Question about my live rock

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dgk9723

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Nov 12, 2009
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So I bought 30lbs of Fiji live rock from www.aloha-aquariums.com located in anehiem, CA It was ground shipped so took 5 days. When I got it the first thing i did was set up at tank and a bucket of SW and took one rock at a time and scrubbed it with a hose scrubbing stick and used a wooden kebob skewer to get into spots. there was alot of crap on these rocks like dark red gunk, molding parts on the rock that you could scrape off but you wouldnt be able to notice it, lime green color on the rocks that is rock solid, i think there was dead mushrooms on it that were dark red and had to yank it out from its stem or w.e took me about 2 hours to inspect and clean each rock, then let it sit out in the hot ass sun for about an hour. After that i put them in a 20g tank for one day with a ghetto skimmer which collected nothing geussing because of the depth of the water cause it usually works, anyways. Next day i took out couple of my inverts, ( Tank has been running for about 1 and a half month} getting it cycled) I put the 30lbs of live rock i got into the tank that i have about 20 pounds already in there. This is a 75 g, running a 2236 eheim cani that was on my fw tank and had the right media that came with it and i threw away that cause it was unusable, it has 4 stages so i just threw some sponge pads and rest with bio balls in the baskets, marineland HOB 350 x2, 3 Power head rated over 200gph and planning on getting a reef Octopus BH 100SS
hang on back protein skimmer due to no sump because of my stand,
Lighting i have for now is 4 bulb hagen glo t-5 fixture but will have to get another 2 bulb fixture later. I plan on doing a reef with reef safe fish like scorpas tangs however you spell it but just one of those, a maroon tang, coral beauty angel fish, possibly one trigger dont know yet and wont go past 6 fish in this tank. But anyways i got carried away of topic oh and nitrate is 5, and salinity is reading normal. Am i missing anything if so just let me know. Heres a pic of my live rock i got in.


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Sounds to me like you did a number on your live rock...getting it into the water asap is the best thing you can do to keep as much alive as you possibly can.

Damage is done now.

Scopas tang would be one of two tangs that I would say you could possibly keep in a 75g. I would recommend at least a 90, but this will work for that small tang.
 
So what I did wasn't a good idea? And also that greenish line and dark red went away I guess last night some how and rock is white now, almost.
 
Yea...leaving it out in the sun probably killed the coraline. Who knows what else it killed.

Like I said, damage done, hopefully the rock stayed some wet in the middle, and whatever was left alive in there will get out, and give your live rock some life again.

Live and learn.
 
sorry to necro post, but OP I really dont see how any of that would have been beneficial at all. You ended up wasting money by buying live rock and then making it dead rock...

EDIT: I'm pretty sure the red stuff you were describing was coraline (beneficial)
 
no it was dark red there was a half n inch layer where you could push threw it? does that sound like coraline algea? There was dead black coraline when i got it. it came in a thrash bag and a box that was falling apart.
 
Well, you started out ok by scrubbing the rock and putting it into saltwater, The next steps were kind of a fuster cluck though. Fleshy is right, live and learn.

What was green and red was corraline algae, what was black was dead organic material on top of it. This is all very common for live rock.

After scrubbing you should have skipped the sun part. that rock needed water more than anything else at that point. I am relatively sure you couldn't dry the rock to its core in that period of time, so you should still have some internal bacteria left and the whole thing isn't a total waste. Next time, pay for air shipping, and get and keep it wet as soon as possible. You will have some serious die off, and the tank you have that rock in will likely incur some ammonia and nitrite spikes. do not put anything else into that tank until these spikes taper off. You should expect to lose some inverts. (which will further lengthen the nutrient issues)

As far as filtration, there is alot I would do differently. Check out WetWebMedia.com and do alot of reading in their filtration section. You can use canisters, but they need alot of maintenance. Also, If you plan on keeping corals, I would remove most of the floss and all of the bioballs and replace it with Seachem's matrix or Eheim efisubstrat or similar media. Also, a bag of purigen or chemipure in one of the stages will do you some good.

Fish - tangs need more space than what you can offer. A scopas is the best choice for a small tank, but really there aren't many good choices for a tank that small, especially with the amount of rock and kind of filtration you are describing. I would say the same for the trigger, (who will also wreak havoc on your clean up crew) Again, WetWebMedia.com or reefcentral or simliar sites will have a lot of information on this type of stuff. You should also dig through some of the old coversations on this site for a better grasp on what you are trying to do.

Good luck. (I think your rock will recover somewhat, it will never be totally the same, but you will still get some good out of it)
 
Well the rock is gaining some color back slowly after about 3 weeks of some light green. I have a 3 inch scorpa tang in there with a maroon clown and they get along great. I have a 6-7 colt coral and a pink tip anemone right now. All of these living things have been with me for 3 weeks nows and no problems. I just finished building a stand so i will have a 20 gall sump running soon
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