For years I had always started my reef tanks with live rock and had great success. Live rock comes with a good population of bacteria and you can cycle a tank pretty quickly.

However, about 5 years ago I decided to give it a go with dry rock. With dry rock you can take your time sculpting cool and unique aquascapes and the likelihood of importing pests is much lower versus live rock. Live rock has also been much harder to find during the last few years.

Bad Experience With Dry Rock

Well, to say the least, my lone experience with dry rock was a disaster. I had one problem after another, including dinoflagellates, a bacterial bloom and cyanobacteria. And I just couldn’t grow SPS like I had before. Geez, I had never had any of these issues in my other tanks started with live rock so it was very frustrating.

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