. Panin selle jutu keemia alla, kuna põhirõhk on just kivis toimuvatel keemilistel protsessidel. Vaata kindlasti ka tsitaadis viimase viitena toodud slaide.
I have never heard it called boiling LR before. It used to be called cooking the LR but I don't even know where that name came from as you are keeping the rock at the same temperature as it was in your tank.
The bacteria that live in LR are constantly cleaning it out. If you were to take a rock out of your tank, drop it in a bucket with fresh saltwater, a heater, and a powerhead, you would be amazed at how much junk spits out of it. It will land on the bottom of the bucket and sit on the surface of the LR. You could siphon the detritus out and then wait another two days and there would be more there. This is all done by bacterial turgor (pressure) and it's a good thing otherwise our rocks would be always colored green with algae and eventually, the porespace would get filled in with waste and the rock would slowly become a less effective biofilter because there would be less habitat for the bacteria to live in.
This is why if someone wants to have a sandbed, I tell them to fully cure their LR, wait until the detritus and bacterial floc stops coming out of the rock prior to putting the sand in. Why age the sandbed prematurely? This is also why having good flow in your tank is important and why you should turkey baste your LR often. To get the detritus that is coming out of the rock into the water column into suspension for your skimmer or mechanical filtration to remove. Failure to do this will result in algae growth on the surface because this waste is nutrient laden.
In spite of the self-cleaning nature of our LR, it isn't efficient enough to completely clean itself out in our nutrient-laden closed systems. Eventually, it falls behind. Cooking the LR helps the bacteria get caught up and should be looked at like periodically overhauling an engine. It's a free way of returning the rock to a like-new condition. Worms don't clean out LR, they merely eat larger pieces of detritus and algae and break them down into smaller pieces.
Regarding the Phosphates, I'm going to be lazy and copy a PM I sent to a friend. They had no fish in the tank, no sandbed, was using RO/DI water and salt that tested zero for P but was having massive Phosphate readings even with frequent water changes. This tank was in Michael Paletta's
Ultimate Marine Aquariums book. They wanted to know where the Phosphates were coming from and the LFS wanted my friend to throw out all of that LR and tried to prove that the rock was bad by breaking a piece of it in half. Unfortunately for the LFS owner, the event didn't prove what they hoped would happen. Here's my PM.....I hope it makes sense. Then I'll discuss why Phosphates are such a pain.
Tsiteeri:
Breaking the rock will tell you if sulphur-producing bacteria in the anaerobic areas of the rock had produced sulphides. You would DEFINATELY smell that. However, the Phosphates are odorless so you can't detect them like this.
In a nutshell, Phosphates are in every living thing. This includes bacteria as well. These bacteria are coating every surface in your aquarium, the outside and inside of your LR, inside your sandbed, and at one time the mud filter as well. Some bacteria are also motile and run around in the water column. In other words, different types of bacteria live in different areas of your tank and their "home" is usually dependent on Oxygen level. Phosphate is also in dead things....namely coral waste, fish waste, etc. but not for long before another bacterium grabs it.
We have absolutely no control over the bacteria so we have to control two things....the inputs of Phosphate and the outputs of Phosphate. On the input side, there are a lot of things we can do...use RO/DI water only, use low Phosphate salts, suck the polyphosphates out of the seafood we use in our blender mush with RO/DI water (RO/DI water is the universal solvent), avoid the use of prepared foods, soaking carbon in RO/DI water until it no longer leaches Phosphates before use (trees were once alive so GAC has P), etc. and so on. This list could go on and on so I'll stop here. On the output side, we need to get rid of detritus on a regular basis, skim, turkey basting our rock, clean our mechanical filtration before the detritus can break down, macroalgae export, etc.
Our hobbiest test kits (unlike some scientific ones) will always read zero until one thing happens.....the population of all of the living things has all of the Phosphate it needs and there is no where else for it to go but the water column. (It's not living in anything so it is inorganic).
These definitions are not really correct but they help me with these issues.
Inorganic Phosphates....means not livin' in the tissues of a critter.
Organic Phosphate....means livin' in the tissues of a critter.
Critter...means bacteria, algae, fish, invertebrates, etc.
Everytime a critter dies, the once bound Phosphate gets released into the water column but not for long. Some other critter will grab it right away or it will be adsorbed onto another molecule...namely calcium or magnesium. Every time a critter puts waste into the water column, bacteria will break it down and grab what they need out of it....which is primarily Nitrogenous compounds or Phosphates. (That's why we have to be faster than the bacteria in detritus removal).
