Sunday, 6 April 2008

The Rock and the Prawn

We picked 2 pieces of LR (Live Rock) down at the LFS. Stu picked a lovely purple bubbly bit and I picked a flatter piece with some wee things grRock and Prawnowing on it. Both pieces of LR have come from Fiji, picked up as broken rubble from the reefs out there. The LFS receives it dry and has to ‘cure’ the rock and let the microorganisms re-grow. This takes several weeks and requires lots of water changes and it a pretty smelly job!

Once home, we popped the rock straight into our Nano and arranged it nicely with a wee cave in the middle. We did some tests and got a blue colour on the pH test and clear 0 for Ammonia. We think our pH tests are a bit cheap so will aim get something more accurate.

To start our tank cycling we added a lovely raw king prawn. He is on a slow cook and is slowly turning pink! He’ll stay in there for 3 days , then I’ll take him out and we can do some more tests.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

help! sounds like a foreign language - whatever happened to the goldfish bowl and the bag of goldfish from the showies! Dad

Eilsa said...

1 - why are you putting rock into an iPod Nano?
2 - you put a dead prawn into your fishtank??!! What are you doing, trying to create a morgue?!

Von said...

Dad, wait till you see the amazing fiah you can get for a reef setup. Much more interesting than a wee goldfish!

Eils, Haha! The prawn did make a bit of a mess and created lots of algae. His job was to kick off the nitrogen cycle (see higher Chemistry!) We're not planning on putting anymore dead things in you'll be glad to hear!

reetajenet said...

In pursuit of shrimp cookery, and especially shrimp, you'll usually run into two market terms whose meanings are not perfectly clear or, in the case of prawns, whose meanings are numerous and even contradictory.
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Benita


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