New tank nutrients bottoming out!

[DiscoHobbit]

Hiya all,

I started my tank only about 1.5 month ago (25g). I did a fish cycle while dosing bacteria and it has worked a bit too well. My nutrients are bottoming out and even tho i added another fish and fed more, it keeps going down. Attached a pic of my parameters.

I vaccuumed the sand once, when i scrape the window i put filter floss in the overflow to not get all the gunk in the backsump. I also fed sparsely before. Stocking is 1 dartfish 1 clown and 1 goby. I understand that i am not adding a lot of nutrients and taking nitrate sources out, but i have never had a tank actually bottoming out.

I know its not a faux bottom where algae soak it up since i barely have those. My tank also uses up quite some KH and I have to dose every other day.

I dont even have a CUC yet…

Fun thing is that i only have lps and leathers, and they dont seem to mind and still open up.

I use hanna checkers. (Alkalinity ppm, Phosphorus ULR and Nitrate HR)

Any reason for panic or just let it go until the dinos show up?

 

[mrabolli]

How’s it progressing?

 

[SantaMonica]

This might help..

Zero Nutrients​

Many people newer to aquariums have heard that reducing nutrients to "zero" (nitrate, phosphate, etc as measured by hobby test kits) is not good for coral growth. The answer is, it depends. "Zero" is not really zero of course; hobby test kits don't need to test super low levels like lab tests do. In other words, there is always a level of nutrients there, even if you have "all zeros".

First thing to know is that natural reefs always test "zero" for nutrients with hobby test kits. Yet, they have very high growth rates; acro's can grow two feet in one year. But yes, many hobbyists do see less growth with zero nutrients. Why is this, and what is different with tanks compared to natural reefs?

One answer is food particles. The enormous amount of visible food particles (and invisible dissolved particles) in natural reefs is so high that at night some divers can't see their own hands. And the enormous level of photosynthesis on reefs consumes most of the resulting nutrients. But hobbyists can't have this level of food particles because of nutrient build up, so they reduce feeding, to as little as 1/1000 of natural reef levels. Thus, corals starve.

So one bandaid to help with this is to keep tank nutrients above "zero". This feeds bacteria around the corals, and the bacteria then become coral food. Softies take it in directly, by inflating with water, and polyps eat the microbes and pods that eat the bacteria.

This works but is self-limiting, because in most cases higher levels of phosphate is going to slow the coral growth, and also because bacteria are hard for polyps to grab. So the trick is to keep food particle levels up high, and keep nutrients down low, at the same time. In other words, try to duplicate natural reefs.