Drying Out Live Rock And Reanimating It ?

[crash4444]

My tank crashed 2 months ago. needless to say after 2 years I've lost my energy for it . I had a heater overload and cooked everything in my tank. (I strongly advise anyone reading this to add a backup heater cut off only about $30. ) I have done water change after water change to try to get the tank back on track so I can sell the rock and sand in good conscience. I have bought a bunch of chromis to maintain the tanks cycle and had some corals and inverts that survived the heat up. But to the point, the live rock has gained a huge amont of aiptasia . A friend suggested taking the rock out and letting it dry and reintroduce it into the aquarium . I was wondering to the validity of this theory ? Or if anyone has an affordable way to dispatch my problem. Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[Donya]

There are basically 3 ways to deal with Aiptasia:

1. Biological solutions like butterfly fish and peppermint shrimp. These are hit and miss and large Aiptasia will probably be ignored.

2. Chemical solutions like Joe's Juice and Aiptasia-X. Again hit and miss. After some initial success with Aiptasia-X, I have a remaining population that is completely unphased by it and is rapidly repopulating. You can also use boiling water and kalk paste but these are a greater risk to damaging surrounding organisms.

3. Using something like a soldering iron to burn them off of the rock while it's out of the water. Some people swear by the soldering iron method. I haven't tried it yet but probably will soon given the issue I mentioned above.

If you dry the rock, you will kill EVERYTHING on it, not just the Aiptasia. This will leave a bunch of dead decaying stuff that will dump waste into your tank when you rehydrate it. So no, I would not take the rock-drying approach unless it's very small rocks. Drying is something I have done on shells and bits of rubble, but anything bigger and you probably want to take one of the other approaches.

 

[kj23502]

It depends on how much you want to get for it. If I were to buy aiptasia filled rock, I would dry it out myself and start with a fresh cycle. If you just want to get rid of it, sell it as is. If you want to put in the effort then I would just dry it out. Yes it will need to cycle again. This is with any dry rock, though.