Live Rock in 1.016???
- Thread starter $eaba$$
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If its live rock, then chances are there are pods in it. In any healthy/nice piece its guaranteed there is going to be some. Or at night you can look in the tank with a flashlight and you will see little bug things scurrying around. =)
alrighty thanks jesshika. Chang are you being sarcastic towards me or are you serious hehe? And how do I know that the piece is healthy. I was just wondering, there are like a bunch of small tubes, maybe half a centimeter in length and small white "feathers" coming out. Are those feather dusters? Are they good? Will all the copepods and things in my rock survive with only 15watts fluorescent 10/000K lighting on a 20H?
Sure no problem =). Yea those sound like small feather dusters. If the rock has lots of growth like those feathers, and purple coraline algae then you know its healthy. With only 15 watts of light, you might not get that much more coraline to grow but the light won't affect the pods and the feather dusters should grow fine. Feather dusters are filter feeders and pull particles out of the water with their feathers. They are good to have. Sounds like a nice piece of rock you got from petco! Usually the petco near me don't even sell live rock. BTW what size tank is this?
It might take a little while longer and a few more pieces of live rock before you start to see very many. They are nocturnal and crawl around in the sand and over the live rock. At night time, after the lights have been off for a few hours try again. But then the tank might still be too new to find any. I found pods within the first month after adding live rock on my tank. They will hide in the rock until they feel its safe to come out, so if the rock is in a bucket, they won't come out if there is no sand I don't think.
Since it was mentioned, Any of the play sands or calcium carbonate based sands will do just fine as a substrate. For one, the argonite sand (calcium carbonate) is not going to buffer your tank. For cal.carb. to dissolve and buffer your tank, it would take an acidic pH of your water to do so. Which might happen deep down in an undisturbed sandbed, but no where near enough to where you could measure an actual benefit. Think about it, if calcium carbonate could dissolve (buffer) the tanks above sand water, then your stony corals would be in big trouble, as would the wild reefs. (they already are though due to CO2, but thats another topic). Oh, and silicate based sand is not going to dissolve and add silicates to your water either, such sands are in a form that are not soluable, just like the glass our tanks are made of. I still wouldn't recommend silicate sands anyways, but only because the grains are shaped very sharply and do not provide a good environment for sand dwelling critters.
Chuck
Chuck
