Stacking Live Rock - Aquascaping Your Aquarium, section 3

Stacking Live Rock - Aquascaping Your Aquarium, section 3

Aquascaping is decorating an aquarium with plants and rocks to fabricate a natural or pretty do. In a saltwater fish or reef tank you can space rock in piles or you can duplicate rockwork scenes found in the ocean. There are methods to stacking rock to make usable environments for fish and corals.

There are many personal preferences and opinions on how to aquascape with live rock. Some status the rock flat across the bottom of the tank mimicking reef flat zones such as barrier reefs, atolls, fringes, or patch reefs. Others pile up rock in the center of their aquarium like an island mimicking outer reef edges like reef crests also known as shallow or upper reef slopes.

Another option is to stack rock high in the support of the aquarium simulating reef walls also known as fore-reef slopes or deep reef slopes. This style is aesthetically glorious, allowing the creation of mountainous and/or minute caverns for fish to swim through. It is a versatile stacking blueprint providing cliffs and areas on which to stack live corals with regard to specific needs. Corals requiring extreme light can be placed under a ridge while high light corals can be placed on top. Another back to stacking rock in this fashion is that you can spread corals out so that they do not touch each other. Amazingly some corals can sting each other, so if you have aggressive corals you are now able to separate them.

resolve a wide variety of pieces of live rock up to 1 ½ lb. per gallon of water. Separate the pieces into three groups:

Leg pieces (shaped like chair legs or cylinders), longer than they are wide these are frail as legs to prefer the main fragment of the live rock off the bottom of the tank. These pieces should not be so wide as to remove up a lot of station on the bottom of the aquarium.

Flat pieces (shaped like platters or plates), are ample for bridges, whether parallel or at an incline to provide slopes in the tank. These pieces lie across leg pieces connecting to other pieces creating the ogle of a reef cliff.

Bulk pieces (colossal, wide, round-ish pieces sometimes having arms extending from them or bent in crazy directions), earn aquascaping creative. utilize them as mid-level leg pieces creating 2nd level bridges, or for facial or frontal pieces providing bulk (or reality) to edging and slopes. Or exhaust them as top bridge pieces so that their roundness can provide depth to the aquarium as well as reality to the height (like it's actually the top of a ridge) .

Adding substrate first and placing live rock on top can gain structures unstable. Some fish like to burrow and originate tunnels and this can cause the rock to drop.

Stack rock in a sturdy fashion, yet loosely enough to hold water flowing through it. Also leave ½ to ¾ of your substrate originate (without rock covering it) . In shallow sand beds, less than ½" thick, leaving the substrate inaugurate allows for healthy water changes that pull out dirt, organics and other ruin products. If you stack the rock flat across the bottom of the tank or in the island fashion it may be difficult to extract raze from the substrate.

Whichever style of rock formation you determine here are a few rules to follow:

Try to preserve as remarkable of the substrate start as possible.

create obvious the rocks are stable. reflect using Aquarium epoxy

construct caves to allow fish to feel relaxed.

exercise the rocks to camouflage filter parts, heaters and to get a more natural explore.

Have fun with decorating, and give yourself lots of shelves to plot corals later if you settle. Remember, nothing is site in stone so you can always fabricate changes!