I came upon this thread last night when searching for info on, of course, high nitrates.
I want to say a few things about what I read...this may turn out to be a long story, so if you don't want to read it simply skip to the next writer.....I just want to share...
I am in no way an expert, nor am I a scientist, chemist or a marine biologist. I am simply a 47 year old stay at home Mom with a 17 yr old daughter and a 7 year old son... but I have been an AVID, obsessed reef keeper for over 3 years now... still very much a novice in my own eyes. I spend most of my free time, (almost borderline neglect of some of my other duties,) LOL either researching about this hobby, tending to my tank or simply staring at it for hours!! My family knows if they can't find me that "mom is in her fish room again"!!! They fully expect to see me actually IN my tank one day!
With that said....some history,
At the moment I have a 29 gallon set up, getting ready to set up a 180 gallon inwall. This little tank has been running in its present form for about 16 months. We moved to Kansas from Portland OR Sept '05. I brought my live rock, some corals and even a few snails in a cooler with an airstone all the way from Oregon...3 day trip, with kids, dogs, a cat and a small uhaul trailer with things we would need before the moving van got here.... I got it re-set back up immediately upon arriving. Everything did amazingly well. Over the course of the last year the tank has had to be moved 2 times... to a duplex (while we were building a house) and then again when the house was finished last July '06. I had absolutely NO PROBLEMS whatsoever with these moves... I moved them complete from take down to set up within 1 hour each time..
My inhabitants are: 2 Ocellaris clowns, 1 sixline wrasse, 1 cleaner shrimp, many nassarius snails, many cerith snails, various blue leg hermits, 5 scarlet reef hermits, 4 giant ceriths, ...
Corals include: 1 15 inch GBTA, this thing is huge... many fuzzy green mushrooms, 1 frogspawn, 1 hammer( my very first LPS coral way back in 2004 in Oregon) , 1 finger leather, 3 lime green ricordia, red mushrooms, various zoos, large crop of anthelia, I am sure I have forgotten something, but you get the idea.
I have a CPR bak pak, 1 MJ 1200 with a hydor flow thing, 1 MJ 900, and a hang on filter used ONLY for carbon and flow. Lighting consists of 175 metal halide 14000 k and 24 watts of T5 actinic.
This tank has done extremely well until just recently. I usually do a couple of 4-5 gallon water changes twice a month, but for the last few months I have to admit, I did not get them done as well as I should. I also have not been testing for anything other than PH and SG. I also, had a flatwrom infestation that I just recently hopefully won. I kept blowing and siphoning them, and finally about 3 weeks ago, they were down to a level where I thought I could treat with flatworm exit. I did, this and waited the amount of time, before adding carbon, and doing a large water change. Nothing except the flatworms was affected.
So, on to the reason for my writing.... about 2 months ago , I noticed that 2 heads on my longtime hammer were receding...as I was blowing the rocks off, I accidentally hit one of the heads and it completely flew off the skeleton. I took the hammer out and fragged off the dead part. THEN about 2 weeks ago my frogspawn started doing the same thing. I though that maybe it was the flow, or they didn't like their placement all of a sudden, or that the finger leather was bothering them... everything except NITRATES!!! Last night, stupid me, finally decided to do some tests, and you guessed it... NITRATES OFF THE CHART!!!!! I have NEVER had nitrates so this through me into an absolute panic!!! I immediately began making up emergency water and while it was aerating and warming up, began my quest to find info on nitrates... hence stumbling on this thread.
This is where I really begin my thoughts on this matter....we all know that none of this is "natural" Taking fish and corals out of their environment and putting them in glass boxes of made up salt water is not natural. What we all hope to do is to give our inhabitants the best, most healthy home that we can, all the while knowing that this is NOT natural. We all talk about all of the things we put into our tanks.... kalk, pickleing lime, soda, man made salt, this trace element or that trace element, and on and on and on......is any of this NORMAL for our tanks inhabitents.....NO it is not...in their own home, they don't have kalk, or pickleing lime or this or that... nature takes care of all that. There is no ammonia, no nitrates, no PH swings and on and on.....
So.... where am I going with this??? I think that we are constantly learning and researching this hobby. When people first started dosing with Pickleing lime, what did everyone think about that? Now, it is commonplace. I have off the chart nitrates.... this is NOT a healthy environment for my tanks inhabitants.... Yes, it is my own fault... but I still do not want them subjected to this level of nitrates any longer. I believe it is better to get the nitrates down and then begin the husbandry habits that I should have been doing. Some people on here have talked about using the sugar as " a quick fix" ... isn't our whole goal to make our tank a place where the fish and corals can not just exsist but thrive also???? If our PH is down, we fix it, if the SG is off, we fix it, if the ph is too high, we fix it... if the temp is too high, we buy a chiller, if the temp is too low, we buy a heater....and on and on and on.... the bottom line is WE FIX things in this hobby all of the time BECAUSE IN REALITY NONE OF IT IS "NATURAL".....SO what is wrong with "fixing" the nitrates also???? I am not saying that by using the sugar we should give up on water changes.... not at all... we still dose kalk, we still dose this and that AND still do water changes along with it. Can't this just be one more thing to help make our tanks a place where our inhabitants can live a healthy, happy thriving life......... all in a glass box of man-made saltwater......
Just the thoughts of a Mom who loves her tank...
Thanks for reading!
Jenni
