LR from JLs

[MalHavoc]

Interestingly, Craig Bingman advocates dumping in an entire bottle of DT's phytoplankton right into the container when curing your live rock.

Allow me to quote from the article:

Curing live rock can be an incredibly difficult process. If the rock arrives in bad shape, it can be a month before it is suitably cured for use in a reef tank. There are a couple of problems. Things die in transit, and then more things appear to die during the curing process in what seems to be mainly ammonia poisoning.

Why not get a big culture of phytoplankton going and then put the rock into that container? It seems to me that the algae should avidly absorb that ammonia and other nutrients produced from the transit die off, preventing the “chain reaction” die-off and at the same time providing food for organisms that would otherwise die. It should also allow you to illuminate the rock immediately. There is some loss of organisms on live rock because of the practice of keeping it dimly illuminated for some time to prevent the growth of problematic algae in the nutrient rich solution. So my modest proposal is to give the phytoplankton a huge head start, enabling the phytoplankton to out compete the problematic algae.

The full article may be found here:

http://www.animalnetwork.com/fish2/a...io/default.asp

It seems as though animal network may be having issues, though. If you search Google for "Craig Bingman curing live rock", it'll be the first link, and Google has it cached.