Coming up.
I'm going to talk about why I chose a live rock versus dry rock for this new
tank build.
[Inaudible].
Okay. For years,
I had always started my reef tanks with live rock and had great success.
Live rock comes with a good population of bacteria and you can cycle a tank
pretty quickly. However, about five years ago,
I decided to give it a go with dry rock with dry rock.
You can take your time sculpting cool and unique Aqua scapes.
And the likelihood of importing PEs is much lower versus live rock
live rock also has been much harder to find during the last few years. Well,
to say the least, my experience with dry rock was a disaster.
I had one problem after another,
including Dino's bacterial bloom and cyanobacteria,
and I chose couldn't grow SPS like I had before. I mean, geez,
I had never had any of these issues and my other tanks started with live rock.
So it was very frustrating.
Eventually I broke the tank down and restarted it with Haitian live rock.
I picked up at a local fish store in Orlando, Florida,
the reboot worked and the SBS and the tank flourished.
So when I thought about dry rock versus live rock for my new peninsula tank,
the choice seemed clear. I know many folks have success with SPS in dry rock,
only tanks, but in my view,
it takes a lot of time before SPS can thrive in a tank,
started with only dry rock.
And I truly believe the lack of biodiversity in dry rock is a key factor.
Anyway,
I did find a couple of viable options for live rock suppliers and settled on KP
aquatics.
Since I had heard some good things about them from some fellow reefers,
the agriculture live rock in the Florida keys and can deliver it overnight.
They talked me into paying some extra bucks to have it delivered in water versus
wet newspaper.
And apparently the survival rate for the bacteria Coralie analogy and other
creepy crawlers was much better versus the newspaper option makes sense.
My only hesitation was that some bad hitchhikers would come along for the ride,
but I was told they could be forced out of the rock by dipping it in fresh salt
water with a very high, specific gravity. Anyway,
I was digging this in-water option.
So I ordered a hundred pounds of the rock for $8 a pound and paid about $200 for
shipping. So it came out to about $10 a pound,
not terrible due to COVID KP aquatics was only using Southwest
airlines as a freight carrier.
So I was going to have to make a three hour road trip to Albany,
New York to pick up the rock.
Southwest does not have a terminal and my home in Burlington, Vermont,
I arrived at the airport and loaded the rock in my car. And to my surprise,
it didn't really smell, which I thought was a good sign.
There was just a hint of salt water in the air. I made it home later that night,
unloaded the rock and transported into the house.
Now the fun part unboxing it. I discovered a ton of life crawling on the rock,
including a bunch of brittle star fish and some crabs as recommended.
I rinsed each piece in fresh salt water,
and then dip them again in salt water with a high specific gravity.
This caused a number of other critters to pop out of the rock,
more brittle star fish, crabs, some pistol shrimp, and a mantis shrimp.
I separated out the hitchhikers.
I didn't want in to tank namely the crabs pistol shrimp and manage shrimp and
drop them off at a local fish store the next day.
So nobody was rubbed out that night.
All the rock was placed in the new system to start the cycle and during the
cycling process over the next week,
I rinsed the rock two more times and salt water with a high specific gravity to
make sure other pests didn't make the display their permanent home.
Overall, I could not be more pleased with the quality of this rock.
There was a ton of biodiversity, beautiful correlation, algae,
and even sponges. It was also very poorest, a good thing.
So as there was more surface area for the bacteria, anyway,
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See you next time.