chessmanmark
New member
Your tank looks great Joe. All that hard work is paying off.
JBNY's 270 Ver2.0
- Thread starter JB NY
- Start date
this morning, iPhone pic.
I don't use any coral food. Tried most of them, I don't think they do much if anything.
I am beginning to think the same. Last week I cut back and did not feed coral food. I added two more fish and feed the fish many times a day. Could be coincidence , but I just had my best week of new growth. Nitrates went down, colors brightened , slow growing corals got white growth tips.
This is a great pic. It really looks like fish schooling around on an open water reef. I hope to get this look in my smaller tank.
Usernam Invalid
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Loving all the fish joe. What aminos are you using now if any?
JB NY
Active member
I just started using some AA again three days ago. Right now I am using acro power, it makes up 20% of my nitrate solution. I am working on having a custom blend of the aminos that acropora use and will try that when I can get everything together. Hopefully have it so I can dose in a week or two.
Thanks, yeah I can normally tell pretty quick from the pictures who has LED as their lights.
JB NY
Active member
yes Acropower is an amino acid, it is sold by TLF. Amino acids are used by pretty much all growing things: fish, corals, people, algae etc. Aminos are also a form of Nitrate, and just like all nitrate, some is good, too much is not. Corals need to uptake nitrate to grow. But for their total nitrate needs, corals will only take in about 20% of their total nitrates from aminos, the rest they take from inorganic nitrates like ammonium (from fish) and NO3. So if we add only AA as your nitrate source this can lead to problems as the coral can only take in so much AA and the rest feeds algae. Mixing it with a nitrate solution such as the KNO3 I think is a way to get AA into the mix without over doing it and still getting the NO3 they need as well.
JB NY
Active member
No real updates to give. Things are going really well in the tank. All the fish are doing great too.
Yesterday I was looking at the tank and thought a few corals looked slightly more pale than they usually are, so I measured Nitrates last night. The last time I measured N was about two weeks about at 5 ppm. Last night Nitrates came in at 2.5 ppm, what the heck! So I add 1 ppm this morning and raised the amount of KNO3 I am dosing.
Here is a little video of the tank at feeding time, so you get a good sense of the amount of fish I currently have.
Yesterday I was looking at the tank and thought a few corals looked slightly more pale than they usually are, so I measured Nitrates last night. The last time I measured N was about two weeks about at 5 ppm. Last night Nitrates came in at 2.5 ppm, what the heck! So I add 1 ppm this morning and raised the amount of KNO3 I am dosing.
Here is a little video of the tank at feeding time, so you get a good sense of the amount of fish I currently have.
Usernam Invalid
New member
Love all the fish joe
Relativity
New member
How do you keep algae from taking over the tank.
Are you running gfo pellets zeovit what is your secret
Are you running gfo pellets zeovit what is your secret
JB NY
Active member
Thanks Kieth! I'm glad I finally got the tank on track too!
Thanks, This is the most amount of fish I ever had in a tank. It really gives a completely different vibe to have an SPS tank with so many fish swimming around.
Thanks, loving all the fish too!
Right the tank does look cool with so many things swimming about, the whole tank is so active now.
This is the evening feeding, which is the lesser of the two feeding I am doing. In the morning I add the same amount of food plus about 5 pinches of pellets. I used to feed another 3 cubes in the afternoon when I was trying to make sure all the tukas were eating.
JB NY
Active member
the KNO3 I buy from greenleafaquariums.com costs about $6 for a little over a years worth.
They are tough fish mostly because they are hard to get eating prepared food. Cylopeeze kinds of food is good to get them to start eating something them transition them over to frozen food. Mine are all eating mysis right now.
No GFO and no carbon dosing. Live rock, live sand, a skimmer and a cheato reactor is all I use. Right now I'm not even doing water changes.
JB NY
Active member
Yeah, I absolutely had cyano problems when using AA at their recommended levels. Over the last few months I have had a lot of conversations with other people using AA and even a few conversations with the people who are selling them. One of the things that I have come to understand is that AA are really just another form of Nitrogen that we are adding to our tank. If you are looking for that pop and color from an additive you are better off adding some form of NO3 to the tank water such as KNO3 or CaNO3. SPS given the opportunity will take in nitrogen at about 80% inorganic nitrogen (ammonium and NO3) and only about 20% AA. So the coral, if left to it's own devices will favor NO3 over AA. So it seems to me we are better off providing NO3 over AA to the coral.
But back to the problem of cyano when dosing AA. Most AA you buy are using mostly aspartic acid, which is based research from a papers from almost 40 years ago. In that study they analyzed crushed coral skeletons to determine amino acid concentrations, and found aspartic acid to be in higher concentrations that other AA, which I think could mean a lot of things. All of which don't necessarily mean that the coral needs aspartic acid the most. It could mean that aspartic acid is what gets deposited during calcification because it is not fully used by the coral. Some more recent articles especially this one from advanced aquarist
http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2014/3/corals
focus on aspartic acid too. Their recommendation of using aspartic acid and heavily feeding of zooplankton are what we have been traditionally trying to doing for a while. I think that that method is problematic for the home reef keeper. Zooplankton is difficult to consistently feed enough to ensure polyps can capture food without causing water quality issues. Aspartic acid, for many people, I think has the same problem. Aspartic acid seems to provide some true benefits, but there is no marker that you can use to tell if you are using too much until you start to see problems in the tank such as Cyano. Also for some people they see no benefit from some AA supplements and others say it really helps.
So my whole point of rambling on about this is that I think for most people you are better off using KNO3 or CaNO3 rather than AA to color up your SPS, it seems to work better and you can easily measure if you are using too much as well as it gives that pop of color that is missing from many people's tanks. Right now I am dosing just a tiny amount of AA in addition to KNO3, not mixing it together but dosing separately. I am currently working on getting a proper mix of AA that is not heavily in favor of aspartic acid and will start dosing that when I get it in a few weeks and see if that makes any kind of difference.
