I'm not sure if you've had a chance to read through the thread yet, but my thoughts were the bacteria in my rock was recycling, and the algae was either feeding on the bacterial end products and/or using what nutrients were available by way of wastes and other inputs (ie food). I'm just trying to get a handle on this.
Yes your bacteria will always be cycling but the algae is more of a competitor to bacteria and doesnt really go after most of the biproducts that bacteria produce. To me I would say that your LR had an ammount of sponge in them and it take a long time for that material to disinagrate and then be used up by bacteria and simular. What you have seems to but just a larger longer lasting P cycle going from algae blooms to bacteria bloom. Got to remember the tank went with out preds for a long time to?
Scott one has to look at the whole ecosystem in the wild when tring to find out what one things purpose is. Reefs carry the mass majority of bioload on the planet, yet they have the lowest content of nutrients, how does this occur?? We also kow that bacterial processes are a very slow process and require massive amounts of players.
What happenes is that nutrient for the most part are swept out to more open water and then drop, I am sure we have all seen the tv shows where deep divers are swimming around in a snow storm. In these waters sediment is not required for bacteria to do thier processes. Aerobic and anaerobic processes occur in the water column. In this scenerio thier is alot of mixing of the zones and processes and the result is massive releases of ammonium which upwells and feeds/creates phytoplankton blooms which once again upwells and goes back into the food system of the reef. This is the rough outline of what happens in the cycle of nutrients in the wild.
With our tanks we dont have the ability for nutrients to make this journey, instead we tend to keep the nutrientsoff them into the abyss, it tends of overload them and then makes them more specialized towards the algae side of the game. Now they have become more of a sink, this is why we promote the use of strong flow and blowing off the LR.
When one cooks thier rock all they are trying to do is to eliminate the external food source and light for photo, and then basicall let the bacteria with in cycle and use up the material that is with in it. This process is effective but it is slow, one can assume that only about 5% is going to be used as energy and burnt off through the cycle. How long this takes is kind of up in the air (pending on amount of available nutrient and bacteria to use it). Now thier are also a number of things that screw up this cycle and interupt it or change the overall outcome. The presence of ammonia will inhibit the enzyme that bacteria use to convert nitrite to nitrate, so that process stops, instead it converts it to ammonium and the process starts over again. The presence of oxygen is another inhibitor that will screw up the N cycle, thier are many of these cases. For P its a slightly different game and tends to play in the animal (bacteria) / algae world. Bacteria bind it up into thier matrix and use it up by building thier population, this continues until the bloom of B begins to die off because they have used it up, from thier algae binds it to thier matrix (also algae can take it directly but bacteria is pretty quick) this pendulm keeps swinging from one to the other decreasing in size as the P is burnt off. .
So anyway this is what we face, for me I choose to physically remove as much dieing/decaying material prior to it going in my tank (scratch and sniff), then I try to keep the waste/detritus in the water column with this I can remove the majority of waste in mechanical meathods rather then putting to much load on the rock, and thus the rock acts more like a polisher for me.
Sorry for the long rambling
Mike
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