Stupid Question On Lr!

[woody88]

Hi all, just a quickie! ( ) cured live rock in an uninhabited tank. Your meant to drop a prawn or flake or some other food for the live rock to feed of the decomposition of the food to keep the organisms on the live rock alive.

I've just been having a think and in theory what's the point in 'feeding' the live rock as surely if you was to just leave it alone the organisms would die off creating the right bacteria to keep the rest of them alive. It's just the same as cycling a marine tank with the die off from uncured LR creating ammonia, nitrite etc for new organisms to grow and survive!

If this is true then in theory we could just leave the live rock to continuously cycle and then re-cycle in a curing tank until we decide to use it providing we use it when it's just finished one of it's cycles.

Am I right in thinking this or am I just having an 'off' day where I'm missing something stupidly simple!

 

[-Nemo-]

I don't think there would be enough die-off to keep a sufficient amount of bacteria alive.

 

[Donya]

I've just been having a think and in theory what's the point in 'feeding' the live rock as surely if you was to just leave it alone the organisms would die off creating the right bacteria to keep the rest of them alive. It's just the same as cycling a marine tank with the die off from uncured LR creating ammonia, nitrite etc for new organisms to grow and survive!

Yes, but...we usually want those organisms alive, not dead, right? I mean, I could take a rock covered in tunicates, sponges, and all sorts of goodies and let it rot in a tank to keep the cycle going (a bit, as Nemo points out), but then I'd be out all the goodies.

If this is true then in theory we could just leave the live rock to continuously cycle and then re-cycle in a curing tank until we decide to use it providing we use it when it's just finished one of it's cycles.

Even if it's just bacteria we're bothered about, if I start out with some amount of bacteria and lose x amount of them to dieoff, this seems to be assuming that the released nutrients are sufficient to recreate the same x amount of bacteria again with no other input...which sort of violates the laws of thermodynamics, unless I'm totally not getting what you're talking about setting up.

 

[woody88]

I don't think there would be enough die-off to keep a sufficient amount of bacteria alive.

Cheers -nemo-

So basically it would all die off slowly until it is literally just dead rock.
Or would it not die off enough to create a mini cycle/ammonia spike and therefore be ok without supplementing any food into the tank?

Cheers