What is Micron Rock?
Early on I set out to enter the reef keeping hobby, in the search for equipment to get started, the pay wall rose. When you consider starting to put together a large reef tank, you find mounting costs behind the tank and shipping, pumps, heaters, and definitely lights, with any one of these items costing hundreds of dollars or more. My first look into the world corals was a discover scuba trip in the Virgin Islands. Prior to this adventure, I had not given the coral reefs of the world a second thought, but after, I may have ruined the rest of the vacation with my obsessive research into what it would take to get a piece of the reef under my roof. At first, I was fascinated by the accessibility of corals through online vendors, illusions of grandeur followed, then the budget kicked in. I wanted to learn and grow but was on a tight budget with only a couple hundred dollars to spare (some may purchase a frag at many times this cost). I learned how to reef in a vase that was no more than 2 gallons in volume with a small pump, I did not succeed, but there were elements of that early reef that taught me a lot. The typical advice to beginners is to go as large as you can afford, more water volume affords you more errors tolerated in water chemistry before failure. As I assembled the aquascape for my first reef, I noticed how much less water it took to fill the vessel, it got me thinking there had to be another option that wouldn’t detract from the total volume of precious buffer water volume.
With these challenges, I started to think of ways to create more space for coral mounting, conserving water volume through minimizing displacement, and maintaining surface area and shelter for the inhabitants of a healthy reef aquarium. The thought of designing the aquascape in a 3D design software could be interesting, I could create exactly what I wanted instead of relying on the right shaped rock from the box to glue and epoxy together. The idea stuck and many months later Micron Rock was born. The concept, currently patent pending, involves interlocking layers of various shapes and sizes to create internal sheets and threads of surface area for microbial colonization and shelter for other small reef inhabitants including copepods and amphipods. It took some time to learn the design software, develop the process for 3D printing the structures, and identifying where they helped with my quest for the perfect, micron, slice of reef.
Pictured above are a representative models of different densities, both models with the porous skin on the perimeter that allows water to move throughout the center of the Micron Rock. The model on the left shows a filling density to support more microbial colonization while the model on the right shows a filling density for both microbial colonization and microbial colonization.
Above is an example of an aquascape assembled using micron rock mounted to a marco base rock scape for an aqueon size 1 rimless aquarium.
