cycling

[asylumdown]

1. live rock comes pre-cycled. That's the 'live' part. A true cycle is the establishment of the bacterial bed where there wasn't one before in response to a supply of nitrogenous waste. Live rock comes with that bacterial bed already established. The reason people cure it before hand is because a bunch of stuff on the rock can die in transit (sponges, worms, some bacteria, crabs, etc.) and when it starts to decay it creates more ammonia than the pre-existing bacteria on that piece of rock can process all at once.

2. If you have no source of ammonia, you have no cycle. If your rock didn't have much die off, or if there wasn't much on it to die in the first place, there won't have been much of a cycle.

3. If your rock was in a holding tank at an LFS for any amount of time, it was probably pre-cured, with minimal die-off between the LFS and your house. So you're not going to see any sort of a spike now. If you put fully cured live rock in to a brand new tank, you very well might never see a cycle, or what cycle you do see will be hard to detect.