So, my wife brings home this lovely all-glass corner tank, and she
fills it with sal****er, hooks up a protein skimmer, plops in some
pieces of reef rock and three fish. I come home from work, and Bam,
now I am a beginner reefer. Many years ago, though, I had extensive
experience with freshwater systems, so I'm not completely new at this.

Got a couple of concerns here, mainly about the reef rock organisms
and the protein skimmer....

The tank is about two weeks old now, and aside from some new algae
growth, there really are no visible signs of life on/in this reef rock.
Also, today is the first day the protein skimmer is not
out-of-control-spilling over the catch-cup with foamy dark gunk. The
foam now is quite clean, with hardly any organic matter deposited in
the catch-cup.

Salinity, ammonia, nitrite, nitrate and ph levels seem normal for a new
tank, although the ammonia level today is lower (between zero and
..25ppm) than it was two days ago.

It seems to me, knowing absolutely nothing about whatever sorts of reef
organisms were supposed to have been living on that rock, that such
critters probably died off when they were placed in a completely
un-established system, and the wife and I now are left with some pretty
rock with yellow-green algae, but no longer an actual living reef.

This would seem to account for the apparent, two-week long bio-overload
on the skimmer, followed by today's fairly clean foam.

Looking for technical feedback, kind folks, I am......

Greg Bensen
Sacramento, California