Short "Live Rock" questions

[izau3138]

The wait is finally over. I received my first batch of live rock yesterday(45 pounds). I am cycling the tank with the rock(no inhabitants). I know there will be a certain amount of die-off.
I am noticing a few worms that have come out of the rock, but they are dead. My first question is this normal and will some of the worms survive? My second question is when should I cut on the protein Skimmer?



55 Gallon
Aqualight Pro - 2 150watt HQI Lamps & 2 96 watt Act. 03 Blue(lights off)
Proclear Wet/Dry Sump Mod. 175
3 Maxi-jet 1200's w/hydor water deflectors
Prizm Protein Skimmer(for now)
Wavemaster Pro
Temp. -79
Salinty-1.024
PH-8.2

[MJAnderson]

Some will survive. Start skimming day 1.

[ralphie16]

Why skim the first day MJ Anderson?

The buildup of the chemicals in the water allow the bacteria to florish instead of turning on the skimmer and extracting it imediately.

I would recommend you not use the skimmer for a few weeks so the bacteria will reproduce faster and have a more nutrient rich environment. Balance will be achieved fast and more efficiently.

[dmo]

My rock arrived in late march and looked nearly dry and had some dead stuff on it (lots of sponge, a clam, a worm or two). Now, six months later, every week or two I really spend some time studying the tank, and I am often shocked by how much life is showing up. Just recently I found a huge peanut worm that crawls part way out the bottom of one of the rocks to eat detritus.

The life is there, it just may take some time to re-establish itself.

[dmo]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=8288416#post8288416 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by ralphie16
Why skim the first day MJ Anderson?

The buildup of the chemicals in the water allow the bacteria to florish instead of turning on the skimmer and extracting it imediately.

I would recommend you not use the skimmer for a few weeks so the bacteria will reproduce faster and have a more nutrient rich environment. Balance will be achieved fast and more efficiently.

This has been a long argued subject.. :)

The bacteria might flourish, but removing excess nutrients and toxins might help any other life survive.

[MJAnderson]

You can skim or not skim. Since he seemed to be worried about life on the rocks and not faster bacterial growth, I would suggest skimming and water changes to keep the spikes down and the water more habitable. But not skimming can work as well.

[Avi]

The skimming that you do will not, no matter how efficient the skimmer you have, immediately remove all the nutrients from the tank. It will take an amount of time that will not interfere with the time it takes to cycle the tank. It will, on the other hand, as darius points out, help ease up on the amount of die-off from the live rock that would be available for a prolonged ammonia presence. At the same time, there will be enough to generate a growth of the bacteria that will consume it as the cycle goes on. So, either way your reef will cycle, but IMO, you're going to expose the life in the live rock to lower deadly ammonia levels and for a shorter period of time, so use the skimmer.

[izau3138]

I appreciate the advice and will skim.

[Shagsbeard]

Skim. Definately.

The idea of cycling is to reach an equilibrium where the bacteria is enough to control the bioload, but not too much to deplete it's nutrients and die off (crash). By changing the rules, you may think you are helping... you are not.

Take herring. It's a popular fish in the North Atlantic that was heavily fished... so much so that they put a moritorium on fishing. By removing the herring's predator, the herring population skyrocketed and the entire population starved. The net result was a lower herring count than there was when the fishermen were fishing, and many other species were harmed by the "help" of the regulators.

What should be done is slow and small changes. Fishing should have been reduced slightly, because there was a problem.

There's no problem skimming a tank. The tank needs to be cycled in pretty much the same way as it will be when it's got it's bioload in it. You add bioload slowly to give the bacteria time to keep up... to stablize. By not skimming, you are going to create an unhealthy number of bacteria. It will be artificially high based on all the dead stuff being allowed to stay in the system. Get it out of there. Give the bacteria a chance to stabalize.

If you take a course in dynamical systems (chaos theory) you will show things like this mathematically. It can be a really interesting math class.