I buy live rock from the LFS, sometimes cured sometimes uncured. I prefer to get it right out of the box, that way I'm getting as much of the "stuff" as I can. Good live rock should be porous, you can get very dense rock or very open lightweight rock. I've got sponge, some sort of what looks like a pink encrusting tunicate, pods of all shapes and sizes, unique species of coraline algae, different types of tube worms, polyps etc on my rock. I've also got two odd looking creatures that so far seem to be harmless, they seem to just clean rock so I'm not to worried about them but I have no idea what they are. They only come out and night, they look like snails with out a shell but they have a blackish bulge where a shell would be. Maybe a flat worm of some sort I don't know, maybe about 3/8 of an inch long... who knows. Even when it's shipped in wet newspaper a lot of stuff is still alive, the homemade rock is great as you can make different shapes and sizes to fit your needs however, it doesn't add diversity of livestock where rock does. If you can get rock from Jakarta, some from Tonga and some from somewhere else, get a mix, you get a larger diversity of life, base rock is nice and cheap, you can use concrete drill bits to cut holes in it and zap strap it together to make shapes if you like and it's cheap and you don't have to wait for it to cure.
Doug
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