the 320 that's going in the wall of my new house is going to be stocked with 80% eco rock. Not because I'm an environmentalist, but because I'm going to lose my mind if my next tank gets taken over by aiptasia too.
I'm going to cycle the the dead stuff using raw shrimp (or raw scallop, or fish, or any kind of seafood really - it just needs to rot) as I won't be adding the live rock until well after there are fish in the tank. I've used the raw shrimp method on 3 tanks and I wouldn't use anything different. I used it on my current 90 gallon, as when I first set it up I was running a fluval Fx5 canister on it. It took about 7 days for the ammonia & nitrite levels to spike, then fall off to nothing.
It doesn't even need to be raw shrimp, cooked shrimp decomposes just as well, and produce just as much ammonia. I don't think you can over cycle either, I'm pretty sure the bacterial colonies grow to the size of the available food, so if you were to put in say a dozen shrimp, your ammonia spike would be higher, but your resulting bacterial colony would also be bigger. It would smell to high heaven while it was working though.
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