Dry AND Live Rock Seeding/Cycling In a Container?

[rhpmiller]

Hey there,

I'm in the process of setting up a Nyos Opus 300 that will be an SPS-dominant tank. In my last tank, I went with the dry rock, bottled bacteria, and time approach for cycling and had some pretty good success. However, it took me a good bit of time to really reach stability and have a diverse and solid biome.

For this new tank, I was hoping to try a different approach of using BOTH dry and live rock isolated in a container (with heater and powerheads) to not only increase the diversity and prevalence of good aspects of the microbiome, but also increase the diversity of bacteria, pods, etc. that could spread to ALL rock. Then, place the rock into my DT, once ready.

My questions for the community are:

• Theoretically, this sounds like it would work out just fine, but I haven't been able to find anyone who's done this outside of their display tank. Is this even viable?
• Are there any particular things I should take into account or lookout for? Meaning, would anything leaching out of the dry rock--highly unlikely--be a risk to the live rock?
• Is this all too much/elaborate, and I should just do all this in my DT?

Steps

• Glue/epoxy dry rock into aquascape structure that I want
• Get Brute trash can or other container and fill with saltwater, add pumps and heater
• Add dry rock and bottled bacteria (Dr. Tim's or something similar)
• (Give it a week--doing some ammonia dosing/feeding and measuring)
• Receive live rock and do a couple of fresh saltwater dips, as well as high salinity dips, in order to get any nasty pests off
• Add live rock to container
• Continue to measure ammonia, nitrites, nitrates, dosing/feeding as needed
• Begin adding other types of bottled bacteria--Microbacter7, MicrobacterClean, etc.
• After 8-12 weeks, or when fully cycled and stable, transfer over to DT
• Add a couple clowns and leave lights off for 3-4 weeks, then ramp up to LPS level, and then SPS level over next couple months

Thanks!

-Ryan

 

[EeyoreIsMySpiritAnimal]

If you're starting a new tank with no initial livestock, why not just add all the rock at once -- to the tank? "Cycling" live rock is unnecessary since the bacteria is what makes it "live" in the first place.

If it were me, I'd set up the tank, add sand and water, and then add all your rock. Then, assuming no significant dieoff, the tank will already be safe for fish. (And even if there's die off that necessitates a short period of curing, if there are no fish/inverts in the tank there's no reason not to "cure" in the tank itself)

You don't need 8-12 weeks if you're getting live rock.

 

[liddojunior]

Make sure to use a light. Otherwise you might just promote a cryptic population.

But I would just add the live rock in the tank display so that you can just have it spread and stabilize in the tank instead of a bucket

 

[tzabor10]

Sounds great. There are many many threads and videos about this. Enjoy the deep dive

 

[rhpmiller]

If you're starting a new tank with no initial livestock, why not just add all the rock at once -- to the tank? "Cycling" live rock is unnecessary since the bacteria is what makes it "live" in the first place.

If it were me, I'd set up the tank, add sand and water, and then add all your rock. Then, assuming no significant dieoff, the tank will already be safe for fish. (And even if there's die off that necessitates a short period of curing, if there are no fish/inverts in the tank there's no reason not to "cure" in the tank itself)

You don't need 8-12 weeks if you're getting live rock.

The reason I wasn't thinking of going directly into the DT was almost as a quarantine procedure for the live rock, to help starve off and reducing any photosynthetic-reliant uglies and ensure I have the ability to get rid of any pests, before going into the DT. Perhaps that isn't that big of a risk.

 

[EeyoreIsMySpiritAnimal]

The reason I wasn't thinking of going directly into the DT was almost as a quarantine procedure for the live rock, to help starve off and reducing any photosynthetic-reliant uglies and ensure I have the ability to get rid of any pests, before going into the DT. Perhaps that isn't that big of a risk.

