Gag!

[Floyd R Turbo]

Since I have been running my scrubber temporarily on top of a tank, and it sheds light into the tank all night, I have been battling a cyano and dino issue for the last couple of months. I decided to run a canister filter for a few weeks to suck out the cyano after blowing it off the rocks. I let it run for about a week and it was pretty clogged up so I shut it down but couldn't clean it for a day. I did that last night and about lost my lunch when I opened it up. Talk about gross. It stank of spoiled seafood, and I mean STANK. If anyone has smelled it, cyanobacteria has a distinct odor to it, I have found this odor to be exactly that of Anthelia / Waving Hand coral. The odor from the canister filter (a diatom cartridge) was NOT this odor. The filter had effectively removed food from the water column and shutting it down for a day before cleaning allowed it to rot.

It was the second grossest thing I have smelled in a reef tank. The grossest was when I was cleaning a pump on a system that had not been cleaned in a few years - that smelled like I opened a sewer drain.

Algae never smells that bad.

[RkyRickstr]

Dang.. and i was planing on having bf now.. :roll:

[Floyd R Turbo]

bf?

[kerry]

Think he means breakfast??

[Ace25]

I got one similar.. a couple weeks ago I was nuking the last of my aiptasia infested live rock. I let it sit outside in the sun for 30 days to dry out, then I put it all in a couple 5G buckets filled with RO/DI to soak for a week before putting it into my live rock cooking tank. After 1 week in the bucket of RO/DI water the bucket turned black. You couldn't even see 1/2" into the water. I didn't touch the buckets all week (stagnant water) and when I went to take the rocks out it was the absolute worst smell I have ever smelled from something aquarium related. I would rather stick my nose in a full skimmer cup and breath it all day vs 5 seconds of this water. It took everything I had to not hurl. When I got all the rocks out, scrubbed them clean before placing in the rock tank (because seriously, there was still some aiptasia ALIVE after all that!), I looked in the empty white buckets and they were literally stained black inside. I could not scrub them clean. I have been in this hobby for 20+ years and that was the worst thing I have ever smelled.

[Floyd R Turbo]

Whoa. I have been upstaged.

Hey, let's make this thread about the grossest things you're ever experienced in relation to your aquarium! Oh wait, it already is. Let's hear it folks. Gag!

[Aeros]

Found a small white "egg shaped" thing stuck in my overflow grate. You never know what's going to turn up in a reef tank. Curiously, I fished it out with the aim to dissect it.

Laid it out on a sheet of paper, grabbed the ol' exacto knife and sliced it in half. Was the consistency of curd, powder white exterior, and deep red throughout. The smell was like cat piss X 100,000,000. The whole kitchen reeked of it for hours.

Turns out is was a bloated, rotten food pellet... Iol gross.

[dtyharry]

Ace25 makes a very good case for not having any live rock in your aquarium at all, and maybe an artificial rock with no porosity for easy cleaning would be better. You do not require denitrification if using a scrubber and I think live rock's denitrification ability is way overrated anyway, just look at all the threads from people with excess nitrates.
If you have taken your rock out and baked it for 30 days in the sun all the 'life' on it will be dead anyway.
A shallow sand bed for easy syphon cleaning will do all your nitrification for you and the scrubber will do the rest.

[Aeros]

Ace25 makes a very good case for not having any live rock in your aquarium at all, and maybe an artificial rock with no porosity for easy cleaning would be better. You do not require denitrification if using a scrubber and I think live rock's denitrification ability is way overrated anyway, just look at all the threads from people with excess nitrates.
If you have taken your rock out and baked it for 30 days in the sun all the 'life' on it will be dead anyway.
A shallow sand bed for easy syphon cleaning will do all your nitrification for you and the scrubber will do the rest.

I don't know any reefers that syphon their sand. What would the point be?
Also, why would you want to clean a rock? I hear of people using a turkey baster to "blow" off their rocks. Seems pretty pointless to me. Maybe it's the old mindset: "this is how it's always been done".

As for "porosity", there are several reasons off the top my head I use these rocks. Aesthetic, coral placement, low displacement (more water, less rock), that "natural" look, living quarters for more variety of life. But foremost, it's surface area. A porous rock has hundreds of times the surface area of non porous rock, or even a sand bed. It will also get better flow than sand.

I'm not sure if it's needed for the nitrogen cycle, but the others reasons and my OCD for efficiency keep it in my tank.

[Floyd R Turbo]

Hey! You guys are WAY off topic and I am not getting grossed out currently.