Here's something pretty neat, few are willing to use their own $ to make examples like this
The reason I drained my twelve year coral-packed nano completely empty of water for half an hour is to reveal truths about bacteria.
If I had to guess, where you got your live rock is less than a half hours drive back to your tank. This means if you stacked your rock in the trunk and didn't even hydrate them, the whole bio system simply awaits being put in a new tank elsewhere. Corals too
While it's true occasionally a large worm like a eunicid worm could die inside, I don't have one of those and in no case will anyone's bacteria ever die upon tank transfer. People normally keep their live rock wet upon transfer to home, in that case the occasional large worm will be fine.
If I had to estimate how many times I drained my tank for half an hour = 200. All rock is like this. I still have sponges, pods, mini brittle stars, the normal live rock complement.
So that means bacteria don't need us to consider them once a cycle is deemed complete (for live rocks to be deemed live, that cycle was completed elsewhere) and the reason that's handy is because it prevents you from making unneeded purchases and actions that will lead to algae invasion challenges soon. it means you can access your reef to clean it, to guide out early invasions durectly, not just through the water. I let my system cake up with cyano in vid #1 and then demod how to undo it.
Twelve hours later
If small reef tanks can be easily drained like that with not much fanfare, and every corner of the tank made accessible outside of water, how can that affect tank invasion options? If you can drain a reef and not kill it (though 30 mins not required, I did that to show bac strength) then you can clean your invaders out, and not kill the bacteria or the system. Being able to deep access your tank to hand guide/garden it directly, not just through the water, is the best trick ever.
