that was a good thread. it was cool when EB was spending a lot of time around here.
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=11238229#post11238229 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by mr slinky
dont matter how old the rock is (maturation) the water needs to be cycled going in there!! 
There is something wrong with this statement.
Not sure what the meaning is, but if it means that water has to be cycled in any way, that is wrong.
worse, this is confusing nitrobacter cycling with longterm maturity.
all those rocks have nitrobacter established. unless you spike the nutrients to "re-cycle" the tank, you will not see any cycle, as the bacteria are handling whatever comes their way already.
furthermore, the "cycle" is not about the water. the water is the rinsewater during the cycle. the cycle is about the bacteria.
that's why you do a waterchange AFTER a hard cycle. time to change out the rinsewater for new, once the bacteria is all settled in on the LR.
and this whole maturity issue leads back to the BB vs DSB wars.
Following EB's mention of the "climax forest" concept if you will, there is a point where DSB's hit their peak, and are awesome. But due to the closed nature of our systems, the inevitable prrogression is from peak to eutriphication. this is where bacterial cementation, attrition of sandbed species and general siltation gum up the works.
This is about where I started pursuing the methodology of using periodic major disruptions to sort of keep resetting the eutriphication timer with the goal of maintaining an indefinite stability.
Mother nature's answer is to just keep adding sand, and the stuff below gets pressed/cemented into reefrock, so the sandbed critters just keep creeping upwards leaving the yuck behind. this keeps longterm stability in the top layer of sand via constant change.
Maybe multiple remote DSB's would work, replacing alternate ones alternate years, so never a brand new one alone and never one get old and crash.
The reality? juggling nutrients vs starvation in a BB is a trick. I'll get it going sweet for a year or two, then something goes wrong and I'll have a setback, then get it dialled in again. This iteration is the firat time I've tried minimal LR, so we'll see if that was some of my troubles: having too much LR in the system all this time.
I laugh, looking at this one rock of generic green paly's "moon polyps" that I have had since the beginning. How many times it has ridden out a crash
. After the bad crash in like '92 (it was all about a dolomite sandbed, who knew ) they stayed closed for a couple years heh. Some day I'll get it all figured out. but then I'd probably be bored with it.
I think There is much more to tank maturation and the "climax forest" than the sand. The sand does act as a nutrient and toxin sink and this does cause issues latter, or right away such as 
