How do I re-arrange my live rock?

Hey Jennifer

Three days ago i relocated 35 kg (sorry i dont know what that is in lb's), it took a while because of the size of my canopy. All of the fish apart from the Percula darted off in the opposite direction until i finished. I must stress though be VERY CAREFULL when moving LR, try and get both hands in there if you can and take your time, nothing worse than a cracked tank or wet floor.
Try and get the bigger pieces down the bottom to form a solid base.
There is a product you can buy that you can use to stick LR together if you want.
You dont have to bag the little guys it might cause unnecessary stress.
When placing the LR in the new position make sure you dont squash any fish, inverts etc.
Maybe the other members can jump in for some other thoughts.

Good luck
Nick

I agree with Nick. I have rearranged my LR several times, sometime to clean (there gets to be quite a build up of detrious crap under there). The fish will be fine. Be careful with the coral. I usually move the coral to a portion of the tank that I'm not working on. You should have plenty of room with your 90 gallons.

I would also consider adding more rock. The poundage is difficult to measure in size because of the varying densities of different rock. However, I have a 70 gallon tank and have about 125 pounds of LR and still plenty of room. Also, when arranging the rock, try to leave a many surfaces as possible on which to place coral.

Have fun!

n8

Just an idea...........

I like to put my larger pieces of LR up on smaller ones as kind of a base. For me, this does several things. First, it gets the LR up off the subtrate for more contact with the water. At the same time, if the small pieces are in contact with the bottom of the tank, it prevents any shifing or sinking of your aquascaping. This is especially helpfull if you have burrowing critters like gobies. It also provides a lot more cover for the fish to enjoy. Lastly, it makes the LR look like a LOT MORE LR!!!

It's funny this topic came up now, I just rearranged the live rock in my 90 gallon tank last night. 'Course all I have for sessile inverts is two curly cue anemones and a few shrooms. I just took all the rocks out and set them out on the floor so I could start over, because it's too hard to shuffle things around in the tank with all the rock in the way. I only left the rocks with the anemones on them in the tank. (I really like my new arrangement too) Before I just had a wall of rocks from one end to the other and now I have a big island in the middle with branch rock sticking out on the sides and some flat base rock sticking out like plate corals. It looks like a reef (except no live coral) and there's a lot more room for my fish to swim, as some of them will grow quite big. I also rearranged my 29 gallon reef when I changed the substrate about two months ago. I just siphoned out a bunch of water into a plastic container and carefully put the rock in with all the corals attached, dumped out the tank, scraped off the algae that I could never reach with the rock in, poured in the sand, and put the water and rocks back in. It never even had a small cycle, and the coral was all fine.