More about the Live Rocks + the strange comment

So continuing from where I left off, how can a rock be alive? Well its not actually alive but more like these rocks are super porous and these pores actually house millions of tiny friendly bacteria in them. Very similar to what i'm hoping to achieve in my bacteria farms housed in the filter canisters. Besides bacteria, these rocks may also have nooks and crannies where organisms such as copepods, crabs, worms, algae, plants live in and on the rocks, hence the name live rock. Live rocks are an essential part in any marine aquarium because the bacteria which they house helps to regulate the water quality. As two of our friends here have pointed out either in earlier comments or on the shoutbox that rocks should go in first, live rocks play a very important role in establishing and stablising the environmental variables in the aquarium. When we buy new live rocks from the shops, the live rocks that they sell may have been out of the water for an extended period of time while being transported from their orign to the shop and hence the organisms inside them might have started to die. When you put these rocks into your tank, these dead and half dead stuff will rot and hence bring about a spike in ammonia levels, just like what the shrimp was intended for in my earlier blog about the nitrogen cycle. But over time, the bacteria colonies will actually start to grow again and start converting ammonia to nitriites and so on. This whole process is known as curing of the live rocks. So what i need to do now is to let the rocks sit in the tank for a week, and measure water quality again.

If you notice the reddish tint on some rocks, those are coraline algae, considered to be a sign that the live rocks are doing well. Over time if all goes well, all the rocks should be encrusted with coraline which can be quite beautiful to look at.

Now not forgetting the strange comment that xersion made. It can't be so co-incidental that you sold me the rocks right!?