Pests migrating from refugium

[Doug]

If I cleaned my established rock pretty well and by that I mean just brushing the heck out of it, so will not kill everything.

Wonder if I put some in the refugium that going to be attached to my sump. Its design has a fairly decent algae trap to prevent it from getting to sump and tank but of course bubble algae and aiptasia dont follow the same parameters.

Just thinking anyways.

[Doug]

I also have to separate my sps from their rocks and put them on some type of plug and try keep pest crap from the plugs. They have started to encrust but not enough that cant be removed but in a month or two when ready for transfer, they will be.

Except for the huge green cap. Not sure what the plan is with it.

[mseepman]

Don't do it Doug. If there are pests...especially the two you mentioned...they will migrate to your display.

[Doug]

My thoughts to Mark. Guess I will leave it in the 20g for a quarantine tank. I have some nice branch rock I bought for my refugium.

[Skimmerking]

doug just have that rock in a spare tank that is not lite and cover it up. wont that kill off the algae and then you can have that tank as just extra filteration.

[Doug]

Sooooo, what if I were to drill my 30g.....have it higher than my sump.....have the drain feed some sort of elaborate filter cleansing thingy majigy, then into my skimmer compartment. Think this would stop bubble algae spores, aiptasia, and red turf from getting into my main tank. Surely one can filter fine enough to block it?

[Jaws]

I have a question though. When you're curing dry rock, most people suggest seeding it with live rock. When you seed your dry rock with live rock, don't you run the risk of transferring whatever unknown pests could be deeply embedded into the live rock?

[asylumdown]

The short answer is yes.

The long answer involves asking what you mean by 'seeding'. That term gets used a lot in the hobby and I'm not sure people think through exactly what they mean when they use that term. "Seed what?", is the question.

If you're talking about seeding from a bacterial point of view, there's really no point in taking that risk for what at best would be a one or two day change in the length of a cycle. The bacteria that process nitrogen waste will colonize available surface area so long as there is a nitrogen fuel source - regardless of what you do - so 'seeding' your tank with live rock doesn't do anything except maybe speed the process up the teeniest tiniest little bit. True nitrifiers reproduce very slowly from a bacterial point of view, one division every 12-24 hours depending on conditions I think, so let's say you add a small piece of 'live' rock to a 100 gallon system with 100 pounds of sterile rock - it's still going to take days to weeks for there to be enough bacteria on all of those rocks to efficiently process 2ppm ammonia (The ammonia concentration you should aim for when cycling a tank) in a volume of water that large. Adding that piece of live rock will shave what, 3 or 4 days off the process? In the lifetime of your tank, is that worth the risk? The more 'live' rock you add relative to the amount of dead rock the bigger an impact it will have on the speed of a cycle, up to and including potentially eliminating any detectable cycle at all, but I think when most people talk about 'seeding' they're usually talking about taking one or two relatively small rocks and putting them in with a huge amount of 'dead' rock. Rock that has been cycled is technically 'live' though the only thing that will be living on it are microscopic bacteria so to your eyes the rock will still look quite dead.

If you're talking about all the other things that lives on live rock that makes it 'live', such as macro algae, coralline, copepods, worms, feather dusters, sponges, etc, etc, etc. Then yes those need to come from somewhere, they won't just appear from the ether. However, it's not necessarily true that you need to get them from other, matured live rock. That's just the easiest way to get them. In that case, whatever life was on that piece of rock will spread through you're relatively sterile system pretty quickly, and if that includes things that might be considered pests, you'll get them. I would argue however, that whether you intentionally 'seed' your system with live rock/sand or not, you will eventually acquire the full compliment of commensal, beneficial organisms that have proven to do well in aquariums. It's no accident that you can look at pretty much any reef aquarium anywhere in the world and find the same species of sponge (pineapple sponge, that white fluffy sponge that grows in dark sumps, etc.), the same species of bristle worms, the same species of copepods & isopods, the same species of feather dusters, the same species of stomatella and vermatid snails, and on and on. There are obviously thousands more varieties of each of those species out in the ocean, and corals and rock have been collected from very diverse regions of the pacific and Caribbean for decades now, so why do we all seem to have the same varieties of beneficial hitchhikers? I think the answer is that some organisms, through whatever accident of evolution, have a set of traits that make them particularly adapted to living in aquariums. They're VERY good at finding their way in to closed systems whether we want them there or not, and reproduce successfully within those parameters. The first frag of an acans you add, or the fist branching LPS, you're probably going to introduce most to all of the species of pods and worms that are normally associated with healthy reef tanks.

The other question I have is what do you mean by 'deep' in the rock? Things like Aiptasia and bubble algae live on the surface of the rock. Their cells might penetrate a few mm below the surface of the rock, but they don't grow roots or anything. If the rock is highly convoluted with lots of crevices and such, it's very likely that they can and will be hiding out there invisible to you until after they're in the tank and have had a chance to grow (and if they've grown big enough for you to see, they've probably already spread), so if that's what you mean by 'deep', then yes, that can and will happen.

Right, that was the long answer. jeez Adam.

[Jaws]

Long but very much appreciated. I guess the other question is then, do you think you're better off seeding your tank with live rock to introduce those beneficial organisms or are you suggesting you're further ahead without them?

[asylumdown]

I'd say that's a judgement call you'll have to make. The fun part about live rock is seeing things grow that you're not expecting, or haven't seen before. The not fun part is finding out that that cool little creature you were so excited about was in fact a baby aiptasia.

Live rock can only introduce what happens to be on that live rock, so if you're looking for cool reef life that you can't buy separately, so to speak, getting the highest quality live rock is key. The pretty, uncommon, delicate things have a hard time surviving shipping (else wise they wouldn't be uncommon), and they certainly seem to not like the conditions present in live rock holding tanks. The organisms that have no problem with shipping and holding tanks are the ones that are in every body's tanks - bristle worms, aiptasia, 3 or 4 major genus of pods, and a couple kinds of tunicates and sponges. While the live rock may have originated in Fiji, by the time you buy it it's possible for there to be very little actual Fijian sea life left on it, having been replaced by whatever organisms were in the tanks along it's chain of custody, and the longer it's been in said tanks, the less of the cool stuff I think there will be. The more live rock you start with, the more chance you have of cool things being on it (as does the chance you'll get a pest), so if I was only going to add one or two pieces, I'd want to be very picky about selecting those pieces. They'd need to relatively fresh and have tons of obviously identifiable diversity on them. If you're looking to seed a diversity of life, you'll want the rock to have been treated as much like a prized coral along it's chain of custody as possible. Otherwise all you'll really get from it are things you'd probably acquire without even trying to anyway. It's a shame no one ships rock in water any more.

FWIW, I added live rock to my display after cycling a couple of hundred pounds of marco rock. The way I tried to avoid getting the nasties was by striking a deal with the now closed Red Coral Calgary where-in I bought an entire box of the stuff off one of their orders (it was about 66 pounds total weight). I stayed in pretty regular contact with Kevin nearing the ship date, and the night it arrived I picked the unopened box up from him as he got the order back to the store. That order came directly from Walt Smith, so it hit no holding tanks between leaving the ocean in Fiji and getting to my house. None of the really big things survived (there was two dead dinner plate sized brittle stars and a few dead largish crabs, sad), but there was tons of macro algae, lots of different coralline species, several kinds of snail, and three different species of encrusting SPS that survived the trip that are now actually some of my largest corals.

I still got bubble algae and aiptasia, but that was my own stupidity. I introduced them later, they weren't on the rock.