OK, that makes sense, but if you still don't plan to add any fish, etc, until after the live rock is added to the tank, my advice is the same. you will have a cycled tank once the live rock goes in, no need to pre cycle the dry rock.
And the "photosynthetic uglies" on the live rock is what you want... to prevent the regular uglies. If you kill off the algae, there will be all kinds of vacant real estate for undesirable algae to populate.

 

[rhpmiller]

OK, that makes sense, but if you still don't plan to add any fish, etc, until after the live rock is added to the tank, my advice is the same. you will have a cycled tank once the live rock goes in, no need to pre cycle the dry rock.
And the "photosynthetic uglies" on the live rock is what you want... to prevent the regular uglies. If you kill off the algae, there will be all kinds of vacant real estate for undesirable algae to populate.

I was thinking that the container in the dark would kill off any cyano, diatoms, dinos, slimes, etc. that may be on the live rock and could transfer over to the dry rock. Most everything I've seen and read talked about seeding rock in the dark. However, most of that has been around starting with only dry rock or live rock from an existing tank (vs. ocean), so maybe that doesn't apply here (?).

 

[skey44]

I am currently curing some old dry live rock in a brute and plan to add a small percentage of premium Aussie live rock to inoculate with biodiversity. I was going to cure it too but after further consideration I don’t want to kill off the photosynthetic organisms on the very expensive live rock I plan to purchase. The cured rock will go in the display and the Aussie rock will be added directly in.

 

[EeyoreIsMySpiritAnimal]

I was thinking that the container in the dark would kill off any cyano, diatoms, dinos, slimes, etc. that may be on the live rock and could transfer over to the dry rock. Most everything I've seen and read talked about seeding rock in the dark. However, most of that has been around starting with only dry rock or live rock from an existing tank (vs. ocean), so maybe that doesn't apply here (?).

That's not how cyano, diatoms, dinos, slimes, etc work.

 

[EeyoreIsMySpiritAnimal]

That's not how cyano, diatoms, dinos, slimes, etc work.

Again, it's about real estate and competition. If you have no algae on the rock, then any opportunistic algae that does start growing will have free reign. If you already have lots of stuff (algae, bacteria, archaea, etc) on the rock, there will be less room for new stuff to take hold. Plus, existing algae, etc does the same thing a refugium does - takes up nutrients before newer algae can get to them (like a good lawn will outcompete weeds)

 

[taricha]

this question is more in the realm of opinion answers than stated facts, but If I were doing this, I'd keep it all circulating in the dark and after a while, very lightly ghost feed while keeping it in the dark.

I think the popular old method of curing rock in the dark had some logic to it.

 

[EeyoreIsMySpiritAnimal]

this question is more in the realm of opinion answers than stated facts, but If I were doing this, I'd keep it all circulating in the dark and after a while, very lightly ghost feed while keeping it in the dark.

I think the popular old method of curing rock in the dark had some logic to it.

But why spend money on live rock and then let everything die? Sometimes it doesn't need much "curing"...

 

[Reefahholic]

Only dose Nitrifiers once. Don’t let N&P bottom out. Correct all chemistry if possible. Cook it for 3-6 months. Add some critters from IPSF. The closer you have it to natural seawater the less it will bind or leach in the tank.

: : : : Indo-Pacific Sea Farms : : : :

Indo-Pacific Sea Farms produces captive-bred marine life for healthier reef aquariums: invertebrates, detritivores, live sand, snail grazers, amphipods, beneficial worms, macro algae, plankton, corals, coral food and beneficial bacteria.

ipsf.com

 

[taricha]

But why spend money on live rock and then let everything die? Sometimes it doesn't need much "curing"...

Fair enough. I made an assumption that the goal was stability and fewest possible headaches, which might not always be true for me or others.
If I got some cool gulf live rock with gorgs, corals, nice macros etc. Then I would keep some light during the circulation and just deal with the inevitable nuisance growth and consider it a fair tradeoff.
(but if the only cool stuff on it was sponges, clams, tunicates, non-photosynthetics then yeah - I'd circulate in the dark like I said.)

