Hitchhiker Removal From Lr

[Donya]

I would like to add another piece of LR to my 12g that is still being re-built from having been nuked...but I really desperately want to avoid adding anything that would cause a re-nuke (last time I had something that nuked the water and baby mantis that killed stuff--both came from inside one particular rock). I am wondering if I can be relatively safe in that regard if I take the new piece of rock, put it in a bucket, and make it warm without additional oxygenation for a while. My hope would be to drive off anything that would come out normally using that technique...hopefully including any nudis and whatnot. And if something nukes the water it'll be in the bucket, not in the tank. But, I also don't want to un-cure the rock in the process if I can avoid it. What do you guys think?

 

[Mr Miagi]

I had good success with warming water to remove a mantis shrimp. With the warming of the water I also found alot of goodies like bristle worms, crabs, and one nudi died. It didnt have a huge effect on the other life on the rock, but the tank did re-cycle (I did this with every piece of LR though).

 

[SkiFletch]

Well, if I were you I'd get a 2.5gal and warm it up to normal tank temp for a few days and keep an eye out for mantis' and nudis, etc. It'll take a while to re-cycle and re-cure and hopefully by then you can spot anything unwanted in there. Make sure you inspect it really well visually before you even put it in the curing tank and turn it around a lot to inspect hard to see areas while its curing. As mr miagi said, raising the temp can kill off wanted as well as unwanted items.

 

[Donya]

My buckets are between 2.5-3 gallons so I should be able to use one of those. What bugs me about just using inspection to see if the rock is harboring unwanted things is that the "bad rock" that crashed my tank showed no signs of what was to come, no signs of any non-microbial life for that matter, having been closely inspected many times and working perfectly for 3 weeks.

 

[SkiFletch]

Yeah thats a tough pill to swallow . Also remember, O2 starvation will work wonders on most critters and probably won't hurt most of the "good" organisms, so maybe seal it for a couple days as well?