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Rock leaching phosphate?


madweazl

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I see this statement frequently these days and it makes me wonder just how feasible it really is. In '96 or maybe '97, I set up a 40 breeder with a couple Hagen 402s for flow and an AquaC Remora (it actually came a couple years later). Lighting came from four 24" VHOs running off an IceCap 660 (best ballast ever made if you ask me). I had right around 60lbs of Fiji live rock and about two inches of courser crushed coral. At the end of '98, I joined the Marine Corps and the tank made a small move from Lake Arrowhead CA to Yuma AZ. I drained the tank, moved everything into the back of a Ryder truck with the rest of our junk, set it back up (about 2/3 full), tossed a couple battery operated pumps on it, and set sail. 

 

About five hours later we pulled up to the new house but our keys didnt work and the realty office was closed for the night. We grabbed a hotel room and hoped for the best with the aquarium sitting in the back of the truck. The next day we got the new set of keys and the first thing I did was transfer the tank. I ended up losing a derasa clam but the crocea made the journey just fine; the derasa was the only casualty. Over the next decade, the tank was subject to all kinds of instability with me deploying all over the place but the biggest came when I went to Okinawa Japan for a year. My wife ended up having to care for the tank for 13 months. She didnt do a single water change but kept a sane feeding regimen, topped it off with fresh water regularly, and dropped in the Sea-Lab 28 blocks as needed (not sure if these blocks are around any more or not). Things werent looking great when I returned in '04 but nothing was dead or dying. 

 

Finally, in late '08 I gave the entire setup to a coworker as we executed another move that I didnt think the tank would recover from but for the 10 or 11 years that tank was up, I never had a single hair algae bloom. This BS of rock leaching phosphate in just a couple years (and even far less in many posts I read) is just crazy. I never did any odd maintenance; I gravel vac'd every once in a while (twice a year max and probably far less realistically) and let things just go. Had lots of brittle stars, tons of bristle worms in the gravel, all kinds of neat stuff but I never had phosphate issues. Also never dosed anything; just did water changes (with the exception of the one year) monthly (or so). I didnt have a ton of coral and no SPS but had a nice bubble coral, toad stool, the crocea clam, some polyps, shrooms, etc.

 

So where has the rock leaching phosphate mumbo jumbo come from? 

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I believe it comes from the fact that some of the rock that people use in tanks comes from land-based quarries and is filled with phosphate that has leached into it from groundwater. You place it into the tank and then the phosphates begin to seep out of the rock into the water.

 

You used real live rock from the ocean and the rock was free of phosphates.

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Rocks can also absorb excess phosphates.  In my case I used rock from my seahorse tank on my 150 and they leached phosphates BAD due to the phosphates in my seahorse tank was in the 0.30-0.50 ppm range.  I am in the middle of taking down my 150g and soaking the rock in lanthanum chloride for a month or 2 before drying it out to store it.

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How does one determine that it is the rock though? In your case sethsolomon, how long was the seahorse tank setup? 

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How does one determine that it is the rock though? In your case sethsolomon, how long was the seahorse tank setup? 

My seahorse tank was only set up for a year.  How I determined it was the rock is I pulled a few of the pieces of the rock into a fresh batch of saltwater and let them sit for a week and then measured the phosphate levels of the water.  When in the container they were getting good flow and the water was heated to the same temp as the tank. Measure the phosphate level before adding the rock and after it has been sitting for a while to measure the increase.

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