Live rock is one of the most important parts of your saltwater reef tank for two reason. First, it makes your tank look amazing and complete. Second, it is called “live rock” for a reason. Live rock is relatively light and very porous. It is a lot like lava rock but don’t use lava rock in your tank because it has heavy metals that will leach into your tank and can destroy corals and fish. Most of the time live rock is made up of dead coral such as Tonga Branch, Fiji, and Florida rock.
Live rock comes in all shapes and sizes. The reason for such a wide range of characteristics of the rock in the worlds reef comes from the type of corals that grow in each region or reef. There are a lot of hard branching corals in Tonga. For this reason 90% of the live rock that comes from Tonga looks like small dead trees. Tonga branch rock is very sought after for this reason. Fiji and Florida live rock normally look like boulders or plates. The reason for this is because the main types of corals that grow in these areas is crusting or plate corals.
Why call it “Live Rock” if it is dead coral?
The term Live Rock comes from the Anaerobic bacteria that lives “in side” the rock. Because live rock is so pours it has an ample amount of surface area. This provides an environment of slow moving and low oxygen saltwater to move through the rock. This is the perfect home for the bacteria to live and feed. Without this bacteria there would not be a “Natural Wast Cycle” which is natures way of filtering the sea of impurities that kill coral and fish. More on the “wast cycle” and “anaerobic bacteria” later.
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Image Source: Fish Lore
