High Tide Aquatics

Peter's Garage Tank

Mark B said:
Perhaps we got it from Will? Does it look like the one you have?
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Yes, that's correct. Green with brown polyps. This is what the mother colony looks like. Btw, The more light, the better.

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Perfect! That's 2 down - Thanks Will (and a belated thanks for the frags!) we will see about keeping the spongode into as much light as possible.
 
So today is 5 weeks without a water change or protein skimmer. Although I guess I was wrong about seeing a decrease in nitrates/phosphates with daily Phyto and rotifers/tigger pods, I have not seen an increase either. All of the other parameters are holding nicely:
Cal. - 440
KH - 9
Phos. - .025ppm
Nitrates - 5
The corals all look good to this newbie and the pod population is noticeably increasing. We can see large groups of them congregating on areas of the glass that have the highest flow.
 
Mark B said:
So today is 5 weeks without a water change or protein skimmer. Although I guess I was wrong about seeing a decrease in nitrates/phosphates with daily Phyto and rotifers/tigger pods, I have not seen an increase either. All of the other parameters are holding nicely:
Cal. - 440
KH - 9
Phos. - .025ppm
Nitrates - 5
The corals all look good to this newbie and the pod population is noticeably increasing. We can see large groups of them congregating on areas of the glass that have the highest flow.
Click to expand...
Keep it up. I'd like to see how this goes. Do you plan on doing it indefinitely? What ends up being more work? Doing water changes or keeping the culture going? I have to say I am surprised that there hasn't been an increase. It doesn't seem possible since you are only adding nutrients and not exporting any of them.
 
Flagg37 said:
Keep it up. I'd like to see how this goes. Do you plan on doing it indefinitely? What ends up being more work? Doing water changes or keeping the culture going? I have to say I am surprised that there hasn't been an increase. It doesn't seem possible since you are only adding nutrients and not exporting any of them.
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Yes, the tank looks happy so we will just keep going. Most of the nutrients that we are adding are alive, so we don't have the instant decay that you would get with processed food. And when they do die, in theory they are eaten by the remaining live plankton The cultures of pods/rotifers really take very little effort. Just an air bubbler and a little phyto every day. We stopped trying to grow Phyto as it is a lot more work keeping a bunch of 2 liter bottles going with lights. We can buy a jug of live Phytoplankton (a 45 day supply) for $30 so we just buy it. I will resume doing water changes every 2-3 weeks or so but the skimmer will stay out for now.
Cheers!
 
Off hand, I can't think of a scenario where you would not get a buildup of Phosphorus unless you exported it somehow. I can see NO3 being exported as Nitrogen gas....but obviously that doesn't work for PO4. Hmmm....


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Well, phosphorous would be used by the algae to grow more algae, but at some point then the algae will need to be exported because the phosphorus is trapped in the algae. Maybe not now but later. The phosphorus will still be phosphorous. It's not like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, which will off gas. That's the trickier thing about PO4.


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I am not a scientist, so I don't have an answer. When growing corals, we do want to have some phosphates? Maybe the phosphates are not actually leaving the tank but as my ph came up to 8 they are binding to the rocks/sand? I don't think we have an algae problem, so no worries??
 
Well, do you want to be reactive or proactive? Wait until you have a phosphate problem or prevent it from occurring?

Without any phosphate export mechanism I'm pretty sure with some time you will have high phosphates (if not that would challenge a lot of what we think we know about reefing). And yes, you could do big water changes, but some people theorize that these can get absorbed by rock etc and leach for awhile. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!

But at less than 0.03 you've got a ways to go before anyone would start getting concerned. Let's see where it goes :)

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So regardless of numbers, don't we really only worry about phosphates if we have extreme algae problems? In fact don't corals need phosphates?
 
Corals need some phosphate, yes. And yes, you can choose to worry about phosphates once you have a algae problem. There are some amazing tanks that run surprisingly high phosphates. I think doing water changes alone could be all you need. But doing nothing will eventually raise your nutrient levels given that it is a relatively closed system that you're adding to.


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