening.
Ppl are way into the "psychedelic" fluorescent coral colors these days that they do everything they can to make them "pop". I still prefer 14k lighting over this straight actinic stuff.
I don't think that is an entirely bad idea, but I think you are still missing out by putting the rock in a filter sock. The micro diversity is important, but I think macro diversity is equally important. And don't mistake my comments for thinking I'm advocating for taking no safety measures. If I bought some TBS rock, I would put it in a bucket for a week or 2 and try to entice the gorilla crabs and mantis shrimp out with a piece of raw fish. But I will just use my sump as an example. I replaced my 18 year old sump about 6 months ago, and installed a Rubbermaid 150 gallon sump. In that time, and like I stated in my original post, I literally have countless thousands of tube worms that started growing on the wall of my sump. In addition to that are the countless thousands of what I think are pineapple sponges (not sure exactly). Each one of these individual animals is a filter feeder. As they grow, they are exporting nutrients from my system and filtering my water. I did not intentionally add these to my system. They obviously hitchhiked on my live rock. I'm no chemist, but I can't see how this isn't a net benefit to my system as a whole. Just look up cryptic zones. But I would hate to miss out on this part of the diversity equation by adding rock that was stuck in a filter sock. It's hard to get a clear picture, but this is about a 1 foot section of my 150 gallon sump. See if you can count the sponges and tube worms. Each one of those white dots is a tiny tube worm, except one is a limpet.How about this for thinking outside of the box a bit for those afraid of hitchhikers. To avoid them, take a piece of ocean live rock or two and place them into a filter sock. Tie up the end real good so that nothing can get out and place it in a position where it gets some flow. The microbes (bacteria, archaea, etc.) are so tiny that they can easily pass through a typical filter sock designed to catch detritus and will then populate the reef tank, but nasties will be stuck inside the sock. Once the inoculation is completed (a week or two should do it, but more time won't hurt), one can remove the sock and pass the live rock on to another aquarist or sell to a LFS.
Ppl are way into the "psychedelic" fluorescent coral colors these days that they do everything they can to make them "pop". I still prefer 14k lighting over this straight actinic stuff.
Phoenix 14k or Radium 20k MH bulbs were the best. Sometimes I want to go back, but LEDs are just so much more efficient and infinitely controlable.
There is so much going on in this thread that it's confusing even the OP.
It's funny that when we reminisce, we only remember the positive and forget the negative.
True live rock (or if you want to play the semantic game "mericultured") was great for bio diversity. We took the good with the bad, because there was no other way. Pesky micro fauna was a trade off for a robust diverse bacteria culture. The hobby as a whole didn't realize that bacteria was a big piece of the puzzle. We are now starting to realize that we lost the diverse bacteria cultures when we started using dry rock.
The hobby took a turn and suggested that in order to avoid all those pesky creatures let's use dead rock instead. But we failed to consider what else we were losing by doing that. Flash forward to today and we see tank after tank battling dinos and taking 18 months to see real coral growth.
Come to find out by starting with sterile rock we unwittingly lost all the necessary bacteria that makes up a successful tank. Now our tanks don't have the healthy bacteria to dominate the bad, so we get the ugly stages.
But the question to the OP and those that are eating the 'member berries is, "Is taking a huge step backwards the right way to go?"
Why can't we have the best of both worlds? Start with dead rock and then seed the tank with true culturing bacteria. And I'm not talking about bacteria in a bottle, none of that cultures inside a tank, in order to get the benefits from bacteria in a bottle you have to continue to dose it.
Why can't someone bottle live bacteria that only needs one shot to the tank and it starts to multiply? And to be clear, I'm not talking about nitrifying bacteria.
The fear with starting with dry rock is not having that diversity or eventually getting a single dominant mono culture that promotes a dino outbreak. We need a robust culture of diverse bacteria and NOT have the pest that come from ocean live rock. Stepping back is not the answer. Moving forward we need to understanding what a tank with biodiverse bacteria looks like and then be able to easily replicate it.
Fauna and micro fauna is easily replicated. The benefits of live rock is primarily deverse bacteria.If you think the diversity we are referring to is just bacteria then i don't think you really understand.
I don't think that is an entirely bad idea, but I think you are still missing out by putting the rock in a filter sock. The micro diversity is important, but I think macro diversity is equally important. And don't mistake my comments for thinking I'm advocating for taking no safety measures. If I bought some TBS rock, I would put it in a bucket for a week or 2 and try to entice the gorilla crabs and mantis shrimp out with a piece of raw fish. But I will just use my sump as an example. I replaced my 18 year old sump about 6 months ago, and installed a Rubbermaid 150 gallon sump. In that time, and like I stated in my original post, I literally have countless thousands of tube worms that started growing on the wall of my sump. In addition to that are the countless thousands of what I think are pineapple sponges (not sure exactly). Each one of these individual animals is a filter feeder. As they grow, they are exporting nutrients from my system and filtering my water. I did not intentionally add these to my system. They obviously hitchhiked on my live rock. I'm no chemist, but I can't see how this isn't a net benefit to my system as a whole. Just look up cryptic zones. But I would hate to miss out on this part of the diversity equation by adding rock that was stuck in a filter sock. It's hard to get a clear picture, but this is about a 1 foot section of my 150 gallon sump. See if you can count the sponges and tube worms. Each one of those white dots is a tiny tube worm, except one is a limpet.