How Do they do it?

[aaronlp]

So ive been looking to red omy aquascape with a different type of rock...but as i ve been lookign around to get ideas im wondering i see all these huge tanks with little amounts of live rocks and tons of corals.


Lets take this tank for example

Ive always wanted something like this...2 cool islands some sick corals and a few good fish but how do they get away with smal amounts of live rock in the tank...do they keep the bioload completely down...kepp the rocks in the sump or do they have a huge skimmer? This would be a cool idea to have in the tank. Just a random question how they do it.

THANKS!

 

[TruReef]

IMO keep rocks in the sump. This is why I'm building my own sump. I'm still debating on building out of acrylic 60"x18"x20" or using an old 75gal glass tank 48"x18"x20". Leaning towards build my own to maximize space under tank..

 

[der_wille_zur_macht]

There are lots of ways to "get away" with a small amount of rock in the tank.

For starters, the rules of thumb as far as how much rock you need in a tank were generally propagated by vendors selling live rock, so IMHO they are generally very high. There's really no conclusive research or validation for "needing" a certain amount of rock in a tank, other than to make the tank look full - we really have no evidence to suggest that a certain amount of rock is required to provide a certain level of benefit in terms of biological filtration, for instance. At any rate, there's clearly a HUGE variation in the porosity and density of live rock, so even if there were good information, it would be hard to generalize to all types of rock.

My approach has always been this: Put rock in the tank until I like the looks. I never bother to determine how much rock there is, any many of my tanks have had way, way less than the typical amount for a given tank size. My 125 probably had 60 or 70 pounds of rock in it. The 55 I had before that probably had 30. The 29's I had before the 55 probably had 10 or 15 pounds each. People sometimes assume that having less rock will cause problems because you have less surface area for beneficial bacteria, but I have seen no evidence to suggest that my tanks did not have enough beneficial bacteria. And I would even propose that a sparse aquascape has several obvious advantages - it takes less pump power to create a given amount of water movement, since there's less rock in the way to slow down the flow. You have more water volume, so parameters are more stable. Fish have more room to swim. Corals have more room to grow. Less rock means less nooks and crannies for detritus to settle in. And so on.

So, don't get worked up about having a certain amount of rock. Design the tank the way YOU want it to look.

 

[der_wille_zur_macht]

Double post...

 

[aaronlp]

There are lots of ways to "get away" with a small amount of rock in the tank.

For starters, the rules of thumb as far as how much rock you need in a tank were generally propagated by vendors selling live rock, so IMHO they are generally very high. There's really no conclusive research or validation for "needing" a certain amount of rock in a tank, other than to make the tank look full - we really have no evidence to suggest that a certain amount of rock is required to provide a certain level of benefit in terms of biological filtration, for instance. At any rate, there's clearly a HUGE variation in the porosity and density of live rock, so even if there were good information, it would be hard to generalize to all types of rock.

My approach has always been this: Put rock in the tank until I like the looks. I never bother to determine how much rock there is, any many of my tanks have had way, way less than the typical amount for a given tank size. My 125 probably had 60 or 70 pounds of rock in it. The 55 I had before that probably had 30. The 29's I had before the 55 probably had 10 or 15 pounds each. People sometimes assume that having less rock will cause problems because you have less surface area for beneficial bacteria, but I have seen no evidence to suggest that my tanks did not have enough beneficial bacteria. And I would even propose that a sparse aquascape has several obvious advantages - it takes less pump power to create a given amount of water movement, since there's less rock in the way to slow down the flow. You have more water volume, so parameters are more stable. Fish have more room to swim. Corals have more room to grow. Less rock means less nooks and crannies for detritus to settle in. And so on.

So, don't get worked up about having a certain amount of rock. Design the tank the way YOU want it to look.

+1 very perfect explination

 

[oneradtek202]

idea clepto!

yea that tank is easy to want to aspire to, but to get it looking that way aaron, we all would have to spend alot more money and take more time. check out the whole diary if you want to learn how much preparation that tank took. sps forum, sticky up top. its called a reef in the sky