Nitrate DOSING?

[mike klein]

Good points.  It's been about 6 months but I'm less worried by the GHA as i agree, my livestock can counter that.  The Dynos are what furstrate me.  I do a 2-3 day black out and it wipes them out and then less then a week later they come back quickly across my sand bed.   Is this a deficiency in my dosing you think? 

[victoly]

This is just anecdotal for me, but as far as dinos go, they seem to correlate with non-detectable phosphates. When i get the phosphates a bit higher, they seem to go away. But its a fine line between keeping the dino at bay and making the GHA take off. 

[Timfish]

In contrast to Victoly I don't dose and don't see any correlation between nuisance algae like "dinos" and GHA and PO4 levels in my systems.   You haven't mentioned what your are feeding and how often.  One difference I've noted but have not taken the time to try comparing in my systems is I feed only Spectrum pellets, I don't feed frozen.  It's been at least a decade since I last tested the water from frozen but PO4 was way off the scale.  I've wondered if one difference is with frozen there's phosphorus that's  injected into the water that is immediately available to nuisance algae where pellets need to be digested by fish and inverts like hermits crabs and then released at a much slower rate.  Passing through an animals digestive system phosphorus will be mixed with urea as well as with calcium and magnesium carbonates that form in the digestive tract.  How nutrients are mixed or not mixed and the speed nutrients are made available in a system may be a major factor in uptake by different species utilizing them.

[mike klein]

Interesting. I feed twice a day a mix of pellets and frozen mysis. I usually don’t defrost first so imagine this ups my phosphates a bit but I don’t think my total levels are too high.  I might try the pure pellets method for a bit and see if your theory works! Barring that, I may then try to slowly up my phosphates and see if that works.   My Fuge and Macro algae are growing at a decent rate but not crazy so wonder if more phosphates would also help here too?

 

 

[Timfish]

Keep in mind your slow macro algae growth in your refugium may have nothing to do with PO4 levels.  The client I set up this system for insisted on a lit refugium for macro algae.  Over the 5 years they had the system PO4 levels climbed from undetectable to ~0.4 mg/l but the Calurpa taxifolia growth slowed and no macro algae was harvested after the second year.  Palletta's review of Leng Sy's "Ecosystem" methodology noted the same response over two decades ago.   One of the puzzles that led to Forest Rohwer's DDam model of reef degradation was the observation of nitrate and PO4 levels on pristine reefs higher of than the hypothesized levels needed for macro algae outbreaks (His book "Coral Reefs in the Microbial Seas" is available on kindle, ~$10, or paperback, ~$20.)