Anytime you can measure Phosphates with a hobbiest test kit, it means everything is "full". We have surpassed an equilibrium of housing, food, and critters. The short-lived bacteria are dieing and releasing Phosphates but there is no other habitat for the bacteria to live so nothing is grabbing the Phosphate. As a result, it stays in it's inorganic state and floats around in the tank. Then things get interesting. Algae and cyanobacteria will start taking over.
The live rock is constantly cleaning itself out. If you were to take that rock you broke, drop it in a bucket with fresh saltwater, a heater, and a powerhead, you would be amazed at how much junk spits out of it and will land on the bottom of the bucket. You could siphon the detritus out and then wait another two days and there would be more there. This is all done by bacterial turgor and it's a good thing otherwise our rocks would be always colored green with algae.
The sandbeds and mud filters also contain bacteria. They are great at temporarily storing Phosphate-laden detritus and bacteria that have Phosphate in them. However, over time they fill up. When that happens, they will leach Phosphate back into the water. That is why Leng's method of replacing mud periodically works. He's simply pulling a "full" biofilter out and putting in a fresh Biofilter to give the bacteria room to grow again and to remove the accumulated detritus and mulm. This is also why I recommend to people with sandbeds that they should perform regular maintenance on them or wait until they fill up and then remove them (which is a ROYAL PAIN!!!). Steve Weast removes his entire sandbed out of his 850 gallon tank every 3 months.....YIKES!!!
You no longer have a mudd filter so the Phosphates aren't coming from there. If you had a sandbed, I would definately look there but I know ecosystems are bare-bottom. (Actually...that is usually the first place to look....how many threads have you seen asking why cyanobacteria is growing on their sand???) By the process of elimination, we are left with your Live Rock being filled up. Once filled, it will take some time to unfill. Sometimes things have to get worse to get better.
OK....that's part one of the problem. Bacteria inhabit LR and they are filled with Phosphate. Their life cycle is very short (i.e. most species are born, eat, reproduce, and die within 24 hours). However, if there isn't enough Phosphate for their population they will actually create enzymes that will dissolve the LR itself and obtain Phosphates in that manner. So how on earth is Phosphate in LR other than in the bacteria that reside in the LR?
Ok...here's part two of the problem. Phosphate precipitation. Dissolved Inorganic Phosphates (DIP) naturally are adsorbed (yes that is spelled correctly) onto CaCO3 where it bonds with the carbonate ion. Basically, our sand bed, LR, and skeletons of our corals. They can be annoying as the bacteria will eventually free the Phosphorus that is bonded.
Particulate Inorganic Phosphorus (PIP) bonds with particulate Ca and Mg. Whenever someone complains that protein skimmers remove some Ca and Mg, I say, "Who on earth cares.....think of all of the PIP you are removing too!!! I'll gladly add some more Ca and Mg." Here's a good article by RHF that describes this
http://home.mweb.co.za/jv/jv79/reef/skimmers2.htmlIf you are running a properly sized skimmer, then this is less of an issue. Once a biofilm develops around the particulates, they are removed by the skimmer. (Think about that before you decide to get the model that is $25 cheaper).
OK...now we are to part 3 of the problem. At low pH, the Phosphorus de-adsorbs. This article is not completely factual but it's good enough for government work. They are blaming adsorption of P on Kalkwasser when it normally happens anyway....Kalkwasser or not.
http://www.w3page.com/fishline/microalgae.phpThe reason that Phosphate sponges are not very efficient is because they can only bond with the Phosphate when it is in it's inorganic state and that isn't for very long unless everything is "full". They can't touch Dissolved Organic Phosphate nor Particulate Organic Phosphate (DOP and POP).
Total P is defined as DIP, DOP, PIP and POP. This slideshow shows how this works.
http://bell.mma.edu/~jbouch/OS212S00N/sld001.htmMy friend is now cooking their rock and has already had to do two water changes. The siphoning wasn't enough. They mentioned they they were amazed at how much detritus was generated. The reason cooking the rock is done in the dark is because the detritus that comes out of the rock is supernutritious for algae and we not only want the algae that is already on the rock to die, we don't want to compound the problem by letting the algae have what it needs for photosynthesis.
Postitatud: 06.08.04 00:12 
Kun kivi pidetään pimeässä ilman ruokintaa – alkaa se kuolemaan, kaikki fotosynteettiset organismit kuolee, (toki, myös levät), myös mikroeliöstö alkaa kuolemaan, sen monipuolisuus huononee jne. Kun kivestä alkaa poistua vähemmän detritusta – se on merkki siitä, että eliöstö vähenee.
