Dinos and Dead Rock

[SofaSnorkeling]

It seems reefers who start with dry dead rock have higher chances of getting dinos from what I have read. But I cannot get over the fear of weird hitchhikers off Florida LR. If I am going to use dry rock, what can I do to prevent dinos aside from using Dr Tims and not letting nutrients go to 0? How have your experiences been with KP aquatics? Are there others who gather rock in the Keys and not the gulf? Going back and forth here.

[Michael Hoaster]

All Florida live rock is farmed, meaning they dumped a bunch of dead rock in the ocean and let it get colonized with life. I believe it's all in Tampa Bay. I got mine from gulfliverock.com. They include shipping in the price. They have less colonized rock they call coralline base live rock, if you want something less weird and mysterious.

Dry dead rock is like a blank canvas for algae.

[mcgyvr]

Oh Jesus...
Take a chance for once in your life... Bad things can happen to anyone.. Adapt...adjust...live life

[sfdan]

I tried very very hard to avoid dinos in my new setup with dry rock (after my old setup was decimated by them). I seeded the tank with all sorts of live sand from other established systems. I dosed N+P to keep nutrients from hitting 0. I ran UV sterilizers. In the end it didn't matter and I ended up with some pretty bad dino outbreaks. Fortunately the things I was doing, such as running UV and keeping the nutrients high, ended up allowing me to deal with the outbreaks.

My opinion is the best way to avoid dinos is to have a mature tank with a relatively high fish load (which keeps nutrient levels up). The best way to get a mature tank with a high load of fish is to take your time in the beginning, add fish slowly but surely, and deal with the algae issues as they come. Then give it time. If you do get dinos it isn't going to bother your fish, so if you take it slow with corals then you won't have much to lose. Then eventually as your tank matures the dinos will go away and you'll be ready to go with harder to keep corals.

People treat dinos as if they are a death sentence. They are not. I'm quite confident I could put a rock full of blooming dinos into my tank right now and nothing bad would happen. The same tank that 1.5 years ago was full of them.

If I were starting a new tank I'd still use dry rock, because for me the extra time you need to wait for tank maturity is worth the tradeoff of ensuring you don't have any troubling hitchhikers. However depending on the size of your tank and what you are going for in your reef, I could certainly see it the other way too.

[Heart of Dixie]

Read “Revisiting my Elos tank after 18 months” by Mike Paletta. I started a new 150 gallon with deadrock and bacteria and had the same results. There is something about real live rock that you can’t get anywhere else, no matter what the commercial says