 

[EeyoreIsMySpiritAnimal]

Fair enough. I made an assumption that the goal was stability and fewest possible headaches, which might not always be true for me or others.
If I got some cool gulf live rock with gorgs, corals, nice macros etc. Then I would keep some light during the circulation and just deal with the inevitable nuisance growth and consider it a fair tradeoff.
(but if the only cool stuff on it was sponges, clams, tunicates, non-photosynthetics then yeah - I'd circulate in the dark like I said.)

Good points.

 

[Timfish]

Go for it. I've setup systems both ways over the years but my prefference is to QT the live rock just like everything else. I would definitely use the samr lighting on the rock regardless of which way you do it. As @EeyoreIsMySpiritAnimal pointed out nuisance algae is a function of the equilibrium of an ecosystem and ruunning a system without lights doesn't fix it long term. FWIW I use a lot of local limestone I get from sides of roads and landscape supply centers, in most tanks it's about a 50/50 mix with a quality maricultured live rock.

Keep in mind not all "live rock" is the same. Research has shown only about 2% of the microbial stuff found on reefs can be cultured and stuck in a bottle. You definitely want maricultured live rock if you can't find wild and get it sent airfreight so it doesn't sit in trucks or wherehouses a couple days. Beside a lot of beneficial microbial stuff there's also cryptic sponges that are essential for heathy reefs. I like gulfliverock but kpaquatics and tampabaysaltwater have good reviews also and I would also recommend Aquabiomics certified sand and reef rubble products. Here's an article on live rock by aquabiomics:

Establishing a Healthy Microbiome in a New Aquarium Using Live Rock

Studying the effects of live rock in a newly established aquarium shows that high-quality live rock promotes the rapid establishment of an effective biological filter and a microbial community similar to those found in mature reef tanks.

www.reef2reef.com

And here's some more links to waste some time on

"Coral Reefs in the Microbial Seas " This video compliments Rohwer's book of the same title (Paper back is ~$20, Kindle is ~$10), both deal with the conflicting roles of the different types of DOC (carbon dosing) in reef ecosystems and how it can alter coral microbiomes. While there is overlap bewteen his book and the video both have information not covered by the other and together give a broader view of the complex relationships found in reef ecosystems

Changing Seas - Mysterious Microbes

Microbial view of Coral Decline

Nitrogen cycling in hte coral holobiont

BActeria and Sponges

Maintenance of Coral Reef Health (refferences at the end)

Optical Feedback Loop in Colorful Coral Bleaching

DNA Sequencing and the Reef Tank Microbiome

Richard Ross What's up with phosphate"

 

[taricha]

@Timfish Been meaning to ask you this question, and in this thread it's maybe as close to on topic as it's going to get.
Regarding bacterial communities of coral systems like mature sps dominated reefs or tanks - are there "weed corals" that share enough similarities in microbial community to make us think they might be useful pioneer species from the perspective of creating a similar microbial community to the later more desirable corals?

Or to state the reasoning another way, if went with the hypothetical
"I'm gonna use big pocillopora damicornis and monti caps to get my microbial community more friendly to my desired future acros, because I can get a lot of SPS tissue for cheap that way, and it would be better that waiting on a bunch of acro frags to slowly grow to dominate the system."

Got any reading material that might have something to say on that question?

 

[Timfish]

@Timfish Been meaning to ask you this question, and in this thread it's maybe as close to on topic as it's going to get.
Regarding bacterial communities of coral systems like mature sps dominated reefs or tanks - are there "weed corals" that share enough similarities in microbial community to make us think they might be useful pioneer species from the perspective of creating a similar microbial community to the later more desirable corals?

Or to state the reasoning another way, if went with the hypothetical
"I'm gonna use big pocillopora damicornis and monti caps to get my microbial community more friendly to my desired future acros, because I can get a lot of SPS tissue for cheap that way, and it would be better that waiting on a bunch of acro frags to slowly grow to dominate the system."

