Live Rock Vs. Dry Base Rock

[Wheelman76]

Very light and porous , and really cool shapes too. A little more expensive per pound than Marco rock , but it's not near as heavy as Marco, so as far as size goes it probably works out to be cheaper.

[asylumdown]

I'm all over the dry rock too. My logic:

a) no one's ever published any sort of survey of bacterial fauna in a reef tank period, let alone a comparison between dry vs. live, so ideas about bacterial diversity are more nice stories we tell ourselves than anything we can actually know.

b) all the critters that typically populate reef tanks will get in to your tank whether you want them to or not, and whether you use marco rock or not. The critters that show up in reef tanks are pretty universal - you'll see the same ones whether you're looking at a tank in Canada, Europe, Asia, the US, or Australia. They're the creatures who, through an accident of evolution, acquired traits that allow them to reproduce in the presence of skimmers and filter socks; don't get eaten by things we normally keep (or reproduce fast enough that it doesn't matter); have diets that can be satisfied on the byproducts of what we feed our fish & corals; can survive being shipped around the world on damp rock; can hide in the tiniest crevice of the most innocuous looking rock; and can tolerate temperature and chemistry swings that would nuke most corals. There's 10,000 species of polychaete worm, and yet it's the same 5 or 6 species that show up in every tank, everywhere on the planet. This is true for friend and foe alike, but foe usually exhibit one of those traits to the extreme detriment of things you pay for.

c) live rock from the ocean might have one or two things on it that are rare, unusual or surprising, but that might just as well turn out to be the next great aquarium plague as it will something that you'd want in your tank.

d) the bacteria that do the work of running a tank are pretty much ubiquitous on planet earth. Sure you might get some ocean specific variant that you might not get from the doorknob you touched on your way out of the office, but you'll never know that and if they do the same job, who cares?

[toytech]

My dry rock has just exploded with pods , ive seen bristle worms , feather dusters and flatowms all from frags ive got . It all gets in eventually .