My live rock can't be cured already?

[base13]

I'm just bought my first salt water tank and set it up 3 days ago with live sand and live rocks. I tested the water today and everthing is perfect (no amonia, nirates, nitrite, salt content is perfect, the PH levels are perfect, and there is no odor from the tank). The live rocks look the same as when i brought them home and three small translucent plants have appeared. I was told the rocks wouldn't cure for a month but everything seems done. Are they ready to go or has the curing cycle not began yet or did i screw something up?

PS I have a Oceanic Biocube 29 gallon Tank and made my own salt water.

 

[Kristall-99]

did you throw in an ammonia source? .ie. raw shrimp tail or ammonia dosing? you need some sort of source fom the ammonia to be present from.

 

[melosu58]

I dont think 3 days is enough time. As mentioned above add an ammonia source and have your water test ready. They will let you know.

 

[austinsdad]

Tell us more about where you got the rock. Was it in a tank? Was the water moving where it was strored?

 

[base13]

I bought the live rocks from a local fish store. The rocks were in big fish tanks with moving water. I have checked everything once a day and everything is perfect. The live rock look exactly how they did when i brought them home. They were only out of the water for 20 min.

 

[Floyd R Turbo]

If it was healthy live rock, then it will retain a great amount of bacteria, but in 20 minutes out of the water you will have a lot of die-off, and I would expect you should have had an ammonia spike of some kind right away. The way to test the filtering capacity would be to buy some janitorial strength ammonia from Ace Hardware (don't buy anything else anywhere else in my opinion) and add a VERY small amount (this is super strong stuff), wait 1 hour to mix, test ammonia, wait 12 and 24 and test again to see if it's getting taken down, test Nitrite and Nitrate also (before dosing and after). The amount of ammonia you need is probably only a few drops for a 29. I used 2 Tablespoons while fishless cycling a 225 and that brought it up to about 4 or 5 ppm, so you need probably 1/40th of that to get 1 ppm ammonia in your tank. Do a test on some water in a bucket and figure out how much to add for what concentration you want to see and extrapolate it out.

Theoretically, if you take cured LR and put it into a new setup quick enough, you could avoid a cycle, but with the 20 minutes I would be expecting something.

 

[cmor1701d]

There won't be much die off in 20 minutes if the LR was covered with wet newspaper, towels, etc.
Fully cured LR shipped overnight doesn't have that much die off if kept damp, so 20 mnutes is nothing.
Instead of industrial strenght ammonia I would use a small pinch of fish food or a tiny raw shrimp to feed the bacterai colony with a source of ammonia. Test daily for a week to see if you get a spike or not.