Elegance Coral,
Please let me know what personal experience you have had with using EcoSystem's methods. I don't personally know you but I do know Steve Tyree, and know of Mike Paletta and Chris Cefola. All three are advocates of the EcoSystem Method. Just wanted to know your own experience level.
Respectfully...
I have never put mud, of any kind, into my reef tank. I've never stepped out in front of a moving truck either, but I'm pretty sure it would heart. Some things you don't need to experience for yourself to know what the outcome will be.
My personal experience, about 40 years studying nature in general, and about 25 studying this hobby.
When ever people ask questions like this, they always get responses Like, "I used mud and my tank did great", and "I used mud and my tank did poorly". Which is what you got in this thread. Unfortunately, this doesn't tell you anything about how the mud effects a system. None of these responses can make a connection between the mud and what happened in their tank. Either pro or con. If I float a rubber ducky in a beautiful tank, does it show that rubber duckies work miracles in reef tanks? Absolutely not, because I can't make the connection between the rubber ducky and the health of the system. If you put mud in a tank, and the tank does well, it does not show that the mud had anything to do with it. By the same token, if the tank does poorly, we can't prove that the mud is to blame, based solely on the fact that it's in the tank.
If we want to know how something like, mud from the bottom of the ocean, will effect a tiny glass box with delicate reef creatures in it, we simply need to look at science and our understanding of nature for the answers. We know that tropical coral reefs, at least the healthy growing ones, are found in very clean/nutrient poor environments. This tells us that the animals living there have evolved to prosper under these conditions. Knowing this, it becomes obvious that confining these animals in a tiny glass box with a bunch of rot and decay would be a bad idea.
That whole "circle of life" thing, they sang about in The Lion King, it's for real. Rot and decay is a big part of that circle of life. It is the process that makes nutrients like nitrate and phosphate available to fertilize plant growth. In forests, leaves, branches, animal waste, dead animals and plant, all fall to the ground and rot. When this material rots, it releases phosphate and nitrate the causes more plant growth. The same thing happens on the planes of Africa, and the bottom of our oceans. Animals and plants in the water die and fall to the bottom. Their waste falls to the bottom. When it accumulates on the bottom, it rots and releases nutrients like nitrate and phosphate. These nutrients are then pushed back to the surface where it fertilizes algae growth. The exact same thing will happen when you remove this rot and decay from the bottom of the ocean and place it in a glass box in our living rooms. It will rot, and release nutrients like nitrate and phosphate. There's no way around this fact. It is a process that takes place all over this planet, and it's not going to change because some company wants to make some money.
We can do bad things to our systems, and still make them successful. We simply need to take positive steps to offset those negative ones.
We can take a bunch of rot and decay from the bottom of the ocean and place it into a tank where we are trying to keep delicate animals, that evolved in very clean environments, and make it "work". We just need to take steps to offset the negative effects of the rot and decay. Things like larger/more frequent water changes, better filtration, more maintenance, lower bioload, less feeding............... will all help to offset the negative effects of a pile of rot and decay on the bottom of the tank. The question is, "Why would we want to go through all this, and put our pets at risk in the process?"
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