Originally Posted by jdragunas
the ph should be between 8.1 and 8.4.
I completely disagree with stan. You should do water changes to keep your ammonia low. What's the point of buying LR if all of your hitchikers and organisms on it are going to die??? That's just a waste of money. If the only point of LR was for the dentrifying bacteria, then you can just buy normal rock and put it in your tank. People buy LR because of the other stuff that comes with it. IF you're going to let your ammonia get out of control, and all of your hitchikers are going to die because of that, it's pointless to buy LR.
Fenner actually states that you should do water changes during cycling to keep your ammonia at or below 1.0. One reason is because anything higher will most likely kill your hitchikers on your LR. He also says that it is actually counterproductive to let your ammonia get too high. Once your ammonia reaches a certain point, it will actually inhibit the growth of the dentrifying bacteria. Doing water changes during cycling doesn't mess with the cycle at all, but it will help keep your hitchikers alive.
well I dont disagree that cycling a tank with LR will likely kill the hitch hikers (I didn't put LR in my tank until it cycled) but IF you are cycling your tank using LR then you should expect some hitch hikers to die. I've searched this a bit over the web and there are those who agree and those who dont about changing water during the cycling process. some say changing the water during the cycling process can lead to new tank sydrome (ammonia spikes after a tank has already cycled). I only agree that it isn't neccessary because I have never had to in over 10yrs of saltwater tanking. The point of buying liverock is to KEEP your ammonia from spiking in the 1rst place (not that hitch hikers arent cool and make for interesting diversity). dead/base rock doesn't have denitrifying bacteria or beneficial algae already present and usually less surface area for it to grow on and in. Live rock is used as a form of biological filtration, the hitch hikers growing out of it and crawling around arent a part of that (although they may be part of the clean up and a food source) so it will still do its job without them. Also most LR has already been expose to some scale of an ammonia spike during the curing process. its not considered cured until die off has siezed and ammonia levels fall to zero. From what I understand this applies to all rock thats been out of water for any significant time (which is often during time from collection to final destination).
