asylumdown
09-11-2012, 04:03 AM
I've been doing a whole lot of work surrounding grassland successional series as part of my masters thesis this summer, and it's got me thinking a lot about something that I'm seeing in my tank. It's been most apparent to me with this tank because half my rock is Marco rock, so it started out with nothing on it. I've noticed very distinct phases that my marco rock has gone through, from turning from bright white to bright green with a film algae, to then being over-run by some sort of mono-culture of marco-algae, to eventually losing most of the macro-algae cover and being replaced by small but diverse spots of different kinds and colours of macro-algae, but being overall dominated by dark, greyish bare rock with spots of various colours of coraline starting up. I thought that it was related more to the cycle that a new tank goes through, but I've been gluing frags to marco rock rubble that I've got left over in my garage, and I'm noticing the same sequence of events on pieces of rock that have only been in my tank for a month or so, even if they're sitting on top of a rock who's macro algae was replaced by coralline months ago. I also re-scaped my tank when I took all my fish out, which meant that some pieced of rock that were partially buried in the sand were now fully exposed. The bright white part of the rock that was in the sand is going through the exact same processes that the rest of the rock went through when the tank was new. On some pieces there's a thick carpet of green macro-algae that stops at the exact line where the rock has always been out of the sand. I have one piece of real live rock that I had taken out of the tank months ago and completely dried, but put back in as a piece of base rock a month before the re-scape. Even though it wasn't Marco rock, it followed the same trajectory: it turned bright, filmy green, then got completely covered in this fuzzy green algae macro algae, the same algae that's now covering the part of my rocks that used to be buried. However all of the algae on that piece spontaneously started turning white and dying last week, while it's still going strong on the freshly exposed surfaces of marco rock. This makes me think it's not related to something related to nutrients in the water, but an inherent process occurring on the surface of the rocks.
Has anybody else ever noticed this before? It makes me wonder if so many of the things that aquarists freak out over when they set up new tanks is really just a successional phase that they have to go through to get to the desired 'climax' rock plant and animal community.
Has anybody else ever noticed this before? It makes me wonder if so many of the things that aquarists freak out over when they set up new tanks is really just a successional phase that they have to go through to get to the desired 'climax' rock plant and animal community.