Costly mistakes

I had begun to feel that some of the original liverock that I purchased wasn't really ideal for making a reef aquarium out of our Biocube 29 when we had brought home our first 3 corals. When I arrived home with the latest two, it was pretty much confirmed. We had at least 3 pieces of rock that were basically just solid hunks of rock with a bit of coralline algae growing on them. They didn't really have the nooks and crannies and surface area that the other rocks in our aquarium had. Also, we had a very limited number of flat areas onto which we could attach coral. Allie and Ben also agreed that we did have a few pieces of rock that seemed to hold little interest for the crabs and snails and took up a lot of space in the tank. I had to admit that I had made a rather large and costly mistake with those rock purchases.

Ben and I once again hopped in the car and sped over to Gallery of Pets to look at their available liverock. I had always thought that the pieces they had were rather nice looking specimens. When we got back there today and really inspected the pieces, they were all really too large to work in our aquarium. Ben and I decided to swing down to Aquatek. The last time we were there, they had a huge aquarium just chock full of cured live rock. We showed up there this afternoon, and the amount of liverock was much larger than I even remembered. Ben was quickly able to pick out 3 new pieces for us to bring home. We also decided to buy about 4 lbs of live sand to add to the tank while we were re-doing everything.

With a lot of sadness, Allie, Ben and I pulled out the 3 original pieces of liverock that we felt needed to be removed from the tank. We felt like were basically letting down a mini ecosystem. We were going to kill off whatever was living on the rock. With the new pieces, we were able to make a new aquascape that left more room above the rock for corals and fish while at the same time providing more ledges for corals as well as more caves and passageways for mobile tank inhabitants (shrimp, crabs, snails and future fish). In the end, I was glad that we decided to go ahead now and replace the rock rather than a year from now, but at the same time it was a rather sobering experience to realize how costly my impulsive decisions were on the aquarium fauna.