Got any reading material that might have something to say on that question?

Yup.

Before I ever stumbled across the research by Ritchie, Rohwer and others I learned reading through Veron's books that some species within a genus needed very specific requirements while others lived very cosmopolitan lives. There were acropora species that were only found in the company of other acropora species. Most goniopora species have very specific requirements while a few could be found in a wide range of environmental conditions.

A good example of this is teh Strawberry Shortcake acro, Acropora microcladoes. 95% of the colonies are found only in the company of other acropora. (The link does make a mistaken assumption the waters are nutrient poor.)

Rohwer and other researchers found each individual species has it's own microbiome and he discusses it in both his book "Coral Reefs in the Microbial Seas" and his video. I would urge anyone interested in this subject to study both the book and video as together they present a more complete picture of jat's happening on reefs. Just keep in mind there's lots of new stuff being discovered all the time and the picture keeps getting more complicated.

Rachel Wright's work at the Matz lab at UT Austin looked at the immune systems of different genotypes of Acropora millipora. She found HUGE differences from easily killed by infections to very resistant. An obvious take away is don't expect two different colonies to do the same thing or react the same to a stress event.

Intraspecific differences in molecular stress responses and coral pathobiome contribute to mortality under bacterial challenge in Acropora millepora - Scientific Reports

Disease causes significant coral mortality worldwide; however, factors responsible for intraspecific variation in disease resistance remain unclear. We exposed fragments of eight Acropora millepora colonies (genotypes) to putatively pathogenic bacteria (Vibrio spp.). Genotypes varied from zero...

www.nature.com

This was an interesting paper, partly because it shows different species promote different types of microbes in the waters surounding them. To the extent this affects how well species of different Class - Order - Family survive or thrive together in the same system will depend on some degree on their immune system I'd imagine. And it seems the sequence different specimens are added may be a factor id they are from a different Class - Order - Family.

Aura-biomes are present in the water layer above coral reef benthic macro-organisms - PubMed

As coral reef habitats decline worldwide, some reefs are transitioning from coral- to algal-dominated benthos with the exact cause for this shift remaining elusive. Increases in the abundance of microbes in the water column has been correlated with an increase in coral disease and reduction in...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

And lets not forget age (as much as I'd like too).

Age-Related Shifts in Bacterial Diversity in a Reef Coral

This study investigated the relationship between microbial communities in differently sized colonies of the massive coral Coelastrea aspera at Phuket, Thailand where colony size could be used as a proxy for age. Results indicated significant differences between the bacterial diversity (ANOSIM, R...

journals.plos.org

Tissue Age Affects Calcification in the Scleractinian Coral Madracis mirabilis | The Biological Bulletin: Vol 212, No 1

In this study, two factorial experiments were used to investigate the role of tissue age in affecting the phenotypic expression of calcification in scleractinian corals. Both experiments tested whether calcification was altered by tissue age and whether corals of different ages exploit...

www.journals.uchicago.edu

Error - Cookies Turned Off

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

So your idea of using "weed" species to help establish healthy microbiomes in the water for delecate species is good. But from the research I'd say as long as it's a hardy genotype or species in the same genus.




As far as adding frags versus actual colonies, for survival of frags, species AND stress events AND size matters.

Survival, growth, and branch production of unattached fragments of the threatened hermatypic coral Acropora cervicornis

Fragmentation has been regarded as the most important reproductive strategy in the threatened reef building coral Acropora cervicornis. Before the Car…

www.sciencedirect.com

Effects of multiple perturbations on the survivorship of fragments of three coral species

Fist-sized fragments of Porites cylindrica, Porites rus and Pavona frondifera were deployed in single-species (P. cylindrica) and mixed-species (all t…

www.sciencedirect.com

Differential survival of coral transplants on various substrates under elevated water temperatures

