Good live rock

[fishmaster]

Originally Posted by justinl

TBS ships their LR with water in the box. essentially it's underwater all the time. No other place i know of does this practice. Everywhere else ships in wet newspaper. If you want fully cured LR with a pretty good guarantee of no cycle then id say your best chance is to wait until someone local decides to sell off some LR. that's what the classifieds are for!

or if you're a handy man with some time on your hands, you can MAKE your own LR. that way you can get custom shapes to your own liking, while spending about a third of the cash. plus it's super easy on the environment. GARF had a page on how to make it... lets see if i can find it...

I got my rock uncured from my lfs. It came in wet paper, but wasn't too stinky. In order to save some $, I added 40lbs of base rock to the 60lbs of live. The base rock is now becoming cover in coraline, and I'm sure it's fully functioning live rock. If you are going to cure your own, and want the most life possible; first make sure you remove as much of anything clearly dead or dying. If you think it MIGHT make it,get rid of it. No matter how you look at it, anything that dies will cause a major ammonia spike which will kill more stuff. Secondly, spend the money on salt, and do major water changes every couple of days. Make sure to remove as much dead or dying stuff each time. Shake each rock around in a bucket of saltwater to help dislodge dead stuff. The more time you spend, the more that will survive. Make sure you run a good skimmer through the process as well as lots of flow. If you're not concearned with the hitch hikers, your rock will cycle just fine with no water changes in about 3-4 weeks. Your coraline will start to come back as soon as you put it under light. Hope this helps.
Shaun.

[jslaney]

Wow! Thanks for the great replies. Untamed I cannot believe the amount of life on your live rock. I am really happy as I am trying to set up my tank as sustainably as possible, (which when you think about it is kind of a joke). To get sustainable live rock and all that life is worth the extra price.

Thanks for the DIY links as well. Maybe when I get a bit more experience I will try that. Ideally I really want all the macro life rather then just the bacteria and algae though.

I am located in Calgary so I really hope TBS ships up to Canada. I will look into that.

Anyway thanks for the good ideas and responses.

Jonathan.

[howdy20012002]

u will need to get a CITES permit for the LR.
Actually the company that you are buying from will have to get it and it takes at leat a month to get it done.
so if you are looking for something immediate, it won't work from a US supplier.
HTH
Neal

[howdy20012002]

Actually looking at the webstie of TBS, they don't ship to canada.

[justinl]

yeah i belive untamed actually went down into the states to pick up the rock himself.

dave, thx for finding the aragocrete link for me

[woodcarver]

No prob

.................Dave

[BCOrchidGuy]

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

[fishytime]

Check out Red Coral in Calgary. He has some really nice Haitian and another one I cant remember the name of. Its a little pricey though.

[bsyoun]

I just got some of Red Coral's Miyaki live rock a couple of weeks ago. They are a bit on the expensive side, but they're quite porous. If you want 'lively' live rock, his isn't too bad. I've found two zoos and a tiny featherduster worm on the 12 lbs I bought from him.

Here's a link to his rocks...

http://www.redcoralaquarium.com/Live...aki/Miyaki.htm

Ben

[Zylumn]

I bought a little of that live miyaki rock from red coral and was blown away with how live it is. It is pricey but would work as a great seed for base rock or diy rock.
my .02
kevin