On 9/16/2011 4:26 PM, Scott Reed wrote:
Not really a plants question, but where does Takashi Amano get the rocks he uses in his Nature Aquariums? I haven't seen rocks like that available here at all, and if they were, they would cost a fortune. My parents live in the mountains, and I have thought about hunting for rocks around their place, but how do I know they're safe and inert? No LFS I have ever been to carries rocks of that size or that interesting. Any ideas?
It would be a rare rock that came from nature upstream of industrial pollution that ended up being bad for fish. I pick rocks from places where they've already spent a long time in the water. I figure if anything's going to leach out of them, it will have already done so in the millennia before I collected it. Otherwise you can soak it in water for a couple of weeks and test the pH and/or hardness for changes. A dunk in vinegar or muriatic acid will be informative as well. Fizzing is bad for soft water, acidic tanks.
_______________________________________________ Aquatic-Plants mailing list Aquatic-Plants at actwin_com http://mailman.actwin.com/mailman/listinfo/aquatic-plants