Closely related scleractinian coral species that exhibited similar survival patterns under relatively normal field conditions responded very different…

www.sciencedirect.com

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17451000.2018.1528011

Survival and growth rate of coral micro-fragments for coral reef restoration in Chonburi Province, the Upper Gulf of Thailand | Ramkhamhaeng International Journal of Science and Technology

ph02.tci-thaijo.org

An experimental assessment of survival, re-attachment and fecundity of coral fragments

Many branching corals are routinely broken apart into live fragments, mainly by physical disturbances. Fragments have the potential to survive indepen…

www.sciencedirect.com

Yes and no. We are looking at layers upon layers upon layers. There's stuff important for reef ecosystems as a whole, there's stuff important at kingdom level on down to the genotype (and likely variety) level. And a lot of it is certainly antoagonistic. The conflicting roles bewteen algae and corals being an obvious one. And the role of sponges in promoting algae or corals depending on what the sponges are feeding on is an indication of how complicated it is.




Unfortunatetly as I see it we're looking at multiple microbiomes just like we're looking at multiple species of corals. Quality (read not shipped by boat or truck) wild and maricultured live rock greatly speed up the maturing process by providing a wider, more diverse group of organisms thatare needed for the whole ecosystem than is available with dry rock and bottled bacteria or rock that's just been cultured with nitrifying bacteria. The needed diversity might, or might not, be achieved by adding corals but it seems obvious this is a much much slower process and fraught with problems

 

[taricha]

Thanks @Timfish I figured you'd have some good papers to go through. Especially like the "aura-biomes" one.
I wonder if it might be a simpler way to think about this rather than trying to pick pioneer species for a later mature reef tank based on similarity of microbiome - what if it were selected based on similarity of released dissolved organics (DOC).

(the premise being that the released DOC might be the easier measurement so we might have better quality data, and the resulting microbiome of those corals is in large part a downstream effect of the released DOC anyway.)

I remember that studies trying to understand why coral planula settle on some species of Crustose Coralline Algae vs others - looked at the differences in DOC released by the species of CCA as a likely explanation.

We could probably make a good argument that the organics that have been measured to be released by algae and soft corals are what makes them not great to be dominating organisms in a system that you want to move SPS into later. (with the microbiome being a downstream effect of that)
I wonder if it might be possible to choose easier, cheaper pioneer species based on their known organics release habits.

 

[Timfish]

Thanks @Timfish I figured you'd have some good papers to go through. Especially like the "aura-biomes" one.
I wonder if it might be a simpler way to think about this rather than trying to pick pioneer species for a later mature reef tank based on similarity of microbiome - what if it were selected based on similarity of released dissolved organics (DOC).

(the premise being that the released DOC might be the easier measurement so we might have better quality data, and the resulting microbiome of those corals is in large part a downstream effect of the released DOC anyway.)

I remember that studies trying to understand why coral planula settle on some species of Crustose Coralline Algae vs others - looked at the differences in DOC released by the species of CCA as a likely explanation.

We could probably make a good argument that the organics that have been measured to be released by algae and soft corals are what makes them not great to be dominating organisms in a system that you want to move SPS into later. (with the microbiome being a downstream effect of that)
I wonder if it might be possible to choose easier, cheaper pioneer species based on their known organics release habits.

That would be great! Unfortunately DOC includes thousands and thousands of "species" of compounds and many (most?) have still to be charictarized. Some of the papers I've looked at are showing species specific responses. And we have to include microbes and fungii in the equation so it's a REALLY, REALLY complex equation with lots of unknowns. Even the DOC from a coral when concentrated and reapplied to the coral will cause problems.

Here's two of the earlier papers looking at this problem

https://people.uncw.edu/szmanta/2007%20Bio%20585%20pdfs/Kline%20et%20al%202006%20Elevated%20DOC%20and%20microbes%20on%20corals.pdf

https://www.int-res.com/articles/meps2005/294/m294p173.pdf